New Year's Eve TV is Shit

At what point did New Year's Eve TV become so shit? I know it's become the norm over the last few years to channel hop and moan about the state of telly before finally settling on Jools Holland on the basis that it's the least offensive of a bad bunch, but this year's effort takes the piss more than a catheter connected to a vacuum cleaner. My girlfriend and I spent the New Year in a cottage in the Peak District and had the free channels on a Sky box, so we decided, naturally, to check out the telly on the night, and lo, what we found was an abysmal lineup.

On BBC1, Graham Norton was holding the fort, joined by special guests Joan Rivers (who appears to have had so many nips, tucks and lifts that approximately 98% of all of her skin is now stitched between her buttocks), Sarah Jessica Parker (who many people aspire to be / shag, but always seems to me to resemble a fairly normal Boots checkout girl who's been herded onto Extreme Makeover and 'improved' by 'style gurus' and cosmetic surgeons), and Jedward, the freakish teenage duo shat out by relentless media bowel the X Factor. When we tuned in, Jedward had just arrived and were blithering an endless fog of random words, talking over one another and so quickly that even without the distraction of two identical voices competing for your attention, you still wouldn't have been able to decode much. Not that what they were saying should have grabbed your attention; from what I managed to gather, they were basically wittering about bike accidents they had when they were twelve. The random word cloud became so dense that Graham Norton looked as though he realised the error of inviting them to the show, and despite Joan Rivers' face being locked in one vaguely surprised expression due to her years of entire body rebuilding, her eyes were practically begging for the world to end. Only Parker was brave enough to engage them in conversation, gently needling them. Nobody knew what to do with them. On the one hand, there was the mothering "Aww, aren't they sweet" approach, and then when they started spewing verbiage, turned into more of a "What the fuck? HOW DO WE STOP THIS? DO WE HAVE ANY GUNS?"  

While we're on the subject of Graham Norton, what happened to him? How the hell did he get to be mainstream? Am I dreaming, or did I welcome in 2000 with him hosting a show in which the New Millenium's firework display was set off by a woman firing a ping pong ball out of her vagina onto a target in front of a live audience? Now THAT was television. These days he seems to be a fairly safe, mainstream chat show host with a hint of cheekiness.

We got bored with Jedward, and flipped channels. ITV were welcoming in the New Year with a programme about the best adverts of the decade. Good going there, ITV. Keeping up the quality for which you are well known. You've only had ten years to think about what to do at the end of the first decade of the millenium, and what a piece of programming you've managed to come up with. Didn't even last five seconds on it. And that was during the adverts.

Channel 4 had Alan Carr with guests David Tennant and some other people, but Alan Carr annoys the tits off me. He seems to be trying to fill the 'cuddly alternative gay' chat show host vacuum left by Graham Norton and succeeds in just being camp and annoying. 

BBC 2 and Jools came up next. Jools had his usual Hootenanny line up on offer; a couple of trendy interchangeable Indie bands that probably had names beginning with "The", a handful of ageing blues / soul 'legends' that nobody under the age of 40 has ever heard of, some pissed up comedians who were all sat together and who are always so drunk that they aren't really that funny (apart from the year Ade Edmondson stood up and sang with the Kaiser Chiefs in a moment of embarrassing car-crash TV on a par with the best that The Office ever managed - and for a bonus, it was all real), and Tom Jones, who has apparently stopped dying his hair and beard (but not stopped applying the fake tan) and looked, according to my girlfriend, like a sexual mahogany Santa Claus. He may look like he's been Tangoed, but fuck me, that man can sing. He welcomed in the New Year with a rendition of 'In The Midnight Hour' and blasted the weedy newcomers and so-called legends into atoms with his mighty voice, a voice that can stun leopards at fifty paces and rupture concrete dams at twenty.

It's telling that none of the terrestrials kept our attention for long; instead we stayed with More4 for an unnanounced evening of sheer pleasure; a night dedicated to Graham Linehan written shows, with re-runs of Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd, all of which I'd seen before, and all of which were  500% more entertaining than anything the other channels were offering.

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.