Confusious, Richardson and Mole

Potential Revelations Aged 24

2011-09-13T15:54:00.008Z

I've been trying to think of potentially useful information I could pass back through the time-vortex in my back garden to myself when I was a young'un, other than stop poking around that fucking time vortex you irresponsible little sod you'll get us both unborn.

Wear condoms: a stitch in time saves nine. Do not stitch a condom to your penis, this invalidates the warranty on both.
Don't lick people's faces. It seems wacky and freaks them out but it's unhygienic. It's how I got mumps. Social contact with other human beings is a delicate balancing act between exposing yourself to new experiences, and exposing yourself to unpleasant contagions. If you want to avoid these and other risks, never leave the house (though you might catch something from the rats).
Leave the house. Now. Nothing you do beyond the 5-10 acceptable minutes of faffing around you take beforehand can make the slightest bit of difference.
Take drugs, or leave them - Just don't leave them lying around where children or animals might find them. Be they prescription, recreational, illegal or otherwise, take the good with the bad, and don't just limit their effects to good or bad or up or down - If you've taken just the right amount of drugs you'll have a broader perspective than this. If unsure, take more drugs. With some drugs it is possible to take a step back and notice the changes in yourself, others it isn't, because they directly distort your capacity for self-aware reflection. This may lead to insights into your own behavior you may find disturbingly accurate. In these instances it's useful to have someone around who has not taken any. If you are this person take notes and feedback later. If you know this person, take the time to thank them, get some feedback, and apologize where appropriate. Give drugs to other people, but if they say they don't want them, leave them be/ask them for feedback later. If you want to take drugs, ask, but don't take without asking or ask without taking. If you want to take drugs but aren't sure, ask someone who's taken drugs, though it may be an idea to wait a while.
Apologize and correct yourself. Do this as soon after an argument as you can, if not during.
Don't argue on the internet. You are either a troll or being troll'd. Usually both. Argue in the pub, face-to-face, following Point 4 if at all possible.
When you have sex with someone you just met, call, or don't call. If you call, you register interest, and get to see if the feeling is mutual, if you don't you register disinterest and have to assume that feeling is mutual. Rather like Schrodinger's Cat, if you don't ask, you won't know. Weigh up the statistical probability of further, enjoyable sex/communication, against the amount you would like that to happen. In the case of a male human, the latter almost always outweighs the former, so register the relative difference between the two variables correlative to experience, then ignore all this and then just go for it. You will always seem more or less like a creep, you will always seem desperate, and this is an accurate and necessary embarrassing debasing experience that will make you a better person. This insight has been made redundant by the "Poke" function on Facebook, which is exactly the right amount of interest to show without actually risking anything important because it is so inherently ridiculous that a grown fucking adult would use this as a means of communication that it's almost endearing (but not quite). In a short time, it has become both creepy, desperate, and almost endearing.
You are a twat, and the more you try not to be, the harder your overall twatiness will come round and knock you off your feet into a spiral of self loathing and depression. Drugs are a useful excuse for this, and by confronting your own twatiness head on, and will magnify or shrink these characteristics, giving you a valuable new perspective on them, and increase your overall awareness of when to stop being a twat by removing yourself from the situation (the only surefire way not to make things worse).
Flava Flav lost his virginity at age 6, to another 6 year old, not child molestation.

Where will it all lead?

2011-02-13T22:38:00.000Z

Where will it all lead?

I was at the bus stop the other day, and rather than confront the reality of that horrible experience, my mind was given to wander.

And I thought that just as I was at the bus stop, in a way, I was very much also in a waiting room and rehearsal space for Jeremy Kyle, the amount of people who insist on taking their problems out and performing them in public is astounding, and kind of beautiful, in a very uncomfortable way. Because to air your dirty laundry in public you have to first have dirty laundry. And why stink up your house? It doesn’t benefit you to keep things festering on the inside, and confidentiality is no longer a source of pride or esteem. We have Reality TV, Celebrities, ASBO’s etcetera - being seen and heard and observed and judged, making a spectacle of your problems is how we get status these days, not by resolving them, because where’s the story there?

So in the future, when there’s no NHS, and Jeremy Kyle bids for all psychiatric services in the UK, he’ll get it. Lack of confidentiality will cease to be an ethical concern, because it’ll be seen as an intrinsic part of the therapeutic process.

But as there is only so much room in the midday ITV schedule, waiting lists will go up, eventually ITV3 will become a 24 hour live Jeremy Kyle channel, and competition will take what we’re told is it’s natural effect, and competition from other channels offering a similar service will drastically improve the quality of day time TV. Which is good because by then we’ll all be unemployed.

So Jeremy’s aftercare team, increasingly beleaguered by the mounting volume of problems that simply can’t be solved by a paternity of lie detector test, will be in the same position as social services are now. Quality of care will receive a sharp drop off after your 15 minutes are up. Kerry Katona, facing competition from so many other briefly famous fuckups, will have to drastically up her game, to the point at which she becomes the maniacal dictator of the Isle of White, slaughtering thousands on a whim just to get on the cover of Heat magazine to say she lost 3 stone doing it. Attention will be at a premium, and only the most deserving screw-balls will get it.

Jeremy himself will be stretched. Literally. He will need to be cloned, and after several generations the integrity of the genetic material will be corrupted, and the resulting Lesser Jeremys, each a chromosomal mutant who’s value in terms of eugenics has sunk lower than the kissing cousins who almost exclusively populated the show’s audience and guest-list.

And eventually we will forget, as we constantly do, the lessons of history, and the human dignity afforded us in more enlightened times.

And all that will remain of our disintegrating world will the the inbred descendants of the Great Jeremy, who’s only resemblance to the man himself, other than on a genetic level, is their irrational sense of entitlement and superiority, presiding over a persecuted underclass, who cannot be trusted to resolve their own disputes or own their own lives, and must be marshaled into a theatrical court system where their betters hand down judgement to them based on the flimsiest of evidence, screaming testimony, rambling conjecture, and a polygraph test, which at this point it should be said is a scientifically valid as drowning someone to see if they’re the father of your baby.

Anti Monarch Bus Rant

2010-11-21T15:47:00.005Z

Germany currently don't have a fuhrer, and I doubt they'd reinstate the position in a ceremonial capacity if the gas chambers were converted into cat sanctuaries. Similarly, children in need make a lot of money but nobody bows in submission to pudsy bear.

In the name of monarchy god and empire people have been slaughtered in their thousands, Catholics, Protestants, Pakistanis, Jews, Muslims, not to mention Levellers, Quakers and Shakers in England who's only crime was to believe that every person born was, if not equal, then at least not inferior.

During the Blitz Buckingham Palace was bombed, once. The Queen was quoted as saying "I can finally look the east end in the eye." She lost 4 bedrooms to the attack, of a possible 60, whereas for most east end families, that was 3 more than they had for their entire family to sleep in.

Cut to present day, and the monarchy are at a point when their only justification for being kept around, is their contribution to the tourist industry.

And the prince's trust, who lobby against GM crops, presumably on the grounds that genetic modification was okay when the tudors needed to feed their armies and it was done in a field, but not when Africa needed to feed it's children and it's done in a sterile lab, and who's huge majority of good works are undermined by the minority interests of their own jug-eared pudsy bear, who between handshaking sessions with inner city youths, manages to find time to put the screws on The Centre for Complementary Medicine for having the audacity to suggest that the NHS should not fund homeopathy, on the grounds that extensive clinical review showed that it's benefits do not differ significantly from that of a placebo.

The Prince's Trust is great and should continue to be so, but Charles uses it exclusively as a vehicle to fein legitimacy, to him it is a smoke screen, and a little kingdom for him to play forts in. Cut the head off of it. Call it The Trust, and keep it. Charles has stated that when he wants to be king, he wants to change his name, as the first incumbent monarch to bare the title had his head chopped off. Now I'm not saying we should chop his head off. Just his title. If he wants to keep being a barmy private citizen who takes an interest in matters of state, he's free to do so. But he's not a prince.

Abolish the term, and with it the idea that they are symbolic of the preeminent historical narrative that shouts down so many other histories. There's so many other histories in Britain other than "who was king at this time". It's a dull story, and I'd rather read about Levellers.

A side note. In the Pacific there is an island, visited by Prince Philip some time during the post-war hay day of the British Royalty. There is a tribe on that Island who believe Prince Philip is a God, specifically the great white god from the mountain, and I suspect this is largely because they never actually met him during the visit, just saw him from very far away, getting off a plane, and being bowed to and revered by the various greeting committees. I think this story resonates because someone who in my mind is primarily associated with offending foreigners by implying that they are in some way primitive or backwards, can seem like a beneficent and glorious omnipotent being, so long as you never actually meet him. The whole thing relies on a very broad perspective, preferably outside of hearing distance.

Okay I actually need to start tidying and stop scanning...

2010-01-31T14:50:00.001Z

...but vintage Brooker needs to be put on the webernet!

The good thing about cleaning out my closet...

2010-01-31T14:28:00.003Z

...is using it as an excuse to read old copies of PC Zone (1999... 11 Years ago...) and remember how Charlie Brooker taught me to be bitter and resentful, even (especially) as a 12 year old!

The End of all Time (dumdum DUM)

2009-11-28T10:57:00.002Z

By carefully deciphering the clues in this trailer, I have worked out exactly how The Doctor is going to die in the Christmas special. From what I can work out, The Master is going to try and mug him for his phone, but the doctor doesn't have a phone because he gave it to Rose ages ago, so The Master stabzimup blud.

With The Doctor temporarily incapacitated, The Master (hereafter referred to as John Simm) manages to get into the TARDIS, presumably using that fucking spare key The Doctor never seems to be able to keep track of, and spends half an hour dancing around in a silly montage to Scissor Sisters and laughing maniacally.

Meanwhile, at Torchwood, they're all still dead or dying or sad or whatever happened at the end of that arduous 1 week tribute to Heroes where children all spoke at the same time (which is totes scary if it happened in our Universe but in terms of Dr Who I think the people would actually be fairly prepared for this kind of thing and just take it in their stride). So no help there...

Then Sarah Jane pops in to deliver the Christmas turkey, and is promptly dispatched by John Simm (who you'll remember, still has a knife and a hoodie, which are like middle class kryptonite). K9 looks at John Simm, sniffs his foot digitally, and pooters off into the endless expanse of the TARDIS to go and be obsolete somewhere. Martha Jones uses her skills as a Doctor (WHO NEVER FINISHED HER FIRST FUCKING YEAR AS AN INTERN) to stop some of the bleeding but she dies anyway, at which point Martha vacates the scene using her other skills as a COMBAT NINJA.

Then, SPLOSIONS! and LAZERZZZ!

The Doctor now, having metamorphosed into a foppish child-dandy is powerless to stop the master from flying off with the TARDIS and playing all sorts of havoc with the space time continuum, and being responsible for all those times where you put something down, walked out the room, looked back, and then it wasn't where you thought you'd put it but it was still there just in a slightly different place so maybe you'd moved it without thinking but did you? This is how the world ends, not with a bang, and not with a whimper, but with a slightly confused noise someone makes followed by the pitter-patter John Simm scampering off to cause more almost imperceivable mischief as is his want.

Oh, and then we get a flashback to an Edo telling The Doctor that they're having bad dreams, which he thinks is very ominous because apparently if you're an omnipresent psychic alien hive mind, you can't just occasionally have a bad dream without it meaning all causality is about to be thrown into a fucking wood-chipper. And that old bloke who played the policeman in the old series, he's in it. And they'll probably mention the Time War as if those two words put together actually mean something.

