Xmas Comes But Once A Year, All Over You.

Here we are again, slowly and inexorably moving towards Xmas in the same way as being strapped to a conveyor belt at the end of which is a Wallace and Gromit-esque machine filled with slashing knives, circular saws and meat grinders. Having to brave the city centre to do shopping for presents and tussle with the aggressive old women who appear from out of nowhere wanting the exact thing that you just picked up to look at. Being begged by your children to buy the biggest and most expensive Lego sets known to man and beast. Putting up the tree and decorations and ending up in a tangled mess of tinsel and glitter when it all goes horribly wrong. 

These are all things you might expect me to think about Xmas, but you would be wrong, wrong-wrong-wrongety-wrong, I tells thee. I love it. To me it evokes memories of childhood; getting awesome presents that, because we weren't awfully well off when I was wee, seemed so much bigger; going to my Grandma and Grandad's house for dinner, which would be a huge turkey roast with Yorkshire puddings and mash; singing carols at school, and the nativity; and the only opportunity to ever see Digby, The Biggest Dog In The World. I love Xmas. I actually get a little bit excited as it gets closer to the day, and that only gets better when you get to engage your kids in that excitement too; my son is 6 and still believes in Father Christmas, whereas my daughter, at 10, is somewhat more cynical, but they are both still getting all wound up tightly over that very special day. It's not about religion to me - to be honest, as a complete and utter atheist that represents the very worst part of Xmas in my eyes. It's all about the childlike glee, the magic of old memories stirred into life by the sight of tinsel and the sound of carol singers. It's about not wanting to go to bed because you're so excited about what Father Christmas will bring you and remembering that feeling. 

I know it's not very misanthropic of me, but meh, fuck you all. 

In other news, I have been suffering lately with an abscess that made my face swell up on one side and made me look like half of Marlon Brando in the Godfather. The accompanying pain was quite intense, a deep and pervasive treacle of doom that sat in the bones of my face and pissed all over my nerves until they really didn't like it. Eating hurt. Talking hurt. Moving hurt. Not moving hurt. Laying down hurt. For a couple of days there, pretty much everything hurt and I had about six hours sleep. I had to do the thing I've been putting off for some time now - about 16 years, to be precise - I had to make an appointment with the dentist. 

I know my mouth is shit. I have always had crappy soft teeth that, despite being brushed twice a day, still managed to just randomly collapse on themselves. When I was 19 I had a whole slew of extractions done of all of the bad teeth, and have a palate of false teeth at the top. The ones that were left are mostly still intact, but there are a couple that have gone horribly wrong. Having worked in retail for most of the intervening time, however, there was little to no chance of me ever being able to afford to get them fixed - when you take home £600 a month, and £250 of that goes on your rent, finding £200 for even cheap NHS root canal work is just not gonna happen. So they've stayed that way, until finally one of them has done this to my face. 

Now that I am a dole, it seems like the ideal time to a) get the necessary work sorted, and b) finally try to confront my own ball-tingling terror of dentists and the pain of dental treatment. I am one of those people dentists hate. I am hypersensitive to pain, and local anaesthetics don't seem to do a lot to me other than make my cheek go numb. However, most of my fear of dentists comes from the way they talk to patients. Yes, I know my mouth is shit. Stop telling me. No, really. Shut up. OK, I get the message now, you're really not happy with the way I've not been to a dentist - yes, SHUT THE FUCK UP. It's all well and good when you earn over £100,000 a year and can afford to piss away £500 on a good night out to condescend and moralise about poor bastards who don't visit the dentist regularly, but when it all comes down to either paying for dental treatment or eating for two months, I'm going to take the eating every single time and flip the twatty dentists the finger. They never seem to be able to get this simple inequality between our incomes. Before this, my last experience of a dentist was going for a checkup after my extractions (and to pick up my newer and better fitting dentures which, thankfully, had already been done before I got my job and were therefore still free)and the dentist seeing a tooth that needed filling. I asked him what the price would be. On the NHS, it would be over £100. I was working in a certain wargames emporium at that point and was taking home about £600 a month. Needless to say, I couldn't afford the filling. The conversation went thusly; 

"But it's your dental health, this work has to be done."

"I understand that, but I don't have £100."

"Well, it's you that will suffer."
"I know this, but I still don't have £100."

"You'd rather save money than have good, healthy teeth?"

"No, I don't have £100 to save, either. I don't have £100."

"You'd rather let them rot?"

"Unless you're willing to do the work for free, because as of yet, £100 has not magically appeared in my bank account to pay for it."

That was the last time I actually went to a dentist, and is fairly typical of the way they seem to treat people. None of them ever believed how often I brushed my teeth and those conversations usually went the same way as the one just detailed, with them basically accusing me of leaving them to rot when in fact I was desperately trying to keep them fine twice a day. At one point I was brushing them after every meal when I was about 14 because pieces were starting to fall off them. But no, no, according to the omniscient dentist, I'd not brushed them at all. Do they have classes in pig-headedness in dentist school?

It also makes me think that there should be absolutely no reason why dental health should not all be free on the NHS. That abscess could have made me seriously ill, yet my GP wouldn't touch it, nor prescribe medication for it. Had I not been able to afford dental treatment, my only alternative would be to wait until it got unbearable and go to A & E - who might well have said that they couldn't deal with it anyway as it was a dental issue. Almost feels like being in America. What, you could die from something but nobody will treat you for free? Too bad, you freeloading pinko, get a fucking job like a proper American and pay for it.

Anyway, all this aside, I had an appointment with the emergency dentist on Wednesday, who had to be the usual dentist (I apologised for the state of my teeth but explained my financial past - he just shook his head and said "Don't apologise to me, apologise to your mouth.") and prescribed me some antibiotics. The proper dentist saw me on Friday and, after I explained myself and my worries, actually surprised me by just getting down to work very professionally, with no sarcasm. This helped enormously, and I thanked her for her approach and sensitivity. I need to go back on Wednesday for my first filling, so now I just have to deal with the pain issue...

