The Terrible, Joyless Life Of Women

The internet is brilliant. Whereas once I used to have to reserve my anger at idiots by looking at the tabloid front pages in newsagents and sneering at the pathetic drivel they try to pass off as 'news', or reading it over the shoulder of the bloke in front on the bus and wishing the bastard would turn the page to the next story so that I wasn't being stared at by some plastic Page 3 model's nipples (the model of course looking startled, as though she wasn't expecting the photographer to come round to her house while she was tottering about on her 6 inch heels and wearing only the bottom half of a kinky nurse's outfit), these days I can have the very worst shit that the tabloids pump out fed directly to me thanks to such brilliant places as Twitter and Reddit. Yes, within minutes of the bowel movements of the tabloids being curled, steaming, into the toilet bowl of their website, people are tweeting them to the world. Jan Moir's vile homophobic rant about Stephen Gateley and the subsequent answer that dug her even further into the hole; Rod Liddle's accidental exposure of his inner racist (not that it's that hard to spot generally, mind) - and these are just the high profile ones. Today brought me one that will no doubt get much less interest, but which to me, as someone who respects individuality and women's rights to equality, demands an answer.

 Liz Jones posted an article on the Daily Mail's  website today - in the Femail supplement, of course - that is clearly inspired by the current news about the wife of the Northern Ireland First Minister, Iris Robinson, and her much-publicised romp with a 19 year old boy. I don't feel too sorry for Iris, to be fair, because she also spouts homophobic rhetoric too, so I shrug as she gets pelted with shit from the media and wish someone would just point out to her that this is exactly what she dishes out when she spits venom at gays. However, Liz gets carried away with her discussion of toyboys and takes us on a dark trip into her own frustrated, joyless, dysfunctional sexuality - and then assumes that all women work this way. Let's take a peek into the mindset of this woman.

"But while we all know that men are driven by sexual desire, there is a consensus, and I’m not being anti-feminist when I say this, merely realistic, that women care a lot less about sex and validation via the bedroom." 

I suspect that isn't actually the case, but do continue.

"In her new film, It’s Complicated, Meryl Streep – who at 60 looks fabulous – plays a character who is positively whorish." 
 
Whorish? Did she just say that in 2010? That a woman in a film portrays a character who is sexual and enjoys it, but she's been described as whorish? What decade is this again? Did we suddenly fall down a time hole and end up in the 1950's? I thought the only people who used words like that nowadays were fundamentalist southern baptist types in the US, who also fall to the floor 'speaking in tongues' and frothing at the mouth when they are not staring beatifically at their bibles and listening to voices. But to hear it coming from a modern journo - not only that, but a female modern journo is just gobsmacking. And yet this still pales before the sweeping generalisation that comes next.

"But to be honest I don’t think the majority of women, once they are past the teenage crush period, even think about sex that much.

They put up with it, with the repetitiveness, the ridiculousness, the inconvenience and the inevitable disappointment, because it gets them to where they want to be: married, with children and someone to help shoulder the bills and dig the garden"

Ok Liz, let's backtrack a bit here. So you have issues with sex. You find it repetitive and ridiculous, inconvenient and disappointing. Stick to what you know. But to then take that personal experience and tar all women across the board with that dreadful picture? That's just a slur against your own gender, and you should write another article apologising to the women of Britain for effectively describing them all as withered, dried up sticks who 'put up with' sex and really just want someone to give them children and help them with the fucking gardening. I can see thousands of women gnashing their teeth in anger and disbelief at this article; in trying to speak for everyone in this way she's ended up like someone at a party who's just said, in a loud clear voice, "Well of course, we've ALL wanted to taste someone else's shit at some point in our life, haven't we?" and then wondered why everyone is moving away from her quickly and giving her looks of disgust. I know there are women who do see sex the way she sees it - however (and this is the weird bit - unlike Liz, I'm neither a woman nor a seasoned journo) I also understand that there are many, many other women who do enjoy sex, and for its' own sake too, and many more who fall in the middle. Because, guess what. Humans are all different. Just because I personally get quite excited by ginger haired women doesn't mean that I suddenly believe that all men everywhere only fancy ginger haired women. Jones seems to miss that very fundamental part of writing for people, and assumes that her deficiencies in this area are general female traits.