It's gonna be Fan-tastic!

Let's democratize ourselves into a big fucking hole

2009-06-28T09:39:00.003Z

Let's have a referendum on the EU.

Simply because there are enough people stupid enough to vote “No” and enough again stupid enough not to vote, that they deserve the severe economic and social consequences that leaving the union at this point.

Concurrently, Barack Obama should run for Prime Minister of the UK, against David Cameron and whatever sacrificial peon the Labour Party puts up to be cut down whilst they recombobulate their best-fit policy strategic matrix to whatever pointless concerns best match those of the moronic British public.

This way we could make some sort of move towards American citizenship. Britain's relationship with Europe is tainted by some pickled colonial arrogance. It used to be we competed with them using colonies and empire, but since we got rid of all that, we just competed on statements of arbitrary and inflated hubris.

Or rather, our people do. For some reason the machine that makes British people proud for absolutely no reason but the complete accident of their birth was never dismantled, probably because it kept people ignorant and indoors. What is necessary is an act of forced contrition. When we dupe ourselves out of the EU, we need to let America, former colony, absorb us into it. If they even want us.

I'm sick of our relationship with America, and with Europe. Instead of having half a relationship with each, I want to have double. I want to be able to apply to keep my European citizenship, and for my British Passport to be expanded to include American citizenship. Now is as good a time as any, as no American President has ever been so popular, and our political class has never been less popular, similarly, there has never been a worse time for our country to leave Europe, and a section of political parties who want that to happen have a higher proportion of the vote than ever.

Basically, if everything goes wrong, we should just about get the best possible deal for us as individuals, which is dual citizenship, a massively useful thing to anyone capable of actually leaving this gods-forsaken drizzle pit.

Come on Britain, get off the pot AND start shitting. Hopefully into another toilet. Wouldn't you rather have the choice of two cubicles?

Memoirs of an Elder Brain

2009-05-12T16:02:00.001Z

Education³

In infants school you were given blocks to do shapes with. As there were not enough calculators to go around, the blocks also acted as free-hand abacus, allowing children such as myself, by no means stupid but in no particular hurry to complete their sums, to physically manifest the maths, and count up the total. To avoid spillage, something which frequently occurs in mental maths. In the administrative job I have just left, spillage was a problem. When you buy a round of drinks, you have to first remember what everybody wants. This part of my brain was well developed. I was good at remembering these things. Then you have to get each drink back without spilling it. So when I had to read data from a sheet of paper, and input that data in correctly, I would imagine each piece of data was a drink, and I had to remember what it was (read), tell it to the barman (type) and get each drink back to the table (double check the entry).

Needless to say this was not a problem when I was 6, though the root of it was. I had a poor short term memory, I could not carry figures that well in my head. So to do sums, I used blocks, and counted them.

During the maths portion of the day, the eldest children in the class (who were actually the youngest in the class above held back, to reduce classroom sizes in my year and to increase them in the year bellow so that both were just unmanageable enough that the recommended amount of children could either slip through the net or develop independent thinking at the throw of a dice) were called to the teacher. A crime had been commited, and as the youngest and only members of the eldest present, we were the most likely in our wizened youth to have been corrupted by time spent in an unjust world. I was six years old, but in my extra year what tricks I might have learnt would have put me significantly ahead in the field of sneak-thievery.

The task I was called from was a sum, a sum which because I was the youngest of the eldest present, I was allowed to do, because my accumulated extra years' maths skills, along with lock-picking and propensity for whoring and corrupting women, were exactly one year better than most of the class. I'd gotten through the sums, and was on the last one. They were two, or rather one, of the biggest numbers I had ever used in a sum.

Ten. Twice. 10 x 10.

Don't go thinking you all know what the answer is without even having to do the maths. It's a hard sum to do with blocks. I took up the majority of the class's blocks to calculate it. Those blocks were like the RAM for the whole class' processes, and I was taking up a massive chunk of CPU on a problem I thought was difficult, because of the pure unprecedented scale of it. Double figures. Of course later I learned that 0 isn't a figure or number. Or is it? Scratch that, I didn't learn anything. Or is that I learned nothing? Can you learn “nothing”? Zero is contentious, to say the least. The least being zero.

There was I taking up RAM, ten blocks at a time. I would make ten blocks, then another, then just count to see how many blocks of ten I had. I would keep forgetting this number and would have to re tabulate it. Unbeknown to me, a fellow student assumed the bricks couldn't possibly be all for one sum, and assumed they were free to use, so every time I was away from the table something would break off, disappear. I don't blame the kid. Computing power was scarce. If something looked like it was unused whilst I walked from one side of the room to the other, it was designated for use elsewhere, for there was important work to be done. If the numbers weren't added up, then how would anyone learn maths, if nobody learned maths, how would people calculate how tall buildings were just by standing a set distance away from them on a flat surface and holding a tape measure from the top floor the their feet? More importantly, we'd get shouted at.

Everyone had to show some evidence that they had progressed in their work. It was a very high pressure academic environment, which seemed especially important, seeing as human civilization had come so far, into the post-atomic quantum age, yet teams of number-crunching six year old children had yet to define a set of basic postulates for humanity to live by, such as what is 9 x 7, which with a block set is difficult, because you have to decide whether to make seven 9 lines, or nine 7 lines or blocks, before you even started counting from 1 to 63. It was a gargantuan and so much rested on it.

I digress. I always digress. After seriously doubting my counting sanity for several minutes, I decided to prioritise expedience and move to the desk nearest the counting blocks. I made ten lines of 10. Now began the counting. But before I could even get to 34, which was almost halfway through the blocks, presumably, we were called to the teacher, we elder brains, to face auditing for mistruths and criminal functions.

“You have a very guilty look on your face.”

What is anybody supposed to say to that?

I don't know what my face looks like at the moment of typing. I can roughly tell what muscles I'm clenching or relaxing because the process requires effort, and I am not fond of effort. I was out in the sun all of yesterday kayaking, so I know for a fact my face is a lobster-red. But guilt? I couldn't tell. Now other people's faces, they show all sorts of things. But for the most part all I see is staring, and occasionally that concentration gets broken by a laugh.

There had been a theft. The resources of the school were meagre, and a calculator had been stolen.

I had not stolen it. I could use the thing but surely they made using the blocks pointless, and we had always used the blocks. Also, what would I have done with it? It made me obsolete. And I was certainly not a mind to go about commiting industrial sabotage.

Sequentially she asked each of us the same questions, ending with me. “Did you steal the calculator?” But with me she appended one thing. “You were the last person seen with it.” One of my fellow drones had ratted me out. This was only to be expected. Someone had stolen a calculator. Presumably the Russians were also working on a similar project, and had gotten to the kid's family. He had no choice. If communists (though I was six in 1993 so they'd have to be an underground Kabal of U.S.S.R. diehards trying to resurrect their dead empire by finding and completing the database of defined sums and answers before the western imperial slave-drivers managed it, undermining their whole economic system at it's root – child labour) threatened to kill my family, I'd have given them the calculator. I'd have given them the whole box of blocks if they'd wanted. I loved my parents. More than blocks.

Later in life I found that the communists had been working on a similar project, and that my own research was vindicated. They too had favoured blocks to calculators, but they had made the unique step of combining the two. It is my great regret that the scientific community was so bound by politics as to not allow me to freely share my research with them, put aside our differences for the betterment of humanity, it will remain a regret lodged deep in my heart that we lost what wondrous discoveries could've been through that meeting of minds that was never allowed. Even in my aged state, I am rather good at Tetris.

There were no words. Only a frenzied angst. What was guilty on my face? I was running behind in my research this was true, and I perhaps had gone a little over budget in the resources department, maybe if I'd been given some basic understanding of what multiplication was then I might possibly be able to muddle through with only ten blocks and a volunteer grad-student to crunch for me, but there was no guilt in me. Or there wasn't until that moment.

I think that's when I first started feeling guilt. Because my face had been lying. I hadn't told it to, but one of the key things a person in responsible for, is their face. From that day on, the comments continued: “Are you okay? You look sad...” when I wasn't sad, “You look stressed, anything you need to talk about?” when there was nothing I needed to talk about.

Having not buckled completely to the forces of peer-betrayal and rigorous interrogation, but not responded well enough so that my credibility was not entirely in shreds, I returned to my desk, without thoughts. I had forgotten which colour of which row of blocks I was on, and from the degraded state of what I had made into a perfect square my resources had been plundered. The box was empty, and I was not about to trust my treacherous face and bargain with other departments to borrow there's. One of the other elderly children who had been interrogated with me walked to the desk beside me, stared disinterestedly into the box, obviously not surprised at the emptiness of the situation. Then he looked over at me, with my head facing down at the ruined cube structure.

“What problem are you on?”

“Question 10”

“That?” he said confused, “It's a hundred. 10 x 10 is a hundred 100. You just add a zero to whatever number you're multiplying by ten.”

“But if you're adding zero then it's just ten still.”

“No you idiot, just write one on the end, then you've finished and we can go home.”

Perhaps being so aware of my descent into old age, being forced to work amongst these hot-shot young mathematicians with everything to learn, still on the way up towards the top of their game, had made me slightly reticent at working with double figures. I didn't want to see the answer. Because after double figures, you're close to tripple figures. And not many people live to see tripple figures. The queen sends them a reminder that they're still alive, as if they might forget, and in that moment of forgetting escape death, and become death. In less time than I had been alive I would be 10. It would be 1997. Tony Blair would be Prime Minister, and things would only get better.

Wolverine Variation

2009-05-07T20:03:00.001Z

WE DON'T ALL HEAL AS FAST AS YOU LOGAN...

*Wolverine stabs him with both claws and says: "No. No we don't do we. Isn't that a shame. I'm going to ride off on your motorcycle now and fuck your girlfriend who you thought was dead. We'll bury your body later, when we can be bothered, probably just wait until Prof X and Jean have died and do it as a job-lot. And then we'll have Storm speak at your funeral. Yeah. Yeah that's right, Halle New-Haircut-Each-Film "The Same Thing That Happens To Everything Else" Berry is going to ham the shit out of your eulogy, and you won't be able to do a thing about it, all because you enraged me with your ridiculously hackish comment referencing my healing powers. I'm going to stop talking now, because you've been dead for some 2 minutes, but I want you to remember - we don't all heal as fast as me, emotionally or physically, and some of us are less essential to the trillogy than others." - Wolverine's Stabbing Scott Soliloquy, Director's Cut*

Star Trek Movie bitching

2009-03-09T11:37:00.007Z

Dear Abrams,
No you don't get a first name, not even the initial of one, first names are for closers.