Oldness, and Where Did The Last 18 Years Go?

It's my birthday soon. I will be 36. 36. Thirty. Six. No longer can I fiddle the way I say how old I am to say 'mid-thirties', no, from here on in, it is most assuredly 'late thirties', or 'late mid-thirties'. In short, I am getting old. So old, in fact, that half my life ago I was old enough to a) drive, b) get a mortgage and c) join the army and get killed in some pointless war we should never have been involved with anyway fight for my country (ahem). Not old enough to bugger or be buggered, however - not that I'd want to, I am as hetero as they come, but it always amuses me that, before they changed the age of gay consent, you could be entrusted with a financial burden like a mortgage, have a child, be trained to use a gun and go murder people in a foreign land, but not old enough to have consenting sex with another man. 

So, half my life ago I was 18. My Grandad had just passed away, which saddened me as he had been a huge figure in my life, I was doing abysmally in my first set of 'A' Levels due to having discovered my guitar and a social life, and was single. This latter wasn't out of choice, I hasten to add, I was just repellent to women in those days, I think. During that year I started college, taking a Performing Arts course, which taught me several things; that performing artists are largely neurotic, bitchy shits, and that I really should have done the media course instead, where I met several people who would become long-lasting friends, including the inimitable Zorg.   I was addicted to Frontier: Elite 2 on my Amiga this year, and had an all night bender where I played it non-stop for about two days running, stopping only to eat, make coffee, wee, and poo. I had to sleep eventually as I was convinced that somehow I was building a bridge with only one brick, my brain's way of saying "FOR FUCK'S SAKE, LET ME GO! LET ME GO!"

And now I'm almost 36. In the intervening years, I have been married, divorced, had two children, had several jobs, been to college (again, though this time got far better results), been to university, made music, written lots of bloggage, and met my perfect woman. Yet all of this sometimes seems to have happened in the blink of an eye. It was my daughters' 10th birthday the other week, and that made me realise how quickly a whole decade had flashed past. I blame work. When you work, you get up, all sleepy, you have coffee, you blunder out to work, spend most of your time and energy working, come home tired, have tea, sleep, and repeat, and on your days off generally fill them up with all the odd jobs that you can't do when you're working, like going shopping, or taking the car to the garage to get new tyres, or one of a billion other things you'd really rather not have to do. The last 10 months have been wonderfully clear, and thoroughly enjoyable despite being unemployed and therefore having no cash; the whole day belongs to me, and I can write, finally; I can also piss time away on Second Life or playing Battlefield 2 if I want to. But this time has passed at what I consider to be a reasonable pace, and it has made me appreciate time in a whole new way that I hitherto suspected. Namely, that work is a vampire that, in a very real sense, sucks your life away from you, and before you know it you're old, tired, and about to die. 

Now I just have to get some writing published so that I can justify doing sod all all week and make that a job...

Astounding Ignorance (The View From the Far Right)

The sheer mindlessness of the far right never ceases to astound me. Just when I think that humanity can't possibly be dragged much lower and made much more inhuman, someone bellows something from their slack-jawed mouth across the internet that makes me realise that not all of our species is actually sentient. This morning, Ian Martin (@IanMartin) tweeted a link to a trending topic on Twitter. This topic was #2wordsliberalshate, and contains some of the most appalling, scary and downright imbecilic political comments it has ever been my misfortune to read. My personal favourite (for proving to me that most Americans haven't got a clue what liberalism actually means) is the way that variations on the words 'Proud Americans' crop up with such regularity. Some actually try to be political ('Afghanistan War', 'Shooting Range'), some are genuinely funny ('Republican Party', 'George Bush') but most of them are sadly massively misinformed. Some of these people actually feel the need to tweet incessantly, creating a foul river of bile towards people who don't share their political idealogies and demonising them, painting them as subhumans. I'm going to pick one, a chap called @CREinstein, whose bio on Twitter states "I am a Conservative Republican, Elected Precinct Committeeman, I am an expert on matters of security and some Statistical fields. Veteran and Truck Driver". His tweets demonstrate exactly how schoolyard and pathetic US political debate really is - this guy actually is in the political system, and here's a selection of what he got up to on Twitter this morning. There were well over a hundred tweets to choose from, by all means go and pick your own and let him know what you thought of them:

"Bush Won" (Yes, after the results were 'recounted' in his home state where he has no influence WHATSOEVER over such things...)

"The Truth" (That great friend of the far right, The Truth. Such as hiding most of the contents of the US PATRIOT act from the house until the very morning of the vote when nobody could read it properly to see what it was they were voting for. The Right likes the Truth...on their own terms, and when it paints them in the right way. That ain't a leftie thing, it's a political thing full-stop.)

"In God..." (He apparently doesn't understand the difference between 'liberal' and 'atheist'. There are plenty of Christian liberals and plenty of atheist Republicans around that might be able to explain this to him)

"No drugs" (Are we including alcohol and tobacco in there? Or are you still happy to peddle two of the most lethal drugs to the masses so long as you get your cut in taxes?)

"Pro-life" (Again with the confusion between liberalism and atheism.)

"Hetero sexual" (Given the number of right wingers who get caught out in homoerotic romps, this is a little bit like throwing stones whilst living in a Victorian Conservatory)

"No unions" (Yes, because then unscrupulous employers can get away with really treading all over the working people, pull paid holidays without notice, force people to work at a couple of hours' notice, make them work with minimal or absent safety measures, etc. In other words, the cornerstones of the Right that they try damned hard to hide [there's that pesky thing, The Truth, again] so that they can get the ordinary folk to vote for them in elections without appearing to be a bunch of rapacious greedy rich cunts who would happily work everyone into an early grave as long as profits were up.)

"pay bills" (Because liberals never pay their bills. Not sure where this one comes from. Some Republicunts fevered imagination, like the whole 'Death Panels' thing.)