On a par with this towering piece of craptitude is her statement about why a woman gets herself a toyboy;

"A woman embarks on a relationship with someone much younger than her because she believes she can manipulate him, boss him, steal his sperm and then nurture him as she would a child or a pet" 

Wow, this is a cold woman. I mean properly, heart made out of cold dark matter that interacts with nothing. Absolute zero is the coldest temperature in the universe, where everything stops completely, but her soul makes 0 degree Kelvin seem like a warm summer day by comparison. So not only does she find sex tedious, but she seduced a younger man (whom she later married) in order to basically stick a joypad socket in his head and control him a la Halo, though involving less shooting and more shopping. Incredible. And to nurture him as you would a pet? Christ, what did she do, have the poor cunt lay across her lap while she tickled his tummy and fed him chocolate drops if he'd been a good boy? Take him for walks with a special collar on and let him sniff her crotch from time to time? Oh no, she'd have hated that latter, it would be too much like sex.

And the scariest part of all? I already mentioned it. This piece of anti-feministic dogshit is published in the Femail, the Mail supplement aimed squarely at women. This is the image they want to pass on to the people of the country. Feel good about sex? Now feel guilty about it because Liz Jones tells you that it's dysfunctional to feel so horny you want to fuck  someone just for the sake of it. Thought relationships might be about love? Nope, sorry to shatter your illusions girly, they're about manipulation and cold-hearted control. What the hell are the Daily Mail trying to do, breed a generation of frustrated, bitter, asexual Margaret Thatcher clones? 

Oh. Oh. Right. Sorry. Don't know what came over me there...

Celebrity Big Brother Retard Speaks Out On Evolution

I'm not going to watch Celebrity Big Brother, I refuse to watch it on the principle that I don't want to become one of the hordes of people talking about the mundane goings on and who-shagged-who on the damned thing - frankly, I don't want to know, and find BB pretty tedious despite the initial interest factor of torturing the minds of minor celebrities and idiots. It wanes fast for me. 

However.

Last night Stephen Baldwin, a man who has the closest approximation of a Lego wig for hair that I have ever seen on a human, spent apparently 45 minutes reading from the Bible to everyone. Tellingly, they cut to this scene from one of Vinnie Jones laid on his bed asleep, and Heidi Fleiss walked off claiming that it was putting her to sleep. He seemed initially reluctant to say that he was a creationist until Stephanie Beacham pushed him on the subject, when he admitted to not believing in evolution. He leapt from one inane and meaningless statement ("I believe in the word 'faith'" - yeah, so does everyone, dumbo, it's in the fucking dictionary, doesn't take much believing in - I believe in the word 'idiot' too, also the words 'dumb' and 'cunt') to a statement of towering stupidity, which is what prompted this blog and, yes, to actually seek out and watch the section in question. He said "Evolution means that something becomes something from something else, correct? So my question is - if we're from apes, why are the apes still here?"

Where do you start? 

Firstly, chimpanzees and humans have a common ancestor going back about 6 million years ago - this ape was neither human or chimpanzee, it was something different that is no longer found presumably because changing conditions forced it to evolve into what we now know as chimps and human bengs, presumably due to the survival pressures of the different wings of the species going to live in different environments - it's safe to say that chimps stayed in a forest and evolved improvements to their ability to climb trees, whilst our ancestors, for whatever reason (living in a swamp, living on plains) evolved to walk upright and evolved new and interesting ways to use their freed front hands (although both humans and chimps can masturbate, so presumably this wasn't the big motivator that produced an entire species of wankers like humanity). This is basic stuff, Baldwin, really basic stuff that my 10 year old daughter understands. If she can understand it, I'm sure a 43 year old can. But wait! He's a born again Christian, a type of religious fundamentalist who simply goes mad for whatever reason and refuses to ever listen to sanity or reason again. Apparently he says that after 9/11 he had 'experiences that go beyond most people's wildest dreams' (Oh yeah? Like what? Someone slip you an acid tab when you weren't looking then left you in a room full of mirrors with a red lava lamp and a perpetually looping video of Keyboard Cat for six hours?) and now, apparently, he 'can honestly look you in the eye and say the experience I am now having with Jesus Christ blows away everything I did before.' Given that you've not done any acting since 1988, (and that was in a 'cult' film that nobody has ever heard of)  and in the meantime have only ever appeared on a string of degradingly stupid reality celeb shows such as 'I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here", "Celebrity Apprentice" and "Celebrity Bull Riding Challenge" (I kid you not, this is true) that doesn't surprise me. Sitting alone in a bare room and giggling every time you shat yourself would blow away anything you did before.