Nobody like Sylar. He should go away.
If Simon Pegg doesn't get at least half an hour speaking time in this movie, all with have been for nout. Just cut some of Kirks bits to make space, he seems like a moody little prick who could do with not being in any movie ever.
That guy from Harold and Kumar is Sulu right? I saw him on HIMYM the other day and though he wasn't exactly brilliant, he did okay. Get George Takei to do a v/o though, because I don't think anyone in the known universe can get that right... Unless you write in Sulu has some weird vocal paracite that warps his voice into a superhuman pants removing machine.
Can we please have more Winona Rider than is technically neccessary? It's just a personal thing. I love that interrupted shoplifting junkie.
Try not to overplay the Batman Begins style of reinvention, it's mostly the music, but seriously Abrams, you are a hack and nowhere near as good as Nolan. The best you can hope for is to maybe hire the same incompetent lighting guy. Did they ask Nolan before you? Who am I kidding, who didn't they ask before you... Maybe you should stick to creating series that everyone claims to be addicted to, but then five minutes later can't stand.
A black hole with massive teeth? Nice touch, that's the one thing I'm terrified of most in the universe, that quantum phenomena will grow teeth and eat my fucking planet. That and giant spiders. Could you pop in a giant spider? Polar bear?
There's some poor bastard at tactical who hears: "Fire everything!" and just despairs, head in hands at the lack of appreciation for the artform of projectile launch sequencing. I feel for him, because Sylar is a douche and Heroes sucks. It doesn't even get italics like it's a show. It's not - a real - show.
Good job on boiling down the emo Macawley Culkin kiddie Kirk to one pathetic "dead father" bit. That crap with the car had to go.
Instead of this Nolan-esque (that's not and should never be a word) music, did you ever think about bringing in the fucking AWESOME music from TOS? By Alexander Courage, who sounds like a glistening Roman Emperor of TV Theme Tunes, the "Where No Man Has Gone Before" Theme is basically the 60's in auible form.
In an interesting aside yanked straight from the song's wikipedia page, Gene Roddenberry actually wrote lyrics to the original Star Trek theme, so he could nab 50% of the royalties. What a cold son of a bitch! Pwnd Courage, straight cold pwnage. Of course, Roddenberry's dead now, so that could technically count as a victory for Courage. Oh wait, no, he's dead too. Damn, May 15 2008? Too soon dude...
So help me God if there's any time travel in this or the Borg show up or any of that crap I'll find out where you live... Yes, First Contact was good and it had both of those things, but Enterprise was terrible, not exclusively but definitely because it had both of those things.

Sincerely,
Some Guy You Couldn't Give A Crap About

Do the teenagers on Skins watch Skins?

2009-03-06T12:11:00.003Z

The short answer is no, because they’ve got better things to do. When I was a teenager, I wasn’t brave enough to have better things to do. It’s difficult to say at what point the reason I didn’t go out much stopped being parents and started being me , but it’s also irrelevant and boring so I’ll stop there.

The long answer is, hopefully, yes. I want the teenagers in Skins to watch Spots, a Skins-like program, self-referential but not ingratiating. I think it could be a rare point of contact between a TV show and it’s audience.

Would Spots be a continuation of the relationship between the viewer and Skins, with the characters watching, learning and mimicking the superior antics and drama of their on-screen idols?

“Do the gods have gods?” Type that into Google and click “I’m feeling lucky” and it comes up with “Do the gods have arseholes?” Well done internet, you continue to justify my renewed faith in you after I broke that nasty Tetris habit.

I don’t know why I googled it, because I knew the answer, from when we spend an entire third of a year in Junior school (a long time when your brain hasn’t learnt to filter out tedious details like everything) studying Ancient Greece. The Greek gods had gods after a fashion, the Titans, more a collection of primeval forces than a pantheon per se, which they overthrew in a ceremonial defeat of the primitive or the unconsciousness or whatever, and then they became stuck somewhat in the awkward silence just after that moment, as nothing overthrew them. Their kids became either subservient Gods or beefed up and impossibly beautiful mortals with a tendency to wreck shit up, party hard and steal things. A bit like the teenagers in Skins.

But there are other possibilities. Spots alternatively might be a darker mirror, rather than just being an exaggeration, an unreachable pinnacle of teenage booze-chievement for them, it could be something that would explore individual character’s relationships to the entertainment they watch. It’s ponderous, dangerous, wanky territory, and it’d probably be much better as a one off aside joke followed up by a haunting bit at the end of an episode where a character mumbles monotonously over the phone “no… I can’t come out… I’m watching Spots,” symbolising their choice of inertia over action and justifying all that shit in the first series where Tony always seemed to be reading Sartre’s Nausea but the writers, like most teenagers/students, confused a character owning and looking at a book with actually reading or incorporating it into their lives in any way.

But the people making Skins aren’t going to put across that first callous message: “we know we’re piping out impossible examples for you to follow in vain and we don’t even care”, they seem to have a sympathetic relationship with their audience, having some genuine connection with the isolation, intensity and phantasmagorical (yes damnit that’s the long word what I’d use to describe Skins) experience of being a teenager with none of the veiled contempt/misplaced earnestness and borderline nonplussed apathy present in other shows I can think of, see bellow.

Just to recap, Either
a) The teenagers in Skins would find a program like Spots immensely tedious.

Or:

b) They would find it a compelling but ultimately unattainable exaggeration of the various emotional and chemical excesses of the lives they currently lead.

Or:

c) They would watch a different program one that, a show that was detached and exaggerated enough that it didn’t hit too close to the bone, but trivial and beautiful enough that it wasn’t concerned with putting across any poorly integrated and overt moral messages. The facile dross of my youth, Byker Grove, Grange Hill, Fucking Hollyoaks every bloody piss poor attempt made at entertaining me between the ages of 14 and 16 and compared to them the relatively non-judgemental accepting territory of Skins is refreshing and long overdue. Yes I know Grange Hill was supposedly revolutionary, I don’t cocking care, it was drab and naff and DULL.

d) They probably wouldn’t watch a show that was about the people who watch the show, in the direction of that straight on mirror lead only to a nihilist spiral into a narcissistic unblinking stare-fit. Incidentally they do that in Skins (a lot) but that’s appropriate, teenagers, and more to the point everybody who has ever been a teenager, does that.

e) I could resign myself to the fact that these are fictional characters, and they actually have a good time and don’t watch much TV, and follow their example by doing likewise.

f) They might watch some strange variant of it that we couldn’t possibly understand. This program fulfils a need in people for different reasons, so as stated above it might be nice to explore through different characters, perhaps a throw away reference in each one’s eponymous episode, what exactly might drive these bright young things to sitting at home and watching TV.

My favourite option is the one with the inertia ending, where the character says he’s going to stay in and watch Spots, only after that happens, his friends all come round with baseball bats and bash fuck out of his TV, then go out and have a good time. Cut to credits, spot cream, cheaper car insurance, throw a brick at your own telly and go see your drug dealer.

***Afterthought a few weeks later: "If they did bring a TV program into it, it should be acted by the teenagers from the first series, now just that little bit comically too old Dawson's Creek style and doing a parody of actual Skins episodes that they themselves stared in. Not that Anwar one obviously, I think he won an Oscar or something so he doesn't need to do this but the rest of them ain't done shit so they'd probably be up for it."***

Deeply Shallow

2009-03-02T22:45:00.003Z

People often mistake a sense of humour for a sign of a fragile yet tortured and defensive intellect, an accent to a deep ocean of neuroses and twisted streams of conflict that could unravel at any minute.

I consider myself a deeply, profoundly shallow human being.

It's also highly possible that humour is a sign of a deeply shallow human being. Like if you were an archaeologist, digging to find some mystery bellow the surface, and just when you were about to break through to that undiscovered cavern, there was another level of top soil, and after a while you're in a massive hole, staring at layer after layer of top soil. Or if you found the exact same piece of Roman pottery, in the exact same place, and decided that someone in the past had clearly been producing replica pottery shards just to fuck with you.

Or not, like whatevs.

Dragonette - Here I Come

2009-03-02T22:42:00.001Z

A review of a song released over three years ago. Because contemporanaity is for chumps. Chumps who can spell...

Synth-based, deliberately exaggerated lesbian video antics aside, potentially less reprehensible than Katy Perry. Poppy lyrics, rather than faux-provocative homophobia. If I can avoid seeing further videos, I may be inclined to tolerate them. It would also appear it is almost 2 years exactly since they "exploded." It's not the first time, and it won't be the last. Music journalists get all this shit sent right to them, their default state is inaction, then if they actually get stuck in they fall off of publishing deadlines, lucidity, their nose for coke and controversy starts sniffing the sweat of their readers, and the much lower grade cocaine of their fellow listeners. Their authority compromised, they get shot in the head like limping horses.

Hyper-Criticism!

2009-03-02T22:40:00.000Z

I was a very judgmental person when I was 18, I suppose I still am now in many ways, but I'm also a hypocrite, it's amazing the amount of things it enables you to do. Like I could go on a protest march against the actions of Israel, and when I get home start throwing tennis ball bombs into my neighbors' garden, then try to annex his fishpond, claiming it's his fault because his garden gnomes were firing crude missiles made out of biros and firecrackers at me.

The gnomes... why do they hate my race?

Genoregicide

2009-03-02T22:39:00.004Z

Fred the shred, which is not his name, nor has it ever been, the newspapers made it up, when you're a banker, nobody gives you cool nicknames, because banking is boring... should be allowed to keep his pension. Then he should be ritually decapitated before a baying mob who run up to his severed stump, and dab their bank statements in the gushing font of bloody justice spewing from his porcine, villainous form.

Ever since I started reading about the French Revolution, I've had this near psychopathic republican urge.

I keep repeating the same thing:

*chop* The Queen is dead, long live the King *chop* the King is dead, long live the King *chop* etcetera ad nausium

Just a load of guilotines on egg timers is what I'm looking for.

Also, it is decreed all bankers should wear bowler hats, woolen suits and carry long black umbrellas, so they can be identified and assaulted whensoever a member of the public needs to let off some steam.

On Cars & Television

2009-03-02T22:39:00.002Z

I like people mentioning car crash television, because the analogy seems to work.

Car crash television, ideally, has to have been steered through production by someone who is drinking alot, then when everybody slows down to look at it, it slows everyone else down, which is analogous to the national I.Q. being lowered.

If we stick with quickness as a mix for cleverness, there could also be TV that was too clever, like someone who just had an unrelenting need to make their show absolute bollocking brilliant, and sped up too fast and span off. Because their wasn't enough traction, traction being viewing figures in the metaphor, and I don't think it falls apart at this point even though the people watching and the road technically represent the same thing.

Only presumably, nobody slows down to look at that. Maybe those people manage to flip their car, Bond stylee, and it went the other side of the verge. If this is the case, out there lie thousands upon thousands of wrecked icarus cars.

So, people (demographic retention) = traction
people (individual viewers) = people
speed = cleverness,
traffic congestion = the lowering of the national average IQ
the road is the M25
TV is like being stuck in a traffic jam. You just have to endure it, instead of turning off.

That "25 things you don't know about me list"

2009-03-02T22:37:00.002Z

Just throw your feet in front of you.

1. When I was a child, I used to dress up like a woman, and instead of an imaginary friend who supported my lifestyle choice, I had an imaginary father who came home and beat the ficticious shit out of me.

2. I don't do DP. Nothing funny, I just don't want my gear that close to another guys junk, even if it is inside a woman.

3. I tell everyone I subscribe to paedophilia newsgroups ironically, but sometimes I just want a good hard wank over some pictures of dogs.

4. I am the auteur visionary genius behind the Saw movies.

5. Though I rant and rail against global attrocities like the oppression of the Zimbabwean people and Star Trek: Enterprise, I think T'Pol is hot and I ♥ Mugabe.

6. I believe in a benevolent higher power that watches over us. I believe that the only way to get in contact with this higher power, is to take psychedelic substances, like LSD, mescalin, or magic mushrooms. I believe that only after you have had this chemically induced spiritual awakening, can you understand the awesome power of Hemp. You can make so many things out of it. Hemp is very versatile.

7. I think bestiality is okay as long as you do it with animals that don't realise you're having sex with them, and don't suffer as a result of that sex act. So hamsters, no. Starfish? Fuck it, they don't know what's going on. And starfish are one of the few bisexual animals in nature, so they're probably into it, the dirty starfish whores. See my standup bit RE: starfish and sex.