"Rent due" (And they never pay rent either? Wow, I wonder how so many liberal people actually own their own homes, or make rent payments without fail if they don't believe in paying bills or their rent.)

"unbiased news" (Like Fox? 'Cause they're really neutral.)

"Jesus Christ"  (And again with the whole religion / politics confusion.)

"The Bible" (Ditto)

"After life" (Ditto) 

"Ten Commandments" (Fuck's sake! Someone get this man to a nightclass or something.)

"Fight Terrorism" (Like those well known Iraqi terrorists? I think possibly he misunderstands, either due to a lack of general intelligence or because he purposefully avoids actually looking at the issue, the difference between liberals hating 'fighting terrorism' and liberals hating governments using terrorism as a bullshit and flimsy excuse for invading a country, butchering tens of thousands of it's man, women and children, and stealing their oil.)

"Personal Rights" (Durrr, you mean the things that is the entire purpose of unions and liberal human rights organisations? Are you trying to have your cake and eat it and also call it a ham at the same time?)

"Personal Property" (Oh, this is a special stretch that shows a complete failure to grasp the span of viewpoints across different poiltical idealogies. Apparently he now ignores the vast gulf that lies between 'liberalism' and 'communism'. Jesus, man, do some basic reading in political theory and realise what a dumb shit you sound making statements like this.)

"Full transparency" (Because the right wing's track record in this area is so unblemished. [Makes a coughing noise that sounds suspiciously like 'PATRIOT act'])

"Patriot act" (Yes, liberals hate this, just as should any US citizen who likes personal rights [quoting you here], full transparency [and again], The Truth [are we getting the point of this yet?])

"US Army"

"US Navy"

"US Airforce"

"US Marines" (So, that and the previous would be liberals...and the rest of the world, then.)

"Coast Guard" (Citation, please. I'm dying to hear of a link to liberals hating coast guards. I suspect it's an allusion to border controls, but it just sounds hilarious to think that this guy imagines liberals all protesting on the set of Baywatch or something.)

"Obama's Records" (Actually I'd imagine the Right hate that more, seeing as how they were made to look like a bunch of incompetent, bullshitting, mudslinging baboons over this whole issue.)

"Welfare reform" (I think there are a hell of a lot of US citizens, liberal or not, who would actually welcome welfare reform - just not in the way that the NeoCons would like to reform it. Apparently someone in the right misspelled 'removal'.)

"Any evidence" (Sorry, when did this turn into #2wordschristiansandneoconshate? Liberals love evidence. It's what they thrive on, because it's there and doesn't involve being hoodwinked by jingoism and religious idiocy.)

"Ugly people" (This from a political party that, if they were all trapped in a burning building, would a) spontaneously ignite via their copious hair products and b) create a poison cloud of burned plastic, botox and silicone that would kill wildlife in a ten mile radius for a decade.)

"Fried Chicken" (I'm a very liberal person, and I, like many other very liberal people I know, love fried chicken. NYOM. Again, I suspect an allusion to a fallacious view, this time the view that all liberals are vegetarians.)

"All Meat" (A-ha. Here it is. All liberals are apparently vegetarians. What an oddly limited world this man perceives. I wonder what he sees when he goes to the shops. I suspect he feels all swollen up with manly patriotic pride whenever he sees someone with a side of beef in their shopping trolley, weeping a quiet tear at the fundamental rightness of that person and all they stand for.)

"School prayers" (Hang on, isn't seperation of the church and state enshrined in the Constitution, that thing that NeoCons keep on harping on about being the cornerstone of their 'perfect society'?)

"Christmas Tree" (Of course all liberals hate Christmas trees. I recall the popular Xmas tree demonstrations that raged across England in the winter of 2005 where vast hordes of filthy stinking vegetarian beautiful people raged across the nation burning Xmas trees.)

"equal justice" (You mispelled 'unequal'.)

"victim's rights" (Erm, completely failing to understand what liberalism is - most victim's rights campaigners are liberals. But I think we're getting that this guy might be a little misinformed in this area.)

"No recycling" (This isn't a liberal thing. If your brain pan isn't filled with scooped up dogshit, you'd be against people demanding an end to recycling. It's about our descendants not having to live in a world full of our own rubbish.)

"Intelligent Design" (No offense, but only a retard would take a look at the mountain of evidence for evolution on one hand, and the small man fervently insisting that you ignore all of that and look in his mouldy old 1500 year old book on the other, and turn away from the evidence to wander off with the little man...That ain't a liberal thing, that's an intelligence thing.)

At this point we are treated to a snide aside to another sycophant - "rofl... This is, as I told someone else, like taking candy from a whole nursery for me! Muwahahahaha" 

My gods, he actually thinks that he is being incisive and clever, rather than showing himself up to be a terrifyingly ill-informed and ignorant individual who is as guilty as any racist of painting an entire group of people with made-up, unrealistic, fallacious and downright contradictory stereotypes. He was far from the only one making such a tirade but I figured he'd be a good one to look at as he is clearly actively involved in the Republican party and thus provides a good insight into the how they view their opponents - the answer is quite scary, and makes us look back at the Dubya years and think "Ah, now it all makes sense." I knew the Republicans hated liberalism, but they confuse it with atheism, communism, vegetarianism, and, apparently, anticoastguardarianism. Is it done deliberately to misinform voters? Or do they genuinely believe it? I get the impression that this guy genuinely believes it. His comment at the end there sounds as though he quite genuinely thinks that he can see off any liberal with his points. I wonder if he's actually debated any of these issues with a real liberal, one with facts and figures at their fingertips. I somehow doubt it. But then I think that arguing with the NeoCons of America is akin to arguing with the religious. The problem will always be overcoming their ignorance and their unwillingness to listen or understand evidence. I'm too much of a realist to believe that a revolution will ever come, but opinions like this make me wish it would, because frankly, to have people who actually think this way make up the membership of one of the major political parties in the most powerful, biggest polluting, and most dangerous nation in the world scares the piss out of me.