What really gets me is the lack of sensible reaction this got ; Sisqo, a real-life brain donor who didn't realise you were supposed to be dead before spooning out your grey matter  and giving it to medical science in a wet envelope, staggering around and going 'Durrrr', and whose only mental power left is to sing like a fucktard every so often, piped up with "Yeah, I would think the same thing" - presumably if you had anything left to think with, I'm guessing? The man is so unfeasibly dense that he just copies the thought processes of those around him - formulating an opinion of your own is just such hard work, after all. Place him in a university with some boffins and he would become a normal person. Place him in a Big Brother house, however, and watch him devolve to a state where he's shitting into his own cupped hand and daubing his name on the mirrors whilst grinning toothlessly within three weeks. Mark my words. Three weeks. Then one of the female housemates (I couldn't tell which one) chimed in with the hopelessly mindless comment, "Well what about spirits and spirit powers and the evolution of spirits and, you know, energy and fields and that?" What? I mean, really, what the fuck? So instead of someone saying, "Stephen, you're wrong, you're a creatin and THIS IS WHY" (cue lengthy, Dawkinsesque lecture on evolution) we get some dippy New Age shitwit who probably has crystals at home to help her piss glow orange and consults a Tarot reader every week banging on about the evolution of spirit powers! Unbelievable! In this day and age where our knowledge of evolution's processes and the evidence for them are so staggeringly overwhelming that you really would have to be a retard or insane to look at even a fraction of it and still say "Buh, no, I don't believe it", that's the only challenge to his idiocy?

But thankfully it gets better. 

Alex Reid and Jonas showed some pluck by challenging Baldwin's preachings, and his counter argument was one of the most confusing and pointless pieces of religious pseudo -reason it has ever been my misfortune to witness, and reaffirmed my view that to be a born again Christian, you have to be completely insane and have no handle on rational thought whatsoever. OK, stay with me, because this gets weird and dumb in equal measures. Right. "What is the thing you need the most right now? The thing that, if I took it away, you would die? That's right, oxygen." Right Stephen, we need oxygen, that's right. With you so far, "Why is it called oxygen?" At this point Jonas earns a bonus point for coming back with "Because we named it that" which renders Baldwin's follow up completely nonsensical - "Ah! Ah! So someone told you that it was called oxygen and you believed them, but someone just told you that the words in this book are true and you said you don't believe them! You believe in oxygen." Alex's comeback to this is rather priceless in its simplicity, and the confusion as to where Baldwin is going with this reasoning is evident on his face - it's as though he's trying to explain it to a child - "But I'm living proof that oxygen exists." Exactly. The basis for science - we say oxygen exists because scientists did experiments to find out what the air was made of, what properties each of the gases had (oxygen, for instance, catalyses reactions and bonds with other things easily whereas nitrogen isn't so reactive) and built up a body of empirical evidence that anyone, even Baldwin, can go out and test for themselves. Mm. Not quite the same for God, though, is it? But according to him, it's only when you let go of all need for proof (ie rationality) that the spirit of god comes to you and gives you proof (ie insanity). Apparently this is an oxymoron. In reality, an oxymoron is a combination of words that seem to mutually contradict one another, ie military intelligence, or clever Stephen Baldwin; although in this context it would also be a good way to describe Baldwin himself, for example: Oxymoron - person who believes that proving that oxygen exists will somehow make people think that God does too.