8. When I fist saw a condom in it's wrapper I thought it was a coaster for a tiny espresso cup. I know, lol, then I opened it up and realised it was a stretchy accessory for autoasphyxiating women.

9. I once had sex with Dartmoor National Park. It was muddy that day, the filthy bitch.

Apple Ogies

2009-03-02T22:36:00.000Z

To make up for the lack of posts, here comes a proliferation of posts, taken from my notebook and the many postits littering my desktop.

301st Post: A Waste of the Licence Payer's Money (Though Not Mine)

2009-02-14T15:44:00.002Z

Allow me to draw your attention to the Sidereel page for Psych, an American televisual abomination from the people who brought you Monk.

Like Monk, the OCD detective using his magical OCD superpowers that all people with OCD have to solve grusome murders, Psych deals with a central character who solves murders, but without and OCD superpowers, the lead in Psych is forced to use actual psychic superpowers, or pretend psychic superpowers, I can't really tell, oh wait no, the second episodes just started and it's real psychic powers, but he's a crazy character who doesn't quite play by the rules, a free spirit if you will. But nobody at that square police department will take him seriously. Despite his obvious ability to solve murders.

This airs on BBC2 on Saturdays. Because with the sport on, they've cornered the market of people who will watch anything that isn't sport.

Though it is complete garbage, it is endearing in it's own way. Despite the lead's Dane Cook haircut and the underlying impression that the comedy comes from the sentiment like: "Damn this police department, if only they would arrest people based on no evidence save the ramblings of an averagely funny stand-up comedian..."

Unlike Jonathon Creek or House, this isn't a particularly clever deconstruction of the semiotics of procedural Medical/cop dramas, but it is an interesting readjusting of the tension in places, where the lead character, through comically bad impressions of the CSI object zoom shot/fuzzy flashback, already knows who did it.

Also, unlike Monk, it doesn't string an unfunny joke about the mentally ill into a seemingly endless hell of curliness which hangs around Tony Shalhoub's neck like an albatross force-fed iron filings untill it's stomach exploded (he is actually a very funny, capable comic actor who does the best with the absolute shite that is Monk) - I don't like Monk.

300th Post: SounDart @The Barn on 3/3/09

2009-02-06T19:04:00.003Z

FirstSpark_3rd_Feb_2009.mp3 -

Here is some recording of me, breathing in too much, sort of painfully laughing more at my own jokes than anybody else is, breezing through new material on my old college.

I'm deliberately NOT liveblogging the fucking Inauguration

2009-01-20T20:55:00.003Z

Nor am I providing round-the-clock footage of people queueing, nor will I pad my 24 hour news channel with live footage of the car waiting outside Obama's house, nor will I pledge to volunteer to end Altzheimers by using less plastic and turning the lights off.

If only I hadn't been at work like most other people when Obama was getting signed in (at about 4/5 o'clock in Britain) I could have liveblogged the many pointless liveblogs attempts to cheapen a monumental event.

Comparisons

2009-01-18T02:52:00.001Z

Progress

2009-01-18T02:38:00.002Z

Demands

2009-01-18T02:24:00.002Z

Decisions

2009-01-18T02:23:00.002Z

Big Cook, Little Point...

2009-01-12T19:39:00.003Z

So, being unemployed, I watch a lot of TV, nothing unusual there. But watching a lot of TV means you start to see connections where people who don't watch, let's call it "enough", TV, don't see anything.

For instance, upon hearing of the latest Channel Number 4 effort "Big Chef vs. Little Chef", I immediately thought of the CBeebies program, Big Cook Little Cook, where two comedians, Stephen Marsh and Dan Wright, play the heros, a chef who is average size, which obviously because it's aimed at Pre-schoolers is huge, and a chef who is comically small (about the size of the average penis, but it very rarely comes up - but enough of my problems symbolcrash hahahaha). I thought, mistakenly it seems, that this was there attempt to take their genius show (I genuinely think it's fucking awesome), wherein a tiny man tries to cook with regular sized utensils to comic effect, to an adult audience, possibly by introducing an element of mortal combat to the situation. This way, Little Cook could be in this epic David & Goliath battle, possibly with lots of 300-style slo-mo whilst Big Cook would have to continue describing the recipe, whilst putting up with the mild irritation of being made war on by a Borrower. But that's just me, I thought that'd be a great idea for a TV program. Like Delia Smith with a crazed fantasy element to it, or Jamie Oliver if little men kept trying to thwart his efforts to tell tiny children what to do.

But it's not. Pretentious wunder-chef thingie bob shit-name, the bloke who cooks everything using Liquid Nitrogen, is going to sort out Little Chef, by taking the remote roadside cafeteria chain, and by doing what he does to -hocks and crapgammoeverything in his programs, make it some how even more inaccessible. Bull-hocks n' crapgammon, that's what I say.

Meadnering notes on a Euthanasia Controversy...

2008-12-12T09:28:00.005Z

The presence of a camera meant that this death was very much performed, just as the presence of cameras and facebook has changed the party. I personally will be really annoyed if when I die, there are people taking pictures, posing, making their "I'm so fucking wacky and crazy I don't know where my own balls are" face. This death became the start of a chain of distribution, rather than the end of one. It gave motor-neuron syndrome and the euthanasia debate attention that it otherwise wouldn’t have gotten, but undoubtably deserves. This was not a private death, not a silent death, but the question of whether it was dignified is interesting. When death is stretched out this long beyond the physical cessation of life, establishing its dignity becomes more difficult. What is the relation between dignity and discretion here? What should we prefer, meak acceptance, a retreat into a progressively smaller world that mirror's the debilitating condition that will eventually kill you, or a clarity and strength of conviction, not willing for death but not accepting the slowness of it?

Euthanasia, the idea of choosing inevitability, is problematic for religious groups because they make a fetish of that death-moment. They show it as the point of transcendence, the greatest point of closeness to something they think of as a source. They are obsessed with endings and death because the fear of these things sustains them. Euthanasia is not a thing done out of fear, it is a confrontation. If they were to acknowledge that we could choose when to confront death, which is synonymous for them with meeting a creator (as if they were created by Death, which is either a very profound commentry on decomposition and the Nitrogen cycle, or a complete tautological fallacy, whic do you think?), then they expose themselves as charlatans. Afterall, why not meet God on your terms, we'll all meet up on the compound, drink the special orange juice and next thing you know it's the day of judgement and by arriving early we got the best seats. Do not go gentle into that good night...

The Watchmen film, done by slow-motion enthusiast and “visual genius” (an appropriate thing to call him, as he always gets the look of a comic book adaptation perfect, almost to the point that to make it more like a comic book he does the majority of the film in slow motion, and leaves the words, morality and politics to go to SHIT) Zack Snyder, is relevant to this debate. In Moore & Gibbons 1986 comic book series, the violence was always real, at times even unimpressive, and never anything less than horrific. In the film, if the trailer is anything to go by, the violence has been done to look stunning, beautiful, and completely unrealistic. This suited Frank Millar’s surreal visual interpretation of the Battle of Thermopylae, 300, which was itself an example of how strange and beautiful comic book violence (a precursor to stupid movie violence) could be (e.g. muscles where people don’t have muscles, frames of mid-air homoerotic violence relant on a lack of movement, a silent suspended animation of displayed contorted bodies with a trapped, preternatural stillness, that engaged on an artistic level the traditions and genre-assumptions of post 1960's comics). But with Watchmen? No. This film will have people dodging bullets, post-matrix spectacle wire-gun-fu nonsense, and more action clichés than you can spit at and say “you should’a killed me when you had the chance...” It will show death the way movies show death.

The programming on Sky of a man being killed was interesting, notably because not many people saw it (because it was on Sky - not everybody has Sky), so they had to be informed that it was on in order to draft their complaints/water-cooler discussions/pointless blogs about it (Hi Ma!). The most likely reason it was on Sky and not the BBC is because the BBC wouldn’t touch it with a 10 foot "pole designed for poking things that would get their public funding pulled and making them float off in another direction". Newspapers crow that it was Cynical Attempt for Ratings, but my first thoughts on it were: “Wow, that’s going to be some really boring TV, and this controversy has convinced people that it’s going to be interesting, so they’ll sit there, watching an old dying man slowly get sleepy and drifting off… and they’ll think it’s somehow worth their time.” Clearly the only real point to having this on TV was taking advantage of the recent trend for pointless controversy, so we could say: “ooh, look at the changing world we live in, aren’t people’s relationships to evolving media changing, lets all have a massive circle jerk around hyper-modernity”. In reality very little has changed, if we want to see old people dying, we just have to watch the Eastender’s Christmas special. Yes it’s an actor, it’s only pretend, but at least it’ll have better production values, it will also be shorter and other things will happen in the program like the Vic will explode when Phil’s attempt to ferment orange juice has gone dangerously awry.

It’s notable that Sky did really well to capitalize on the latest craze for BBC funding rows, because through this we can acknowledge their safer place in the broadcasting hierarchy. Whereas the BBC get complaints that “I pay my license fee, you have to put only things I like on, this isn’t just all about ratings you know, you’re a public-owned company!” Sky are only likely to get the criticism that “this was a cynical play for ratings!” from Newspapers that they don’t actually own. To answer this criticism, Sky can just say: “Yes? And? We like ratings. They give us advertising revenue. That’s how we work.” Thus Sky manage to take advantage of the useless-bastard brigade who believe all television owes them something, without putting themselves in any real danger. Tada! You’re all idiots! Merry fucking Christmas!

Star Trek, soothes the fire...

2008-11-08T00:54:00.004Z

Terrellian Death Syndrome. The symptoms are a slight tingling, then death.

Seriously!? What the fuck!? Check out the TNG episode "Genesis", apart from being a pretty geeked out fun-time, it also has Data's cat Spot giving birth to bastard kittens, Worf turning into a dinosaur, and Reg Barclay worrying that he is going to catch Terrellian Death Syndrome. For more spellings of the made-up word Terrellian, click here.

This is another glorious concept bought to you by Star Trek, the show that gave the world the concept of the DNGN cable. DNGN stand for: Does Nothing Goes Nowhere.

Screw you you Jocky bastards, Star Trek is great!

Also, to complete the geek cycle, I now also post here.

On E4 Tonight:

2008-11-03T20:32:00.004Z

The Wedding Planner followed by Mr & Mrs Smith.

I don't know if I can watch The Wedding Planner. I still don't agree with what she did to Rachel from Friends...

Does anyone else get confused with that? Jay-Lo, Jolie, potato-sized arse, potato-sized lips? I'm just glad Jay Z and LiLo didn't get involved, then this poor attempt at observational humor on Celeb/Slacker culture would get even more confusing.

"LiLo" by the way? Really? Do we not think that's going to become awkward when she's found floating upside down in a swimming pool? I'm kidding obviously, LiLo's sorted herself out but what about when she falls of the wagon? I'm an optimist...

Come back Dawkins, all is forgiven...

2008-11-03T19:47:00.003Z

Whilst sourcing the various links in the previous article, I came across Militant Atheism Exposed, essentially an awful lot of small ideas thrown into a blender and homogenized into a gloopy homogenous mass of fowl tasting quasi-liquidated cringium, the chemical in the human body that causes the human body cringe. If you sip this disgusting nectar, you will cringe yourself into non existence. Fo' shiz.

Did anybody get the license-number of that catchy turn-of-phrase?

2008-11-03T19:32:00.005Z

Alternative slogans to: There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.