The Dissolving Language

Yes, I freely admit to being one of the Twitterati. OK, I only have a meagre handful of followers and I suspect that most of those are bots and spammers, but hey, that's OK. It assuages my need to feel like I have acolytes and that's frankly all that matters. What I have noticed on the scary times I dare to ride on the public timeline however is just how fast and how far the English language is dissolving in the sea of brief tweets. I'm well aware that, like text messages, tweeting is a very limited format in which you have to cram the entire contents of your head into no more than 140 characters (though in many people's cases that isn't a problem without using contractions or abbreviations), so I accept that in order to get the sense of something across in that space you sometimes have to use 'u' instead of 'you', and '4' instead of 'for'. But, like text messaging, the habit soon spreads until you see tiny short sentences that are almost illegible to a non-textspeak speaker, for example; "its nice wen u can make tym 4 ya frenz exspecially after hs". I mean, WTF? (See me getting into the spirit there?) It is a sentence that is ostensibly in English, but actually needs decoding before it can be understood! I am well aware that language is a fluid thing and that changes happen in it, but dammit, we'd just got to the point where English was codified and finally all sorted out, and now a bunch of kids and / or retards are out there reducing fine words into letter dysentry, to be shat out in a fetid stream onto any medium you care to imagine; forum posts, Myspace, Facebook, even emails, none of which particularly have limited space, and so no excuse to be compressing the language in this way. 

Another bug of mine that is on the same wavelength and thus relevant to this blog is the vast and hateful overuse of 'lol' - it isn't a fucking punctuation mark, dimwits! I am so sick of seeing sentences that end in 'lol' - "Hey man, I heard your cat died lol", "My face just had to be amputated because I dipped it in a superglue vat lol" - did you REALLY laugh out loud? Really? Did you? REALLY? I sincerely fucking doubt it. Not unless there are a hell of a lot of schizophrenics out there with inappropriate affect who piss themselves laughing every time their fingers touch a keyboard or phone. Exclamation marks do just as good a job of passing on amusement at a statement  and cost two fewer characters than 'lol'. Also, they make you look like less of a fuckwit brain donor. This also all extends to the similar overuse of 'roflmao' which seems to get used in the same sentence frighteningly often; "My aunt got run over lol it was by a jeep roflmao". 

On a serious note, and rantiness aside, they say that literacy standards in the UK are dropping dramatically, and I can't help but wonder if this is one reason. If everyone wrote proper English, people who want to communicate on the net or via text would have to learn to spell and punctuate properly, but they don't; their friends and peers all communicate in this lowest-common-denominator fashion whereby words are rducd 2 thr smlst bts tl u cnt ndstnd ne ov it. Fucking pathetic. 

In commemoration of the English language and the idiots who can't use it despite being English speakers, I am creating the Idiot's Dictionary. Feel free to drop your suggestions on Twitter at #idiotdictionary and I will publish the best ones here every month. To get you started, here's some I prepared earlier:

Ostracised - about the same size as an ostrich

Qualification - the process of turning ordinary chocolate into Quality Street

Procrastination - what you do before having a wank

Anemone - what tramps say to passers-by

Fibia - habitual liar

Nanotechnology - technology invented for grandmas

Genealogy - the study of genies

Neurologist - tense person given to bouts of drama

Agoraphobia - fear of fighting

Enunciation - liberating nuns

Paediatrician - special doctor who treats paedophiles

Chlorophyll - special pill that knocks you out

Disembark - to pull the skin off a tree

Faction - action film based on a true story

Depilation - having ones' pillows stolen

Compiling - jumping on a prone person in a playground and shouting "ALL PILE ON!"

Have fun, and spell your words properly lol

Porn and Toast

I've never been a fan of porn. My first experience of it was at a friends' house when I was about 15 and it was clearly something he'd found in his dad's stash, being set in the 1970's, the decade that depilation forgot; I'm all in favour of women choosing to grow body hair however they like, but did anyone ever naturally grow body hair like '70's porn actors and actresses? I still have horrid visions of evil grinning directors covering their actresses' bodies with Miracle Hair-Gro to achieve the results I saw on that video. For the first time in my life the phrase 'pubic afro' entered my head to describe what was going on down there. And the man was just unfeasibly huge. Do men watch porn to get aroused, I wondered, or just to be made to feel woefully inadequate and a little zoned out by watching a man with a penis the size of Gloucester rummage around in the pubic thicket of an unnaturally hirsute actress, both appallingly overdubbed with unexcited voices breathing awesome, Shakespeare-esque dialogue such as, "Hey baby, do you like my cock?" and, "Mmm, it's so big," and all set to the background of spaced out, badly played, wah-wah infested pseudo-funk muzak. It didn't exactly make me want to wank. In fact, it made me want to scrub my brains with Brillo pads until the memory was gone forever.

Nonetheless, I have made an effort over the years to at least try and see what the fuss is about. These efforts are almost always short lived because frankly the porn I've seen mostly doesn't excite me in the least. Great, yet another bubbleheaded plastic woman looking surprised that she has tits. Whoopie fucking do. NOT EXCITING. Woman inserting a half full bottle of Sauvignon Blanc up herself whilst on a jetty and being watched by half a dozen leering inbred South American fishermen. NOT EXCITING. Japanese girls farting in each others' faces and pretending to like it. NOT EXCITING. In fact, about the only branch of porn I ever found vaguely fun was amateur porn, because the people involved are clearly having a whale of a time and aren't doing it for money / coke / heroin / fame (delete as appropriate). The downside of it is that you have to sift through thousands of videos and photos of 68 year olds flashing their tits (by lifting their skirts) and BBWs (big beautiful women, apparently) to find something that even begins to make the downstairs stir, and frankly, I'm not that committed to finding pictures to wank over to make that kind of Herculean effort.