General consensus among the housemates seems to be that the Bible readings are not a good thing. Here's hoping they go all Lord of the Flies on us and by Day 20 they'll have built a giant wicker man in the garden out of used toilet roll tubes and be getting ready to burn the black hole of supercompressed stupidity that is Stephen Baldwin to a) see if God protects him and b) prove that oxygen exists. I for one would welcome this and would actually tune in to watch. Especially if Sisqo is still daubing his shit on the walls.

On Optimism

Generally speaking I am not a neurotic person. I'm reasonably stable, but I do have my moments. I have a tendency to obsess about the worst that can happen in any given situation to the point that I end up not doing anything on the basis that the real world outside is too starkly terrifying to contemplate interacting with at all. I daren't even look at my bank statements half the time - some weird part of my brain assumes that if I never actually observe my bank balance, it will remain fine. It's like quantum theory applied to banking. My account contains Schrodinger's Money. How much easier would life be if you could just switch off the 'worry centre' of the brain?

I live in constant amazement at my girlfriend's ability to stay calm in situations that would have me gnawing my own fingers off in sheer, desperate panic. I had previously thought that optimism was the reserve of the hopelessly naive until I met her; now I wish I could learn at her feet. She is so optimistic that I wonder sometimes if her body naturally produces its own Valium. It's wonderful to behold, but also utterly baffling to me, what with me being a hybrid of Mr Grumpy and Mr Worry. If I walk down roads I start to get convinced that I will be killed from behind by a person who has just gone insane and mounted the kerb in the world's quietest car at 70 miles an hour; when I go to the shops I get paranoid that my identity has been stolen and that the police will be waiting at the shop when I use my card to ask me some questions about weapons-grade plutonium purchased on the Russian black market with it. And flying? Don't even go there. I will never, ever get on a plane. Never. Statistically speaking it's often touted as the safest way to travel. But if your aeroplane breaks down at 10,000 feet, the only option is to tuck your head between your knees and wait to die along with several dozen other people who will all insist on screaming and turning your last moments into an annoying and undignified clone of any Hollywod disaster movie ever made. If your car breaks down you just pull over and swear at it a lot before ringing the RAC. And boats? Nope, boats sink. They do, or they catch fire and fall over. And that might not happen a lot, but you can bet that it will happen when I decide to go aboard to try to conquer my fear. My whole life is a classic case of Sod's Law.

When I started writing this, I was preparing for a drive back home from our New Year's Eve holiday in the Peak District. Normally not a harrowing prospect, but then it snowed the previous night and I couldn't even get the car out of the farm without doing hilarious comedy spins on the slight slope up to the small country road - I shudder to even think about trying to get up the bigger hill a few yards further on. And the night I was writing this, the temperature was set to hit -4, freezing all of that packed snow and semi-melted slush into a black ice nightmare. I was terrified that, as the farmer towed us up the hill in his tractor, that the tractor would somehow lose its grip and plummet back down the hill into us, crushing us at the bottom; or that once on the main road, we would effortlessly slide off a curve and into a yawning chasm; or we'd be hit by a jacknifing lorry; hell, I was even worried that a Wampa would rip us apart as we tried to get into the car. And that was just the worry about the trip. I was also worried that my house might have burned down, or that a family of rabbits had moved in, or that I hadn't emptied my bin thus leaving the flat stinking of rotten bacon. Had the building itself been removed from time and space and was only accessible if I used my front door key in any other similar lock around the globe? My girlfriends' response - don't worry. It'll be fine.

And do you know what? She was fucking right. The trip home was tense, but manageable, the flat was still there and smelled fine, and it turns out that Wampas only exist in the Star Wars universe. If she could capture that optimism in a capsule she'd make millions. Millions.