Thing is, I wasn’t worried. I’ve never been worried. Existential angst doesn’t automatically take that form any more. What would I have put on a bus? Is a bus the best vehicle for this kind of statement? What about trains? I like trains! I mean cars are a bit too individual, and there are more of them, so there’d be more competition for messages, with all this global warming stuff cars have gotten a bit of a bum rap. Dawkins is right though, Religion gets an easy ride. There are better ways of shoehorning that pun into this piece (like a fifth fat man into the mini-cooper car pool – simile zing!), but let’s not forget I’m rather lazy.

This bus in an inappropriate vehicle for either side of an informed discussion about religion: store your stupid opinion for later use in the pub.

I feel this one could possibly sell as an advertising slogan for beer, probably for an irritatingly ubiquitous alcoholic beverage that isn’t beer, maybe for Wetherspoons? At this point I’d like to officially dibs this legally as my stupid idea in case these bus adverts get out of hand and Wetherspoons legitimately decide to cash in. Whatever the creative property equivalent of “shotgun” is, I invoke it.

Welcome to the Atheist Utopia of Central London. We have the best parties.

Seriously, Atheist identity is comparable to gay pride. Our Lord Dawkins himself has made the same comparison. So as an atheist, your sense of identity is based on several social reference points, but not really in a community. Since age 12 I’ve noticed an irritating tone taken by people taking great pains to make their views as an atheist known (the worst time was when I heard it coming out of my own mouth, I knew I sounded like a twat, but I couldn’t stop, a bit like now). Not all orthodoxy is religious. Just like in gay-pride, everybody learns, adopts and evolves their own pride-mechanism, tied into community or institutions or just an arbitrary system of hyper-inflation for affirming their self-worth, there are going to develop many variations of atheism (or rather, there already exist and perhaps someone should articulate them, meh, maybe later). Integrationists (think Church of England, stripping religion to its most innocuous), Extremists, Evangelicals, Confrontationists, Populists, they all exist, and as soon as they get a name and sub-identity, they can begin in-fighting, which is the best part of the inevitable decay of complex systems into simple ones.

Stop reading the bus you idiot. (Jesus, get a fucking iPhone or something, how bored ARE you?)

I think this one speaks for itself...

Like, maybe the whole universe is like, one huge big atom? Woah...

I don’t know if stoner-agnostics have a society to campaign for them and put their views on buses, but this could be good for them. That or: Dunno, let me get back to you on that. Pass the Cheeso’s.

The bus behind this bus probably uses an apostrophe incorrectly. It implies that Cheeso’s (which isn’t even a real word) can possess objects, and then fails to state what those objects are. Are there even any objects? Because you used the possessive apostrophe, so presumably you weren’t finished. I am so sick of this. It’s called Grammar you dumb-fucks (a pluralized compound adjective created by hyphenating between the adjective dumb and the noun form of the word fuck, which IS a noun, it was used by Sade in 120 Days of Sodom over two centuries ago).

This could in turn be preceded by the bus:

Dear whoever wrote the previous bus. It's called “Précis”. Look it up.

Politicized bus campaigns; you wait hours for one, then 5 come along at once. HA HA HA. SYMBOL CRASH, WAITS FOR APPLAUSE, NOT A SAUSAGE.

My other car is a Mormon.

/bringbacktypewriters

2008-10-02T13:02:00.001Z

we never had this problem with quills

On holiday.

2008-09-29T04:16:00.002Z

Temporarily next door.

Scans of my old school notebook:

2008-09-11T23:41:00.002Z

Above is a headline cut from the back of the Daily Mirror, some time in '04/05, which I stumbled upon very early in the morning. When I read further into it, it was about West Ham. But even so the sentiment was worrying.

Bellow is a letter written to the Brentwood Gazette by a deeply religious idiot, about a sex shop that was sadly never built. On a visit to the Tate Britain I purchased this postcard, and they both made their way next to each other.

1st page

2008-09-11T16:15:00.006Z

So we got the Hadron collider sorted, and everything was fine.

Then over the next few months aliens started arriving.

Communications were difficult at first. There were attempts to communicate through gigantic tone generators, a series of graduated mathematically concise patterns, and finally, we resorted to shouting. The aliens having done their research had been expecting this one first. They spent most of the time on arrival furiously fact-checking, trying to find the point at which they’d made a mistake. They were on the verge of hypothesizing (correctly) that human beings were just deliberately difficult.

The problem may have been that we chose our most intelligent scientists to lead the communicative charge, men and occasionally women who were themselves incapable of holding a conversation. As it turned out the aliens had done most of the work for us. They had prepared filmic representations in units of 30 seconds, 30 minutes, and 24 hour round-the-clock-dull-footage mode, believing that this would be the format we would have a good or at least some small chance of understanding, some smaller chance of actually enjoying, but if we didn’t understand or enjoy them we’d still watch them anyway.

One of the messages was a 3 camera sit-com, about an alien and a human who lived together. This taught us the points of conflict that we would probably run into in the future, like that the aliens were offended by the stereotypes and preconceptions our race had of them, and also that our pathetic earth-toilets could not contain their mighty waste. As the duo systematically and somewhat formulaically encountered each somesequent difference, rather than overcoming it, they learned to make compromises and focus on their shared goals, which were few, vague and mushy irritating bits in the last 3 minutes. Each message ended at the point it had begun, which allowed the next message to cycle around in a simmilar way to the same point of perfect situational stillness. Once a series of messages finished, it was repeated. These arcing patterns were occasionally mistaken by Earth's scientists for a hidden message about the nature of the universe, but this was quickly dismissed at the point one particularly "Woop-diggy" alien (a popular recuring side character who had gradually funnelled his trajectory into the centre, like a massive alien turd being flushed down the toilet) tried to jump a Jujuzor Dislaxar in a Khaaaaabiu-ti-ti-hacksaw, which everyone agreed was fucking ridiculous.

By far the most intriguing message was this. It was a single camera, pointing at one alien who’d been selected to convey the amazement of all the different species that were gradually arriving and crowding round the earth. ? was the alien who looked most like a human, which was an estimate at best. ? was actually a huge void in time and space, but as ? was basically nothing at all ? could make ? look like whatever ? wanted. This provided extreme difficulties, and most humans receiving the message decided to switch off their Televisions for the first time because there was literally nothing on. The aliens, in choosing this polymorphous absence to be their representative, failed to take into account that those who didn’t switch off, were incapable of acknowledging something that was nothing, and couldn’t really integrate it into their understanding of anything. ? had a message, that nobody received. It went like this:

“Of all the intelligent species in the many universes, you lot, are the stupidest, the smallest, and the most diminutive. Still… kudos on the Hadron Collider. That’s very impressive. No other species in the universe managed that. Yours is a unique and incredibly lazy kind of intelligence. You don’t want to go to the moon, which for future reference, is stupidly close and not that interesting, so you imagine doing it. Then because you imagined doing it you actually did it. Then it took you 40 years to start imagining that you didn’t do it. And now you want to go to Mars. Good luck with that.

“Anyway, not the issue. We’ve invented what for lack of a better term in your tongue-think we’ll call time-travel. It's not really travel, it's more like already being somewhere else. Like holiday photos, but in reverse. We’ve seen the beginning of the universe. We’ve seen the end of the universe. We’ve seen most bits of the universe that don’t count as either beginning or end. The in-between times. It was okay, not great, but it at least got us out of the house. You just made a cheap copy of it in Switzerland! Your consciousness is infectiously lazy. Look at how the warrior beast-men of Zipp-zipp-zipptwang have taken to the hammock!"

"So basically we'd like to say, we give in. You can be our rulers. We submit to your highly evolved slacker-ethic. However, there is nothing else. No one else to conquer, nowhere else to go, nothing else to find out once we basically give you all the rest of the science in the universe. This is the final frontier. I mean you'll find it fun to begin with, controlling gravity will make it possible for you to truly know the meaning of what it is to veg-out on the sofa. When the laws of time no longer apply to you, there will be no unreasonable point at which to sleep in because you don't have a job. But be fore-warned. With nothing to avoid doing, human beings may well accidentally fulfil some microscopic iota of their potential again, if purely by accident. ? out."

Finding Nemo On Ice

2008-09-07T14:46:00.003Z

Star Trek: Nememenesis

2008-08-31T13:09:00.005Z

First post in a while, and it's about Star Trek. I'm getting too old for this Web 2.0 shit, but we can't go back now, and the thought of having to teach Morse Code to a Pidgeon makes me aggressively sleepy.

Some petty details wrong with Star Trek Nemesis (other than the big things):

Even in the future, you cannot to a "Full DNA transfusion." Nobody can or will ever do that. Because it sounds fucking stupid. The beauty of Star Trek sci-fi jargon is it's ability to cobble together bits of actual science and easilly understandable analogy into something that sort of sounds clever.

When they declair "battle stations" they start handing out phaser-rifles. Then they proceed to have a battle. In space. Presumably someone had to hang out the window and do a drive-by. It's important to note that the film manages to be retarded on a micro and macro level.

Also the driving bit is weak, but not as weak as Troi getting raped and the rest of the characters saying: "Okay dear, just sit out the rest of the film and come back when you have to make a bold show of regaining power over your life."

Finally, the fact that after the wedding reception bit, the next scene right after shows them on the bridge, with Worf whinging about being naked for the ceremony... I just wanted Picard to slap each and every one of them and scream: "Do some work! This is an innapropriate forum for you guys to have pointless interpersonal relationship banter! Look at that ensign, he's not even invited to the wedding, how do you think he feels you going on like that! It's not the last day of the school term at a primary school! Tell you what, I'll just slap a Pixar DVD on the viewscreen and we'll wait out the clock, fuck the Romulans, lets go for Spring Break or whatever you slack-jawed gawper Americans call it. I don't have to put up with this! I could be drinking some earl grey right now! Reading a book!"

Finally (again), the fact that Wil Wheton was cut from the wedding ceremony, when the deleted scene clearly shows him portraying the grown up Wesley as an absolutely bitchin' pimp about to have a threesome with two twins. That would've redeemed the whole movie. Hang on... I saw it... so... it did! Come back TNG, all is forgiven.

That guy who did Lost is doing the new movie, about Spock and Kirk and that. Lost is shit, but I shant go into that now. Enterprise is shit. Thought I'd just put that in at the end.

This isn't a Democracy

2008-08-18T17:17:00.008Z

...this is a very democratic pissing contest:

With allowances made for caliber of pistols,
We met at dawn next to the water-fountain,
A quick jolt and we were off,
Trickling down the banks like school-boys,
Eyes blinkered forwards for proprieties sake,
Mine goes furthest said the youngest,
Mine is purest said the oldest,
Mine can stop and start at will said Pietyr the Russian weight-lifting enthusiast,
But mine, said Morris the minor miner,
Is the most joyous! and prolific! O!
What joy it is to piss! I am covered in my joy!
Like a pleased puppy skidding on a polished floor!
I am of joy and pissing that joy away,
I am covered in my joy and I am happy,
Incontinently slow.

That was a poem, about pissing. Dedicated to Kelly Holmes, who presumably had a good breakfast this morning.

Repent Ye Sinners

2008-08-12T16:17:00.004Z

Everything must go!

2008-07-04T19:07:00.000Z

Festival 08 errata

2008-06-28T22:11:00.003Z

Tinted Splinters Helen Auty

Mercury Burns Blues & Office Supplies Inc.