The one thing about porn that truly disgusts me and probably the main reason I am put off by it, is the horrifically degenerate misogynistic attitude towards women portrayed in it. Visit a porn website and read the blurb that accompanies their demo videos. No? Let me burn my eyes and scar my soul and do it for you. This blurb is from a gangbang video, I shit you not, it is 100% real:

"For trashy Julie Night, one salty beefstick is for amateurs and two hot throbbing cocks are still too few! She needs at least THREE cum-trumpets swordfighting for a crack at that spicy tuna! See the pudgy-pussied fuck princess take a punishing poking from three preposterously pumped pricks! Watch a battery of logjamming cocks round-robin her from pie-hole to fishin’ hole to heigh-ho and back again on a carousel of carnality with a triple cum-covered climax that leaves her looking like the last whore to leave a clambake! Towel please!"

Oh, where do I start? 'Spicy tuna'? Really? 'Pudgy-pussied fuck princess'? I get the distinct feeling that the writer of this blurb doesn't pick up many women in real life. Imagine the scene, it's a bar somewhere, a pair of eyes meet over their respective drinks. She sits next to him and smiles, and he jams his hand down his pants and says, "Hey, you skanky fuck-pig, how about we go someplace so I can jam my lusty cum-trumpet in your spicy tuna?" And believe me, this is only the tip of an oderous iceberg made entirely of testosterone bullshit. A lot of the clips involve slapping, choking, and spitting on the women, whilst calling them 'filthy sluts' and 'shitty whores' and a variety of even less pleasant names. Great attitude to have there for 50% of the population of the world. How do these people get by in real life? Do they all live in special Porno Communes inhabited by brainless cavemen with cocks that trail on the floor with their knuckles and lobotomised women programmed to look longingly as three hard dicks are jammed in her arse at once? Every so often a producer will go in and choose the actors / actresses like people choose lobsters from the tank in a seafood restaurant. Oh wait, I think I just described LA.

But what genuinely frightens me is how much of this misogynistic shit is internalised by the inevitable tide of hormonally wired teenage boys who find this crap on the web. When you're young, impressionable, and inexperienced, you pick up tips from what you see in films, what you read in books, and what you find on the net. Do we really want a generation of teenage boys growing up thinking that women are basically nothing more than 'fuck-bags', and wondering why they are getting slapped when they start pinching their dates' breasts hard enough to bruise and then spitting on their faces?

Despite not liking porn myself, I do wish that people could just make porn that was nice to women instead of having to humiliate and degrade them in such revolting paleolithic ways. If a generation of kids learn how to treat women from internet porn, the human race may well become extinct in the next century unless someone starts to produce something better...

And toast? I was eating toast whilst writing this. Buttery toast. NYOM.

Ennui Where You Go

Ennui. Basically, ennui is boredom, at least if you check it's woefully brief entry in online dictionaries (the kind that give the definition of 'ennui' as 'boredom', and the definition of 'boredom' as 'ennui' just to keep you chasing your mind tail until your sanity collapses under the pressure). However it's more than that, it's a kind of boredom on an existential level, a boredom with one's self. I'm bored of myself, basically. I have so many things to do, I could write, I could build a spaceship on Second Life, I could make a song, I could go for a lovely walk in the sunshine, but I've done all of these things. Now, when I sit down to start writing I just get a feeling that can only be described as 'meh'. Same when I try writing any music. I get vaguely excited as I make a particularly nasty sound on my synthesiser, make some kind of dancey bassline with it, but then instantly get bored when it comes to recording drums or anything else. I could go for a walk, but my general misanthropy soars to new heights whenever I expose myself to the turgid mess that is the general public. It's not helped by the fact that there's a gang of workmen down my street who seem to have been employed straight out of the prison release queue for newly ex-con sex-offenders. I kid you not, I just walked down to the shops and there was a young woman in front of me. As she walked by the potential rapist who was stood next to a skip, he leered at her, mere inches from the poor girl, and once she was literally only just past, said in that foghorn voice that these kind of brain donors always seem to have,"Ey, lads, did you see the fucking tits on that? Fuckin' 'ell, I'd give her one." I only resisted the urge to smash the shitwits' face in because his four mates might have something to say about it, though if I ran fast enough, hopefully the friction of dragging their knuckles along the floor would give me enough of an edge to escape.

Then there's the arseholes you see on the street. What is it at the moment with men and alpha-fucking-male contests? One particularly cunty behaviour I've always seen, but seems to be on the rise at the moment is this. You're walking down a street. In the distance, you see a guy walking the opposite way, so you move off to one side slightly to let him pass. Only he sees this, and moves to intercept you, forcing you further in to the side. Only he then moves further in to the side, to the point where, by the time you meet, you will either have to collide with him, or move far out of your way, quite needlessly. The latter alternative is what they want to happen, because basically, it's a typically testosterone overdriven my-dick-is-bigger-than-your-dick contest, and if they can force you out of their way, they win. If you collide with them, it turns into an out and out confrontation, with lots of "Look where you're going!" and, "Fucking watch it!" bandied about, despite these cunts being the ones who made a beeline for you in the first place. I have developed a new way of dealing with these bollock-brained retards. When I notice them veering toward me, I pull out my mobile phone and pretend to be texting someone. I stop, leaving most of the path for these people to walk by on, and become apparently completely oblivious to them. One guy actually did walk into me when I did this a few weeks ago, and when he came out with the old favourite "Watch where you're going!" I responded with, "Dude, I'm standing still. I'm not going anywhere. Why did you walk into me? Did you not see me stood there?" Obviously my being 14 stone something and tall adds to the effect. If I was five foot four and built like a pipe cleaner I'd probably think twice about this method of countering male cuntiness.