File Sharing Bollocks

I see that perpetually media-hungry smug prick Bono has waded in to the argument over file-sharing, more or less suggesting that we become a totalitarian state where all online activity is monitored so that people don't download entire seasons of, say, '24' (the argument he uses) or download U2 albums so he doesn't get anything from those downloads and has to spend slightly less on his clothes than he did last year (the subtext). He claims that "A decade's worth of music file-sharing and swiping has made clear that the people it hurts are the creators...the people this reverse Robin Hooding benefits are rich service providers, whose swollen profits perfectly mirror the lost receipts of the music business." To my eyes, all this proves is that he is an even bigger cock than I thought, although my favourite bit of his piece was when he described how the technology does exist to monitor everyone's web activity, after all, look at China...Yes Bono, you've actually just suggested that we take the lead of one of the most oppressive and least humanitarian nations in the world in monitoring our citizens every web activity. Well done, Bonehead. Any intelligent person would have read back what they'd written and thought, "Fuck, I can't say that. Jesus. It's only a short jump from there to suggest that we open Soviet-style Gulags for filesharing dissenters. I'll scrap that." But not Boner. No, he stridently calls for the government to declare the internet version of martial law because he thinks that some people might be stealing some of his money.

Let's just take a look at some of the actual statistics compiled by the music industry in Sweden (one of the countries with a traditionally more 'relaxed' view on filesharing) for a second, Bono, if you'll permit me. The figures seem to show...why, they seem to show that musicians' take-home pay is just getting bigger and bigger over the last few years. Let me explain this, Bono, as you don't seem to be able to grasp this concept. Most musicians earn considerably more from live gigs than they do from sales of albums. Income from album sales is actually up - to the music industry - and yet the artists are seeing less of that money than they were four years ago. However they were never earning that much from album sales in the first place (say a figure of about 5% of the album's value) so compared to the mountain of cash they earn from playing, say, stadiums (like U2, Bono, you know when you play stadiums and everyone there has paid  £30 for their seat and you get about 50% of that sum), album sales only represent a small part of most artists' revenue. The figures show that the music industry's income from sales of albums is steadily rising, yet the amount they give to artists is shrinking. Who do you want to blame again for the loss of money you get from album sales? 

The music industry is like a bloated parasite that has grown enormous by latching its many vampiric tentacles into the talented for decades and bleeding them dry to fuel its coke habits, big cars (I'm reminded of an anecdote of a time when a certain well-known boy band, who were signed to Simon Cowell's label, were living on, effectively, less than minimum wage, relying on food parcels from their parents despite having had chart topping hits and a hit album, and one day, when they were on their way out of the label's office, Cowell drove past in a new Aston Martin, wound down the window, patted the side of the car and told them with a grin, "See this? This is the last single, boys!" before driving off like the epic cunt that he is), sex parties etc etc, and now that the ordinary person has at their disposal a means of bypassing them to get directly at the music, and through that, give the band more money by going to see them live once they've discovered them, it is the music industry itself that is whining and bleating about the imminent death of the music industry, and trying to wrap it up as a sob story about how artists are struggling now as a result of YOUR THEFT of their music. The figures don't support this, however, and the only artists who actually believe this are the cretins who either a) believe what their label tells them as they deliberately trim more money for themselves from the rising album sales and give the artists' less then lie about it being down to filesharing, or b) earn ridiculous amounts from their album sales, but nowhere near as ridiculous as the amount that the labels earn from them, ie Metallica, U2, etc. Sorry, music industry, I can't feel sorry for your corporate rape of music finally being stung after all these long years of you buttfucking artists to fund your lifestyles and billowing incomes. Time to pay the piper, you ignorant selection of overfed cocks. 

Nine Inch Nails mainman Trent Reznor was so disgusted by this aspect of the music industry that, when he released Year Zero and fulfilled his contractual obligations, he didn't bother signing to a label again and now sells his music directly from his website - which means his subsequent albums are a lot cheaper (he was always very outspoken about how expensive the labels made his albums, 'penalising the fans for being fans' as he saw it) and he actually gets a realistic cut of the money, as should have always been the case anyway.

The real impact of filesharing on musicians seems to be that more people are going to live gigs than before, thus placing more money in the pockets of the bands themselves. It's easy to assume that because people can check out the music of more new bands for free, they then like some of them so much that they buy a ticket to see them live. That's my line on this; go see bands live and put food in their mouths. Or buy albums and singles and put another Aston Martin in Simon 'Epic Cunt' Cowell's garage.