Videos by Wiffles

A Writer's Type Thumb

2008-06-15T17:28:00.002Z

Letter in reply to Velasquez's Mother

2008-06-14T19:23:00.002Z

In reply to:

The Spoiling

2008-06-14T10:00:00.008Z

M. Night Shemale, writer/director/chimney-sweep child prodigy who's voice has yet to break responsible for The Sixth Signs of The Village In The Water recently bitched about how the Sixth Sense wouldn't have worked if he'd made it today, because the twist would've leaked all over the internet, and his movie would've deflated like the rupturing piss-sack that it is. That's uncalled for, but he really is a whiney little douche. "No, you can't have my precious shitty story-water internet, you have to go and see my movie."

This doesn't seem to hinder film-makers whose movies don't solely rely on a twist at the end to get people to watch them.

So the above comments make me think that Mr. Shemale might have purposefully released misleading spoilers. Or rather, the above comments combined with the shittiness of the spoilers.

I've said spoilers enough right? So I can say what the thing is that's causing everyone to commit spontaneous suicide? Good.

Spoiler Alert! It turns out that The Happening is actually an insightful meta-commentary on the banality of Mr. Shemale's movies. Everybody in the movie has actually just come out of a movie theatre having just seen The Happening. Having been Happened Upon so unsparingly, they all go and commit suicide, especially Marky Mark because he was probably planning on doing it before he went into the theatre, and didn't need much of a push.

Also, it's trees. Evil trees. Evil trees are making people kill themselves. And the Village is actually in modern times, they're like Super-Amish. And the Aliens... just sort of... leave... wow I can't even remember what happened in Signs but it was a piece of shit. Oh yeah, water. And baseball bats. A combination of water and being struck repeatedly with a baseball bat kills the aliens. Bruce Willis is a ghost of his former self and was better in Die Hard. He was better in Look Who's Talking, a movie in which he does a comical voice-over for a baby. The twist at the end? For fucks sake go and see Indiana Jones 4/Close Encounters of the Third Kind 2 because for all it's flaws it is a movie that will not make you want to kill yourself.

Don't tell M. Night I said any of this mind you... Mr. Shemale gonna twist my end clean off...

Slave to the Grind

2008-06-13T22:21:00.000Z

The American Sit Com

2008-06-10T21:43:00.001Z

Has any other medium systematized pain so perfectly? Their lives are horrible! It's hillarious!

Members of the Jury...

2008-06-10T21:28:00.002Z

... I put it to you that if you were as cool as me you would be this tired and this inarticulate too. Can you even be inarticulate to a positive extent? Surely that shouldn't be allowed? I instruct the Jury to disregard my testimony prior and preceding this point. Also, I would like it to be noted that my client is guilty as sin and should be take for all he or she is worth. I rest the rest of my case.

Fuck'em they're only bees...

2008-06-07T20:38:00.001Z

The Joke starts at 5:28

Mac Dead

2008-06-05T12:35:00.001Z

No Data Recovery possible = 1 life lesson: Back up your data more regularly you twat.

2008-05-28T19:54:00.001Z

Cig

2008-05-27T21:55:00.002Z

Every now and again I have a cigar. Can't smell a fucking thing for days but the air is fresher by comparison.

Spielberg Maths Spoilers

2008-05-25T23:07:00.005Z

Would Close Encounters of the Third Kind 2 be expressible as Close Encounters of the First Kind 6? Find out, in the fourth instalment of the Indiana Jones Adventures. Watch as Shaboof (Shia Laboof shortened for easy access) rides his On The Waterfront Hat (which is never seen again, it is a metaphorical hat, purely figurative, representing Shaboof's lost innocence) and Bike past the moon and we weep for the tiny little alien come to earth that gets to go home. I myself thought the double-cross/triple-cross thing with Ray Winston was entirely unnecessary. A double cross is only significant if you establish that character is somehow to be trusted. But the first thing he does is double-cross Indy. Then it turns out he's a double-agent. Then it turns out he just lied about that and is back to double-crossing Indy, who to give credit where credit is due, seems fairly blasé about the whole thing, so good for him. The Russians are a fairly weak enemy, basically Nazis with different accents. But that's fine. No one's looking to blur any lines between good and evil here. Another classic exchange could have been eked out of Piotyr, the pedantic Russian lieutenant, explaining exactly how magnetism works, how back on the collective farm they'd had a magnet between them, and they'd try to use it to move things other than iron but to no avail, and that his father, on his death bed, had imparted, along with the magnet, the secret to it's mystical workings. Also I would have appreciated at the end Spielberg coming up and saying: "Ha! Fuck you all, people who didn't like Munich! There, I bloody did it, Close Encounters of the Third Kind 2! E.T. 2: E.T. Harder! For a moment there I bet you believed you were watching a film that didn't involve Jews or Aliens, well guess what? Stephen Spielberg's at the reins here bitch! Peace out. Hey Lucas where's my fucking money!" There were also several moments in the film, first with gophers, then with monkeys, and finally with an unnamed humanoid ("They're inter-dimensional beings actually." Really? Of an ALIEN NATURE perhaps?) where the creatures looked at the characters with a curious contempt as if to say: "Have you any idea how ridiculous you look?" These were top-notch animal cameos, and not to be sniffed at. Overall, I give it a 99 but take the flake for myself.

losingweight4idiots.net

2008-05-22T13:13:00.001Z

Presumably they'd be "overweight idiots". Because loosing weight when you've got none to loose, that's just stupid.

24 Hour Type Writer

2008-05-20T23:02:00.000Z

People Visit

2008-05-20T19:56:00.002Z

My Long Suffering Basil Plant Mr. Basil

2008-05-18T14:23:00.003Z

3rd Potting, excellent yield, has yet to die as a result of my negligence.

2008-05-17T12:30:00.000Z

Liveblogging Chimmels C

2008-05-16T13:43:00.001Z

HERE

Singy Singy Plinky Plonky

2008-05-09T09:10:00.001Z

Humour

2008-05-06T23:27:00.001Z

From the creative team that brought you Charlotte's Web 2: Spiders Die, Deal With It!

Piracy

2008-05-05T15:11:00.001Z

A Man Walks Into A Doctor's Office and says:

2008-04-27T17:56:00.000Z

I have this dream that I wake up and go about my business as if it were any normal day. Then I wake up and feel like I haven't had enough sleep. Then when I drag myself off the sofa someone's always yelling at me that I've overslept.

Humph

2008-04-27T14:23:00.001Z

And with that, goodbye.

I heard that:

2008-04-25T20:48:00.003Z

Vaughan Lindsay has a girls name.
Vaughan Lindsay did not fight in the Vietnam war, but he also did not protest the war, and has a girls name. Why are you sitting on the fence Vaughan?
Vaughan Lindsay knows where Madeline McAnne is, but refuses to tell anyone, and has a girl’s name,
Vaughan Lindsay has an immense penis made from stitched together skin and flesh grafts of tiny penises, and has a girls name.
Vaughan Lindsay is single-handedly masturbating over this text right now and has a girls name.
Vaughan Lindsay has two anuses, one for shitting on you and one at all times wired directly into the Dartington water supply, and has a girls name.
Vaughan Lindsay shot John Lennon, cut the brakes on Mark Bolan’s car, and had non-consensual sex with all of Fleetwood Mac, and has a girl’s name.
Vaughan Lindsay travelled back in time to have sex with himself as a child, and used a legal and temporal loophole to avoid being prosecuted for Paedophilia, and has a girl's name.
Vaughan Lindsay created and funded in it’s entirety Star Trek: Enterprise and has a girls name.
Vaughan Lindsay takes rice to starving third-world countries, then fends the inhabits off it with a shot-gun, and once he has scared all hope out of them, he uses up his ammo shooting down aid-planes, and has a girl’s name.
Vaughan Lindsay thought the final solution was a good start, and has a girl’s name.
Vaughan Lindsay doesn’t agree with you on several key issues, but respects your right to fuck off the Falmouth, and has a girl’s name.
Vaughan Lindsay never asked for this responsibility, but now he’s got it, is going to shit in your mouth and ears and those of your children and your children’s children, and has a girl’s name.
Vaughan Lindsay performs vivisections of Chernobyl mutants and drinks their radioactive blood because he believes it gives him mutant powers, and has a girl’s name.
Vaughan Lindsay talks to everybody as equals but has an incredibly low opinion of himself and has a girls name.
Vaughan Lindsay uses cute little baby animals as condoms when he fucks Bambi’s mother’s dead corpse in front of Bambi, whilst simultaneously forcing Bambi to write “Vaughan Lindsay” is great in the blood-stained snow with his tears and has a girl’s name.
Vaughan Lindsay lures hedgehogs into bombfires with saucers of milk in Autumn and has a girl’s name.
You know that £5 you lost? Vaughan Lindsay is currently using it as a masturbation rag, and is thinking of you, and has a girl’s name.
You know that five pounds you lost? Vaughan Lindsay has been tampering with your bathroom scales, and is waiting until you mention how well you're diet's going in conversation to tell you, and has a girl’s name.
Vaughan Lindsay likes to go for a walk over the carefully raked gravel of the Zen Garden and has a girl’s name.
Vaughan Lindsay told a really offensive Lady Diana joke, to Dodi Fied, before the accident, and has a girls name.
Vaughan Lindsay thinks you’re looking really jaundiced and is happy about it, and has a girl’s name.
Vaughan Lindsay chews with his mouth open and then regurgitates his food into the gaping maws of his many infantile bird-eating spiders and has a girl’s name.
Vaughan Lindsay sells guns to nuns for fun, and has a girl’s name.
Vaughan Lindsay feels really guilty every time he sodomizes a glass recycling facility, and has a girl’s name.
Vaughan Lindsay enjoys thinking about menstrual cramps, and has a girl’s name.
Vaughan Lindsay made a disparaging comment about your sexual orientation. He organizes “Gay Shame” marches, and has a girl’s name.
Vaughan Lindsay has no tears, but likes to watch other people cry.
Vaughan Lindsay pick you up on time with flowers and chocolates, take you to a nice restaurant and offer in a firm but casual manner to pay for half the meal, buy an expensive bottle of wine to take home, would make sweet tender love to you all night long, call you the next day, arrange to go out again, then gut you like a fish and leave in a dirty, smelly ditch and piss on you and has a girl’s name.
Vaughan Lindsay is claims he is a conservationist, but shits down rabbit holes then cements them in and has a girl’s name.
Vaughan Lindsay spliced his DNA with that of a dog, then bred two such creatures, only to watch the two animals mate in a bestial sex-puppetry he describes as V-dogging. And he has a girl’s name.
Vaughan Lindsay believes the cure for homosexuality is to spend your entire life in a cupboard vigorously yet silently masturbating over the cover of Men’s Health magazine.
Vaughan Lindsay stops at traffic-collisions, winds down the window, takes a luxuriant sniff of the metallic, greasy-blood stink and exclaims loudly whilst the slowly-dying victims eke away their final pain-filled minutes on this earth: “Mmmmmm, hot butter!”

Your Vague Affirmative Motivational Statements For Today ARE:

2008-04-03T16:56:00.000Z

Yes we can!
[For/This is] Sparta! (Feminine: Because You're Worth It)
Every Little Helps

Negative Aptitude

2008-04-03T16:21:00.006Z

Fringe Guide Entry:
15 minutes Stand-up, followed by a comic play 'The Postman'. Gangly twentysomething and sub-simian sidekick seek audience to bemuse. Success is finite (and difficult) but failure, incompetence and negative aptitude are potentially infinite. 'Memorable for their ludicrous ambition' (The Scotsman*).

As part of the Free Fringe
NOT the "Free Festival" who by all accounts are [expletive deleted]s.
Up-coming tour dates (in the south west) to follow.