And I would go to the park to sit in the sun and read, only there's a better than average chance I'd end up getting hit in the head by some sort of ball, because it seems to be an automatic reflex when a man has a ball within a ten foot radius, what precious little consideration they have for what goes on outside their thick, heavily brow-ridged skulls disappears in a puff of testosterone, and suddenly they are whooping like chimps and bellowing like dying elephants and kicking heavy footballs into surrounding crowds and then getting all pissy when people don't kick the fucking ball back to them due to them rolling around the floor tending to their broken nose and concussion thanks to the impact. And if it's not a football, it's a rugby ball. Or a tennis ball. Yes, I have seen grown men kicking a tennis ball around the park because they had nothing else at all in their nanoscopic, underdeveloped minds that could possibly have occupied them better than running around and bellowing incoherently like a mortally wounded buffalo.

So, I feel a dose of ennui. Nothing wrong in my life, I have a fantastic girlfriend, I love my wicked flat, I have all the time in the world to indulge my whims. In fact, the only fly in this rather lovely ointment is that I still haven't had my £200 graphics card replaced under guarantee.

I should perhaps try to get out more. I realise that it has been quite some time since I saw most of my friends. I've been living in hermit like seclusion for almost two years, partly because of a tiring job last year, partly because I enjoy spending as much time as I can with Miranda, but mostly because I'm an idle, antisocial cunt who enjoys sitting at home drinking coffee in his bay window and spitting vitriol at any flecks of human shit that drift past. Then writing about it. Online.

Yeah, on reflection, getting out more is a good thing to do...

Oh, by the way, apparently Michael Jackson died a few weeks ago. I'd care more had he released an album worth hearing since the '80's.

I Wish I Could Hate Biscuits

I have a belly. In common with a fair few other chaps, my belly is a bit bulgy, and does obscure my view of my genitalia with its' swollen girth - something I am rather grateful of, franky - but I am starting to worry that it needs to go down if I am to avoid an early death caused by slight fatness. Don't get me wrong, I don't have body image dysmorphia or any such nonsense. I'm not morbidly obese, or even 'fat' - I'm only somewhere between a 34 and a 36 inch waist (technically, if someone started making 35 inch trousers I'd be able to do away with Jeremy Clarkson Bulge every time I don a pair of 34's) - but I am getting a bit porky. On the rare time that I catch my reflection in a shop window as I walk past, I see it bulging out ahead of me as though I were pregnant with a Nissan Micra. Annoyingly, my arms and legs and face are quite normal, and lack the fatness of my distended gut, giving me the mismatched appearance of someone wearing only the abdominal part of a fat suit. I need to get rid of it, but there are several obstacles to this end:

1) I have no willpower when it comes to eating nice food. If you put a packet of bourbon creams on the desk next to me (he says, looking across at the now decimated packet of bourbon creams on the desk next to him) expect it to be gone in the time it takes you to even register its' presence. If there is no crappy food in the house, I will go and get some. Hmm, Super Noodles, or a bar of chocolate...chocolate. Nom nom nom. So the diet of shit is unlikely to end anytime soon.

2) Exercise is, to me, something that should only ever happen to other people. Don't get me wrong, I once ran for a bus, so I know what it's like, I just don't ever want to have to do it again. It makes you sweat and consequently smell like an Olympic runners' jockstrap, and if the almost apopleptic, wheezing mounds of blubber I see jogging around the Avenues I see on an evening are an indication of 'health' then you can keep it. Chase me with an axe or a gun or something, and I will move like the wind. Give me a vague notion about death through lack of fitness, and I will prevaricate like a politician being asked a direct question. I'm rubbish at willpower, basically.

3) I ought to walk, but I quite like sitting down and exploring the world via the interweb, which on its' own is the greatest procrastinatory tool known to humanity. Also, I like writing and have been doing more and more of it of late, working hard on my five part end of the world extravaganza. All of the above involves sitting down and none of it involves going for long walks and running the risk of setting out in shorts and a t-shirt only to be soaked pissless when the weather decides to change its mind for the fifteenth fucking time in an hour. I'm off on a walking holiday to Wales in a couple of weeks time, so I know I should be getting fit and practising, but there's a really good article on Wikipedia that I just have to read about the life cycle of the cabbage white butterfly...

Still, my girlfriend is staying over at my house this week so hopefully some of her healthy eating habits will rub off on me and I will be dissuaded from eating a whole massive bar of Cadbury's Dairy Milk for lunch, and cook something decent for dinner rather than devour a whole pack of custard creams. In fact, right now I am cooking us up some Quorn sausages and beans for tea, so there you go. Apart from the whole pack of bourbons, that gets the week off to a good start! Fingers crossed that I can get to the end of the week and be a little lighter...

Land of the Who? Home of the What?

So we live in a country that is falling apart thanks to the oncoming recession caused largely by irresponsible banks (or banks at least looking like they were acting irresponsibly, but how many of the bastards have actually fallen yet?), our national health system is in a bad way, our education system is churning out imbeciles who can't even pass NVQs, and our government is trying to install CCTV on every street and issue us with ID cards (at our expense, naturally). We can be arrested and held for up to 28 days without charge on suspicion of terrorist activities. Gangs of thick cunts lurch about the streets bellowing incoherent gobshit at one another and passers by and injecting themselves with heroin and hopelessness as the the third generation of their families to live off the benefits system. But do you know what? I'd rather live here than in the US. The more time I spend on the internet, the more I see that the cultural divide between we Brits and the US is far wider than I used to think.