*Refers to last year's show as writers, performers & directors of on and in Fly In The Jam.

From The Postman:

2008-04-03T14:44:00.003Z

Am I a Postman? What a ridiculous question. Do I look like a Postman?

Why do I dress like a Postman? One reason, and one alone: Power. I have a rampant, totalitarian thirst for power. I used to have a rampant all-consuming thirst for knowledge, but whilst studying some I found out that the two can be considered somewhat equivalent qualifications, though some may argue knowledge is actually more the BTEC level 1 to power's MPhil.

So I dropped out of University, and purchased a long, sharp, pointy sword. The reason being that power can be taken at the point of a blade, whereas knowlege, takes 3 years and £15,000 to study and has no point whatsoever.

Poison in the well...

2008-03-13T16:26:00.006Z

"Dartington Estate Services and Environmental Health have issued a precautionary boiled water notice to all the properties on the Dartington Estate, as a result of discoloured water being found in the borehole that serves approximately 200 properties.

"Samples have been taken from the borehole, which are currently being tested at Countess Weir laboratory – we anticipate the results will be back in later this afternoon. The Environment Agency and Environmental Health have been notified and are satisfied with the procedures we are taking?"

Finally an explanation for that recurring nightmare where Vaughan Lindsay is shitting in my mouth.

Unless...

Incidentally Lindsay is a girl's name and he has the cold dead eyes of a constipated sociopath.

JAFWIIIDO

2008-03-10T13:53:00.001Z

The Joe Abel Foundation for Whatever It Is I Die Of.

JAFWIIDO

Our Mission Statement: To help raise awareness of Whatever It Is I Die Of, and if necessary, the fact that I was ever alive at all.

The JAFWIIDO moto: That nobody should live in fear, or ever die at all if at all possible.

Fulfills my two goals, that my name should be endlessly trumpeted around long after my death, and that self-indulgent charity benefits be held in my honor.

Judy Tenuta

2008-03-04T01:51:00.002Z

Whinging Retarded Procrastination

2008-03-03T19:08:00.005Z

The following is written in Dartington-ese. It will be inexplicable to most people who haven’t spent up to three years or more in a field-specific* learning context.

My problem with WRP is that despite the courses saying that we should have an integrated practice, the structure of the courses demands that we separate these elements. We have a research project, and a context project, and a creative arts practice, though apparently the two former are precursors to the latter. This approach contradicts the party line we’ve generally been given in the previous years. I’m doing performances now, but none of them appear to be going towards the object of assessment.

Perhaps this is because this is the year that the degree (or at least a good 60% of it) takes precedence over the practice. It is the practice that is being assessed in it’s totality, but the distinctions of theory/practice/context are made more or less absolute by the structure of the third year. Perhaps I am doing the things wrong. I was doing research for the CEP, but it went into the work, the performance elements of it and the investigation. I want my WRP to influence my practice but I’m reading fucking books all the time. The workshop’s different, that’s definitely fed into both. But I didn’t get that from the college. Or rather I did, but not from any tutors or anything. Is that because I’m supposed to be doing my own work now? Hmm. I get the sense if I mention this to any lecturers, they’ll say: “Ahhh, but do you not see? Aaaaaaahhhhh.” Thanks guys, have £3000.

Because they’ll be all like: “If your only problem is your degree is distracting you for the things you actually want to do then it’s done it’s job, now you’re an artist, here’s the piece of paper we wrote your name on when you joined.”

That’s actually a reference to a jokey thing I though up earlier:
“How much money can it actually take to run a contemporary arts college? All arts colleges are, to some extent, this: they enrol you, they take your name down, they put it on a piece of paper, they herd you into a field, it’s called pastoral education, they take a quick head count every year, then then at the end when you’ve paid ten grand they make you all queue up at the gate and they give you the piece of paper they wrote your name on at the beginning with a number that says how good you’ve been.
“And if you’re really an artist, you’ll have done something with that time and you’ll have somewhere to go, but if you’re some kind of lesser being, say, a human†, then you’ll leave thinking you’re actually less prepared for your future life than when you went in. But that’s fine, because no fuck’s going to employ you, the rest of the academic establishment thinks you’re a joke, and you’ve forgotten everything (if anything) useful‡ that you learned before them, but hey, at least now you know where you stand! And you learned a new word! Context! Hooray!”

*Both potential meanings apply in this case. Our learning is both Field-Specific, and in one very specific large area of grass.

† Or a particularly advanced contemporary arts dog. Kypto: The Particularly Advanced Contemporary Arts Hound Aware Of Working In The Medium, Genre and Context of Being A Dog.

‡ Like the dates which mark a turning point in the reign of the Tudor family, or the chemical compounds and conversions involved in the process of photosynthesis, or why we should tolerate and respect all religions to the point that we ignore them entirely.

The First Thing that is a Thing:

2008-03-03T16:34:00.003Z

The first thing you will note about publications of humour is the consistent inability to title them accurately or without a sneering allusion to a joke-form in the title that is incongruous to the “seriousness business of research” (Abel, 2008), for instance:

“Humour, ridicule, and the decline of the Kalahari Bushmen, or: Have you seen my wife? She’s so fat, she’s not dying of starvation as our indigenous people are slowly filmed to the brink of extinction.”

This is not a real paper, though it should be. The funny part out of the way, the incalculably huge majority then continue to perform the motions of a very dry sociological, anthropological or psychological investigation of humour on phenomenological terms, which is about, give or take a few decibels of laughter, as funny as cancer. (For a comprehensive study of jokes on cancer, see my previous publication by Routledge: A Comprehensive Study of Jokes on cancer, or, How many Zodiac symbols does it take to make a room full of people burst into uncontrollable fits of laughter?)

I once made a joke about Cancer to my Uncle Kenny, who had cancer. It went something like:
Man goes to the doctor, says: I think I've got brain cancer, doctor replies: It's all in your head.

Needless to say we were totally aware of what a bad joke it was, needless to say, that made it funnier. Needless to say, so why did you say it at all? Could it be because you wanted to?

Buy THIS
I did, and I'm great.

Round the Campfire

2008-02-20T19:27:00.003Z

Tesco yes/no retro extravagazapolooza!

2008-02-20T17:20:00.003Z

Momentum and The Vicious Cycle

2008-02-20T15:52:00.004Z

I love the PIP (Picture In Picture) function on my Television.

At the tap of the swap-button, I can create an instant blasphemy desecrating Hill-Street Blues and significantly improving Cagney and Lacey, then during the advert mash despairingly between two different routes to cheaper car insurance and thereafter bliss eternal.

This is nothing new obviously, people have been experimenting with the remote control for years, and a combination of Scrubs and ER isn't exactly going to win me any awards for Best Original Composition using a six inch hand-held push button playtoy, (that one goes to Frank Zappa, I smile benevolently as the better man wins) but it amuses me.

Frogs

2008-02-14T20:39:00.000Z

“Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.”
~ E. B. White, Some Remarks on Humor, preface to A Subtreasury of American Humor (1941), US author & humorist (1899 - 1985)

Quotation’s dependencies:
“can be dissected” - constituted of organs
“as a frog can” - a body, an animal
“but the thing dies” - alive, self contained
“innards are discouraging” - visceral contents, possible scrying connotations of analysis
“the pure scientific mind” - rationality, purity, enlightenment, reason, science, humor can be associated with a mysticism or a contiguous(?) entity in linguistic territory or topology that is defiled by non-initiates or unintegrated investigation.

Painting those who wish to explore humor as frog-killers. The simile of the frog is chosen because it is a low-beast, one that is commonly dissected, but by students of biology. It is something that is dissected and not expected to live afterwards.

They kill the frog first, so there is enough bio-chemical energy left in it to examine it’s reflex functions, they make it work, puppet it around. The simile requires a squeamish attitude to the visceral, to guts and organs and blood. What does that make comedians? Spawning Pools? Microbiotic Jelly? Pond-scum? Hardly flattering but there you go...

A comment on humor as immanent and unremovable from the human experience, that it cannot be seen objectively “without” the holistic or semiotic wholeness of everything.

E. B. White, as well as being an author, is a humorist, a despicable breed who’s contribution to discourse is usually limited to glib witticisms in Quotation anthologies. “The body is the body, it doesn’t need organs.”

My essay, according to E. B. White...

2008-02-14T15:53:00.002Z

Picture by Allen Lew, CC some rights reserved.

Cutting Up Frogs

2008-02-14T15:24:00.002Z

I feel sullied and unusual...

GET STUCK IN!

Probably the best thing I've seen in quite a while...

2008-02-13T22:52:00.002Z

Courtesy of Master Photographer at ('aving it) large, the esteemed Stephen Bolding.

2 pages from Supermarket 24

2008-02-11T20:52:00.000Z

Standup at The Famous Rat and Emu Bar

2008-02-05T18:48:00.000Z

DOWNLOAD THE LATEST SENSATIONAL STAND-UP GIG HERE

The Elephant Gentleman's New Phone

2008-01-29T00:15:00.000Z

One day, The Elephant Gentleman very much wanted a new phone. In fact, he wanted it so much, that he would look at pictures of the phone he wanted for hours at a time, and when he finally looked away into the light, he could see the new phone in the spots on his vision. He wished and wished and wished, but nothing happened. So he went to see Charcoal Charlie, a vicious pimping loan shark who had a way of getting people what they wanted, then breaking their legs because they couldn't actually afford it. But Charcoal Charlie was having none of it. He said to The Elephant Gentleman: "NO! I will not give you the money to buy a lovely new phone! You should work hard for your money, not borrow it from a loan shark! Besides, surely you could just get a contract, and then they'll give you a phone, or just go down the market and get a cheap one to put a pay as you go sim-card in it. Now get out of here, before I slap you sideways with my scary skeletal claw!"

Although Charcoal Charlie was very rude and frankly rather horrid to him, The Elephant Gentleman had to concede the crusty old gigolo had a point, though he could've been a jolly lot nicer about it. In the end, he decided that it was not the phone he wanted, but merely that he wanted to want something, and that real personal worth comes not from owning material things or perceived purchasing power, but from developing character and personality, so he became a brash and arrogant hustler like Charcoal Charlie, and after an extensive turf-war, ran that sucker out of town like the chump-ass Scrooge he really was inside!

The Elephant Gentleman was very sad, because he had become just like Charcoal Charlie. So he decided that instead of being who he was as a result of abuse from the only Father-Giver figure he'd ever known, he would try to be better than he was, and began his journey onto The Long and Rocky Road Of Becoming, in which he tried to enjoy life, and after that he didn't really have much time to worry about lovely new phones, because his every moment was a new summit to be assailed, and that high up there was never any reception any way. The - End. Oh, and he had a party with lovely cakes and biscuits, which was brilliant!

Wonderful Tonight (Saturday Edition)

2007-12-18T15:28:00.000Z

It's late in the morning, she's wondering what clothes are clean,
She takes a quick shower, and then she goes back to bed,
And when she asks me: "Do I look like a hideous pig-beast?"
I say no,
You look acceptable tonight,

We go to the pub, and get in the drinks quickly,
She looks so attractive, once I've got a few in me,
And when she asks me: "Do you think you've had enough?"
I say no,
I've not got work tomorrow it'll be alright,

I feel wonderful and also tired,
Because we both did shots before closing,
And the wonder of it all,
Is that you don't realize that you actually do have work in the morning,

We stand at the door now,
Both trying to find the keys,
I thought that you had them,
You say you gave them to me,
And then I remember,
That I put them in my coat which I left at the pub,
I say: "Fuck,"
"looks like we sleeping outside tonight."