We, for example, take our NHS for granted a little bit. In Britain, if you get hit by a car and break a leg, an ambulance will come and take you to a hospital, and yes, you might have to wait, but a team of doctors and nurses will check you over and fix you up as best they can. And do you know what it costs you? A bit of tax off your pay. That's all. No quibbling, no argument, if you're ill, they will try to fix you. You'd be forgiven for thinking that access to free healthcare is a basic human right. You'd be wrong, but you'd be forgiven for thinking it nonetheless. In the US, however, there is no free health care. You have to have medical insurance, like motor insurance for the body, except it costs more and the companies will wriggle out of paying for it even more often than they do with motor insurance. If you have medical insurance, then you get access to healthcare, but it puts up your premiums because now you've had to make a claim. Or, in the case of one poor woman who was diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid, the insurance company lets her get treated, racking up a bill of over $70,000, and then tells her that she isn't going to get it covered by the insurance as she clearly already had the cancer when she began her insurance policy and it was therefore a 'pre-existing condition' that she failed to declare (despite not knowing she had it, obviously, but that's no defence when dealing with rapacious scum of the fucking earth insurance companies to whom profits are far more important than people's lives). She recovered from the cancer, but the couple were reduced to poverty thanks to the debt they owed the hospital for the treatment. And there's the rub, kids. If you can't pay, you're in for a whole world of financial hurt. Granted, there is some small provision for very low income children and their families, but it's not well implemented and so many people fall through the holes it is scary, and this article demonstrates the attitude of even some surgeons towards uninsured people - a 5 year old boy with an open fracture in this case, for fuck's sake. In 2006, for example, there were over 40 million people in the US with no insurance at all. If they were hit by a car, they would basically be billed by the hospital for the work, and would probably lose their homes paying for their accident.


And there's another reason to be grateful for living in the UK. Especially at this time whilst the world is being ground under by the relentless advance of the recession and more people are being made redundant every day, isn't it comforting to know that the government will give you £64 a week to buy your food and pay your bills, and the local council will pay for some of your rent and council tax? I lost my job in December, and am (just) able to maintain a nice flat in a nice place, with room for my kids and my hobbies, and I am here on the internet, typing away. I've been trying to get something else because, lovely though the freedom is, it does get a little boring sometimes and I could do with the money for a new PC, but the point is that for the last six months I have been able to keep a roof over mine and my childrens' heads. In the US, I'd be on the streets. Homelessness happens very easily in the US. Oh, there is a system to work through, housing projects filled with human detritus, gangs and drug peddlers, but all too often redundancy basically means you're fucked. No rent equals no home. Get the fuck out of my apartment, and no, I don't give two soggy shits that you have nowhere to go.


And that whole thing about the land of the free? It's bullshit. We might think that our police are draconian when dealing with protests and shooting Brazilian plumbers on a London Underground train, thinking he was a terrorist, but compared to the US, our police are harmless sixties style Nick-Berry-esque bobbies relaxing in front of a pub fire and enjoying a bawdy joke with the locals. In the US, a woman in her seventies was tasered by a traffic cop because she was being 'difficult' and was 'resisting arrest'. No offence, but if you can't control a 72-year old woman without delivering a massive electric shock and thus running the risk of actually killing her, you shouldn't be on the fucking police force. In the US, a patrol car actually pulled up and told a man sitting on his own garden fence, talking to a saleswoman, to get on the ground and put their hands behind their heads, and repeatedly told them to stay away from the area and off people's property. Why? He was black. And so was the saleswoman. The man, unfortunately for them, turned out to be an officer in the LAPD, but what if he hadn't been? In the US, the Patriot Act means that FBI agents can access your home, your computer, your place of work, and take whatever they want and not even tell you that they have been, they can tap your phones, read your private emails, open your mail - all in the national interest, of course. It's the war on terror, you see. They can also arrest you and you just disappear into a Guantanamo Bay style non-prison for the rest of your life, held without reason or charge until you eventually break down and confess to something you never did, or until you die of old age. Detained indefinitely due to secret evidence. The US is becoming more and more like the government of 1984 with every step it takes.


And don't even get me started on religion. We're a nice, cosy, mostly secular country. Apart from the door-knocking Jehovah's Witnesses and Morons - sorry, Mormons - we don't really have many tub-thumping evangelical types. The Archbishop of Canterbury accepts evolution and science, and for the most part the religious in the UK do tend to keep to themselves. Even the born-agains, who, although they can't help dropping Jesus' name into conversation and wearing clothes 20 years too old for them (beige slacks and cable-knit sweaters, and Laura Ashley floral print dresses with slingbacks...shudder), tend to just go to church and mingle with their own. In the US the religious are fucking insane. They really are. They are never off the media, spouting hatred against gays, or muslims, or atheists. They believe, quite genuinely, that the Earth is less than 20,000 years old and take the biblical creation story literally. In Texas and several other states, it is even in the state constitution that you can't hold public office there if you don't believe in a supreme being. Seriously. Although there is ostensibly a seperation between the school system and religion, in many states they don't even bother to pay lip service to that, and if you don't want to say prayers with the school basketball team, you'd best have a fucking thick skin because you will be branded as 'that disgusting atheist' and excluded from the team, ostracised from classmates, and even treated dubiously by teaching staff. Think I'm kidding? Check it out. Scary, isn't it?


And then there's the politics. You thought the Conservatives were a bunch of openly arrogant money-grubbing cunts hell-bent on grinding the faces of those on below average incomes into the dirt to line their already full pockets? Even Thatcher looks like a kindly aunt compared to the average Republican. They don't even have the shame to hide their corporate connections like our right -wingers do. I think that many of the American right would gleefully go back to feudalism and reinstitute serfdom just so that they could drive around the grubby peasantry and piss champagne at them from the open windows of their gas-guzzling limousines, driving over any not fast enough to get out of the way. Watching the Houses of Parliament in this country is bad enough, like watching a bunch of dribbling, witless public school cock-sockets acting as though they were still in a playground somewhere, but in the US it escalates wildly. Political campaigns reach histrionic levels. Whenever I see Republicans in particular getting all emotional in speeches I am reminded of Hitler's Neuremberg Rally. They also have this habit of shouting down their opposition in a way that even a hardened Tory would quail at.


And scarily, the media stands firmly behind them in some cases. Fox News are one of the worst offenders, misrepresenting news stories and effectively telling the country what to think, and employing rancid fucking dogsuckers like Bill O'Reilly to shout at anyone who doesn't buy the party lie that the US is the greatest country in the world and if you believe it did bad things then you are a TRAITOR and should go live somewhere else. Again, here's an example. The US media also have an appalling track record of ignoring news about what their governments' policies are doing to the rest of the world in favour of homegrown smokescreens. Sociologists refer to the media as gatekeepers of information, deciding what the people see and what they don't see, and nowhere is this more clearly politicised than in the US. Check out these covers of the same issue of Newsweek. Newsweek has now been bought out and apparently is improving, but this is just an example of how blind and blanketed the American people are being kept. And even then, half of the public were against the war in Iraq, despite this kind of news filtering.