And you say: "Fucking hell it's freezing!"
And I say: "Here, you can have my coat."
And you say: "I thought you left your coat at the pub."
And I say: "Yeah... Oh right here's the keys."
And when you call me,
A stupid bloody twat,
I say: "Yes,"
....
"Yes that sounds about right,"

At A Party And Some

2007-12-17T07:53:00.001Z

Guy says: "I don't believe in oral sex," and I had to hit him. Basically he just called my girlfriend the tooth fairy.
Bad blowjobs are perhaps something like santa clause. You're up all night waiting for him to come and eventually you just fall asleep. Something to do with warm milk? Maybe not...

I mean if something exists and you say you don't believe in it, it doesn't stop existing because belief isn't a prerequisite of it's being. Like for instance I might say: "I don't believe in Barny the Dinosaur." Which actually means I think that Barny the Dinosaur is a person, dancing around in a dinosaur costume. So what about this guy who doesn't "believe" in oral sex? Does he think my dick is just wearing a really convincing girlfriend's-face costume? Should I be looking down and thinking "Wow this is really convincing!" I mean to be honest he sounds like he's not actually having any kinds of sex, that he's the Scully to my Mulder, there's a pornographic poster on his wall saying: "I WANT TO BELIEVE."

But anyone who knows me will know that I don't actually have a girlfriend. Which is why I had time to think of that sort of funny joke about having one. Also, the party was a fiction as well. The only truth that comes of that joke is me, sitting alone, in my room, like a sobbing child spluttering through the tears: "I buh-buh-lieve in blow-jobs."

Party time

2007-12-16T11:18:00.000Z

Another swinging shindig gets a little out of hand...

Finland, Finland, Finland.

2007-12-15T13:32:00.000Z

Between 32 (wikipedia) and 56 (BBC) guns per every 100 people. Though to be fair, all it really takes is one half decent gun to kill 100 people.

The day of mourning passed me by months ago. All I ever hear is the French people outside my room who won't shut up.

My hand last Wednesday week:

2007-12-13T13:09:00.000Z

This is the set list from my gig, written an hour before on the back of my hand frantically trying to think of something to do for 5 minutes.

It's ever so acutely sad.

Pasila this morning:

2007-12-13T11:06:00.001Z

Siisti...

Temporary Myspace Account

2007-12-11T03:48:00.000Z

For an MP3 of my stand up gig in Helsinki On The Rocks club.

CLICK HERE.

It's a temporary site until I can be bothered to host files elsewhere.

Sauce...

2007-12-07T16:38:00.000Z

...like strange geometrically perfect rabbits.

My Sun and Air

2007-12-07T15:55:00.000Z

This is my greatest achievement. From this, dreary mound of mouldy bear cans:

I have birthed a new being, a creature in my own image. The Helsinki Hugging Flashmob, which I am unfortunately unable to attend, may yet know my unique and pungent stench.

Behold! The Man Of The Future:

Huzzah! It is born! Even though it's a camera phone picture (not a battery in the place) it's magnificence is plane and pure! My creature replicates my every function, in that:

It smells slightly of stale beer and old clothes.
It can hug, and be hugged.
It can sit there doing nothing for hours on end, not getting bored.

As a matter of fact, it improves somewhat on point 1, being that the stale beer and unwashed old clothing is the extent of it's odour, not merely the fine accenting points to it.

I have named it: Huggable Love-Me Joble

Thus it is done!

Suggestion Boxing

2007-12-03T15:59:00.000Z

1. Sodomy corner.
2. Leather without the Matrix, and with designated S&M dominatrix-es (if you know the plural for dominatrix you would totally be into this event).
3. A fountain of wine and a discrete cupboard to hide the people who will inevitably drown in it.
4. A really irritating queuing system for the bar, involving taking a ticket, like the one they have in Argos. Obviously this wouldn't count for the wine fountain. That's more of a pig-trough sort of system. The runts will have to drink the dregs, while the strong will grow fat from gorging on the glorious wine-teats of their bacchanal sow.
5. Designate a room at random each night to be "Orgy room" regardless of whether the occupant is comfortable with that arrangement.
6. Staff to be issued with shotguns and tasers to allow quicker clear-out on a Friday night. Also, for funzies.
7. Mop and bucket for Sodomy corner.
8. Special room for people to go to when they feel the soul-crushing disappointment of another night boozing beginning to turn into actual blood-rage.
9. Observation lounge adjacent to said room with 1 way mirror for people who get off on others depression to go and perve lecherously, or licentiously - however you want to perve, perve freely and without prejudice.
10. Backup mop and bucket for sodomy corner in case first set is abused in any ungainly fashion.
11. Bring back the pasty and pie cabinet, regardless of the extent to which it runs at a loss financially and is disgusting.
12. Glow-sticks. Everybody LOVES glow-sticks.
13. Glow-knives. For people who don't like glow-sticks.
14. An LED scoreboard tallying up who's drinking the most so you can pace yourself according to the mean or median shots-per-second of the whole room.
15. Little beer mats with pictures of rats on them, for placing under knees when vomiting.
16. Mandatory pole-dancing for extroverted drunk people, with video camera so they can see how truly unattractive they are the morning after. These videos can be somehow compiled into a greatest hits DVD every month by a pre-approved committee of Student Union officials.
17. A trough full of rancid kebab meat. For the discerning gentleman of leisure.

Found this a while ago. S'good.

2007-11-30T14:33:00.000Z

Seven, all dogs go to heaven, bad blogs go to hell.

2007-11-28T14:48:00.001Z

Two puppies, two boxes, sign on one box: “Excellent pedigree, knows lots of tricks, personable, and good with kids but protective against intruders, walks itself, plays the violin, extensive interview and workshop audition to VET potential applicants for ownership.”
The sign on the other says: “Free to home of not immoderate cruelty, or best offer, flea collar and worming tablets – not included, will be put down regardless of whether or not it finds a home by any vet with half a conscience or eyes to see with, some history of sexual abuse and only put close to the other dog to make it look even better by comparison.”
Now I don't know about you but I refuse to own an animal that's actually better than me.

So I bought both dogs, hoping to average out at one okay dog. Besides, the first one can walk itself, how hard is it going to be to teach it to bring the other one along?

The next afternoon, success, a slow train ride on foot with a difference, rocks, dog parks, roller coaster tracks like coiled snakes being handled by steel, neon signs and and wet pools of tarmac with shadowy skateboard tracks, also, a large mushroom.

Sixth Machine

2007-11-28T14:47:00.001Z

I love the sound of my own voice; so much so that when drunk I am often tempted to discard whoever I am talking to and talk almost entirely for my own amusement. When this does happen I often begin to flirt with myself. If I'm particularly drunk, or both, or neither and lucky, I might ask myself back to my place for coffee, even though I'm not a big fan of coffee but I know that, and I know what it really means... The request is always accepted, even when I'm rejected we're forced together, when I reply with scorn: “Go fuck yourself.” I inevitably get what I want, but am always disappointed, when the pure biology of the task prevents me from succeeding, so I'm left there, awkward, unable to perform, my only solace, a conciliatory hand job. And at this point, you realise that you're not that interesting, and you should've been flirting with the pretty girl, and that there is nothing more boring than waking up alone after a promising night out turned into a drunken hand-job for one.

“The Nightingales are sobbing in the orchards of our mothers,
And hearts we've broken long before have since been breaking others,”
Which is W. H. Auden apparently.

Fucking Teenagers.
Minds only on one thing...
Maths
Perhaps:
“Teenagers fucking is like fish having sex in a barrel”
Thus:
“Abstinence is like shooting fish in a barrel whilst they're trying to have sex.”

Ith Fifth Your Stop?

2007-11-28T14:46:00.001Z

Being on LSD or something similar, stopping to gawk t the large reflective black surface of a shop window trying to figure out which reflection is actually yours, when in retrospect it seems simple, that yours is the one gawking, which triggers a flashback, or something similar, though not necessarily in a sit-com wavy lines stylee.
Other inappropriate observational comedy:
I know we've all had the same thought, you know what I'm talking about guys, yeah you know, would my girlfriend, naked, squatting on all fours, with a stanley-knife protruding from her arse, be the murderous psycho-sexual wasp woman that haunts my day time nightmares? Nobody else? Well how about you know when you loose socks in the tumble drier? Does anybody think that might be the murderous psycho-sexual wasp woman that haunts my day time nightmares? No?

Fourth Stop, Fourth Floor

2007-11-28T14:45:00.001Z

4th floor – bowling in the dark whilst watching spongebob square pants.
The echo is like a swimming pool.
5th floor – God lives here. He doesn't talk much, but from his attire I can see that he likes skiing.
Briefly surprised to see two people without heads.
A sports shop with a race track around it, attended by mannequin slaves, bodies, failed ones, made by someone who didn't understand what their point.
Small darkly clothed borderline androgynous teenagers group on the top three floors at the weekends. Presumably to assert some kind of presence.
It is a reflective surface; it reflects people. And light. Because however light it is outside it's always twilight in there. I had to set the camera to night photography. That seemed to keep the exposure time down (and avoid that insipid chemical orangeness).
I saw a shop being made. It was all concrete and dust. Made me feel a bit sick to be perfectly honest. Not that I'm endorsing honesty mind. Honesty is a dishonourable and cruel practice of sods.
All the conmen have their sob story in English and in Finnish. I'd say it was insulting if I didn't appreciate the effort they'd gone to. It was impressive, if obvious.

Stop That Third, she's got a Scotsman!

2007-11-28T14:44:00.003Z

The joke about Essex girls goes like this:
Four Essex girls walk into a bar; the barman opens four bacardi-breazers and says: “How may of you does it take to change a light-bulb?” And the all sit there thinking about it for a while, until one of them grabs a bar stool, walks to the centre of the room [where the broken bulb is], turns the stool upside-down, turns to the barman and goes: “Tada!”
The the barman turns around, gets a bottle of wine and one of the other girls goes “I wanna go lakesiiiide.”
Then they all leave with an Englishman, an Irishman, a Scotsman, and the gear-stick of a Vauxhall Nova. Because they are promiscuous.

Stop This Second

2007-11-28T14:44:00.001Z

I wake up at 5am every day, and stab myself in the leg.
Then I jog to casualty.
If I don't get there before 7, there's a queue.
Then I eat a healthy breakfast of sand and protein pills.
Then I bloody well go back to bed.

First Stop

2007-11-28T14:43:00.001Z

Hakaniemi is a Tube Station, the only signs of commercial in roads, a kiosk and a cafe. Kamppi is a spike in the wave, comparatively, a frenzied moment of noise. There seems to have come an appropriate moment to surface for air. I am just across from the Saturday market. A man is playing trumpet. It is, or sounds like I Still Miss Someone. An entirely clear sky. Midday sun at 45°. None of the pluralism of the previous interiors.

The trumpet player is on Strangers In The Night. The sound of his playing echoes but very clipped notes make it sound ethereal or somehow artificial, like a keyboard effect. I want to stay here for longer. Save the road, time is a slower thing next to this old man and his clipped excerpts from swing and crooner numbers. He plays to a transitory audience of pedestrians and noisy busses. He continues though interrupted regularly.

I dropped a collection of cent coins in his pot [to cover the royalties] as he played The Pink Panther. He interrupted this to give an almost sarcastic but uplifting salutation. He communicates this to me. Then continues with The Pink Panther until his fractured attentiveness moves him onto a disjointed fragment of another tune, or just a scale. It was as if to say: “I do this, and I get money, not the other way around.”