In summary, then, the whole American Dream thing is bullshit. In reality it's a nation ruled by a wealthy elite and their accompanying fundamentalist Christian ministers who absolutely will not relinquish their power, supported by an ultra-right-wing government that openly uses unconstitutional practices 'in the national interest' against its own citizens. A massive number of the people of the country don't get access to healthcare, and as the recession deepens and more companies go out of business or downsize, more and more families there will end up homeless. Not only that, but they are lied to and shouted down by their own media. I do honestly think that most of the American people are probably nice enough. It's their government and their institutions that scare the piss out of me. Still, if we must find a bright side, at least the US has marginally better track record with women's rights than Somalia.

Insane Republicunts Say "NO" to Saving American Lives

Well, I don't know about you but frankly the US Republican right terrify the piss out of me. No sooner did Obama say that he wanted to introduce healthcare reforms due to the generally shit nature of the US healthcare system (if you didn't read my epic blog about the many reasons I don't want to live in America, basically the first thing the US medical care system does if you are bleeding to death is to check what healthcare insurance plan you have. If you can't pay, there's a good chance they might just leave you to die, even if you were six years old) than the loony right, known as 'Republicans' in the US, started gibbering and howling and throwing their own shit at the walls. Well, they didn't, but it's not too far from the truth. Before the first words had settled, the Republicans were throwing that well-known American dirty word 'socialist' around, and denigrating 'socialised healthcare' systems in other countries, such as the well-established ones in Europe. Meffs like Rush Limbaugh, radio presenter and repulsive Republican sycophant who once referred to Obama as 'Barak the Magic Negro', which I think tells you everything you need to know, chaired phone-ins, telling some guy who rung in to say that he had broken his wrist and couldn't afford the $60,000 to fix it that he shouldn't have broken his wrist in the first place. Then some of these god-fearing brain donors came up with some bizarre notion that Obama's reforms would actually lead to 'death panels' where old people would be voluntarily euthanised after signing a living will. And people actually believed it! Sarah Palin actually thinks that Obama wants to kill her disabled baby. But then, Sarah Palin thinks a lot of scary, scary things, because let's face it, dear reader, she is batshit insane.


At the moment, the argument has crossed the Atlantic because the right-wing news networks are attacking the NHS. And to add insult to injury, Tory MEP Daniel Hannan, appeared on a number of news shows agreeing with the bastards and saying things like the NHS was a "60 year mistake" and he "wouldn't wish the NHS on anyone". The most amusing (for us) and ambarrassing (for them) was when Investors Business Daily declared that genius Stephen Hawking would not be alive under the socialist regime of healthcare in the UK because such a totalitarian regime does not value the lives of the disabled. I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall when Stephen Hawkings' reply popped into the editors' inbox saying that actually, he does live in the UK, has done for pretty much all of his life, and without the NHS he probably wouldn't be here today, thankyou very much.


Living in the UK, we know that the NHS isn't perfect; long waiting lists, no money, wards being closed down - but frankly I'd rather have a system full of holes like ours than no system at all, like the US has. At least if I got hit by a car, I know that a paramedic team would try their damndest to scrape me off the road, set my broken bones and put me in hospital, there to be operated on and looked after as necessary. In the US, being an unemployed bum, I would probably be dragged to the side of the road and left to die by the paramedics once they realised I don't have any healthcare insurance. Even if Hannan suddenly fell down some stairs that someone had carelessly greased just before he arrived and fractured his skull on the cunningly placed lead pipe at the bottom of the stairwell, the British NHS would pick him up and nurse him back to health. Although, frankly, given his views, they shouldn't. I personally vote that the NHS should send a high quality photo and, indeed, footage of Hannan making his comments round every A&E department and every paramedic unit in the country with a memo reading; "If you have to treat this man, do not offer any treatment until you have taken his credit card, phoned up to make sure that it is valid, and taken £60,000 out of it directly into the NHS' account. If the card is declined, please ask him to leave the building before he is thrown out." Let him experience the joys of US healthcare that he so clearly loves so much.


Graham Linehan, comedy writer at least partially responsible for many of my favourite comedy shows such as Father Ted, Big Train, The Day Today and Black Books, was so incensed by the Republicans laying into our NHS that he began a Twitter campaign to get #welovetheNHS as a trending topic - and it did. Truckloads of Brits joined in with their messages and positive experiences, and in doing so enlightened the Americans, whose only glimpse of the outside world tends to be through the highly distorting lens of their embarrassingly right wing media; suddenly they saw first hand testimony that socialist health care works far, far better than the frankly inexcusable abomination they have in place in their country that leaves 50 million Americans completely without any healthcare at all.


Sadly, Obama himself is responding to these insane right-wing attacks in the wrong way. Where he should just tell them to put up or shut up and proceed to show the people of the US that he is a leader with balls of steel and he is going to give them what they need, he is instead getting bogged down defending himself over the imaginary 'death panels' - exactly what the senior repulicans want to happen. Drag it out, delay any healthcare reform, and then it will be too late into his term to actually do anything about it. Screw your courage to the sticking point, Obama. Fuck over the bloated, hideous, Hutt-like healthcare insurance companies and the equally grasping, gaspingly overweight pharmaceutical companies that feed off it, and give proper free healthcare to every single American citizen. Make the USA be the envy of the world instead of its current position as 'Global Village Idiot'. You have the power and the money to do it, so don't hold back because of a bunch of retarded little rich boys who refuse to allow any kind of advance in US living conditions on the basis that they or their rich friends might become a little less rich.