The One Where Ireland Becomes Europe's Village Idiot

Do you know what the worst thing is about having studied psychology? It's when you tell someone about it and they recoil in mock horror from you and look all nervous and giggle about how they bet you know exactly what they are thinking, don't you? I want so badly just to say "Yes, but that's not because I studied psychology, it's because you're a fuckwit." I hate this pathetically mindless belief that, somehow, having studied psychology gives you the power to turn someone's skull into glass and lets you read what they are thinking about on the little mindscreens inside. The world is full of these stupid, stereotyped reactions. If you tell someone that one of your hobbies is playing computer games, you are treated like a moron or a child; tell a group of lads that you don't support any teams because you hate football, and you'll have your sexuality questioned; tell someone that you do roleplaying games and you are instantly a geek, despite the fact that the person who has said this to you can tell you the lineup of Manchester United in 1995 and exactly how many goals they scored in each game they played that year without even a pause. The reason for this proliferation of automated programs is simple; most people are thick. 

You heard me. They're thick. They can't handle having to actually think about anything beyond drinking a can of Special Brew, staring slack-jawed at a bunch of howling baboons on the telly voting for X Factor, and farting, so people acquire a set of standardised, second-hand responses to things - social programs, if you will. They're like a viral set of memes, passed on from idiot to idiot. Most of them are passing on opinions or statements, ad verbatim, that they then recite ad nauseum like some sort of reality-defying mantra when their single thought is challenged. How many more 'salt of the earth' cunts must I hear bang on about how the BNP is 'only representing the voters, mate, that's democracy'? 

The real danger, however, comes from religion. Religion thrives on creating and passing on whole meme sets to allow the common person to cope with most situations - need to deal with homosexuality? Here you go. Someone is an atheist? Here's a bunch of statements we think are clever and that should befuddle them, yet leave you writhing like an insect on a pin when they come back with deeper questions. Religion goes deeper though. It passes on a whole second hand morality and saves you the effort of having to think your way through any morally grey situation you might come up against in your life. The side effect of this is that most of them don't fully understand these morals, which is probably why they keep fucking them up (Dubya not quite understanding the idea of loving thy neighbour, and the whole 'thou shalt not kill' thing - hint: it applies even if you don't actually do the killing with your own hands, Bush - for example). Religions pass on these ideals, these beliefs, and make imbecilic recommendations like the Catholics telling Africans that contraception is a BAD THING despite the rife AIDS epidemic there. It's based on fairy stories from the arse end of time that have somehow achieved massive validity simply because enough people around the world repeat it in the face of all of the evidence to the contrary (which is pretty much all of the evidence that's available, incidentally). And what's more, the Republic of Ireland has just passed a law that makes it a crime to say all of this, because it's blasphemous.

Let's just look at that last bit again in case your mind refused to accept it the first time.

In the year 2010, when we should all be driving flying cars, when science has unravelled the human genome, worked out what happened mere seconds after the Big Bang, made enormous discoveries about the origins of life and the processes of evolution and can send a probe out to the cold, distant worlds of our solar system to parachute through an alien atmosphere, where homosexuality is becoming more and more accepted, where rationality and logic and evidence and information are deemed the ultimate tools in the quest for knowledge, the Republic of Ireland has made it illegal to write anything that might offend a religious person, on pain of a fine of up to £20,000. I mean, have you seen how easy it is to offend deeply religious people? Just saying that you know someone who's gay and they're quite nice actually on your Facebook page is enough to send some religious idiots foaming at the mouth and chewing on furniture. Writing "There is no god and those who think otherwise are morons" on your blog will trigger a frenzied horde of offended Catholics that will burst through your door and drag you screaming to the courtroom, there to get a criminal record and a ridiculously over the top fine.

How far will it go, this law? Let's say you live in Dublin, and you're engaged in conversation on an internet forum or newsgroup, and you say to a persistent fundamentalist mentalist that they need to go and look at the evidence for evolution because their literal bible interpretation is not backed by any evidence whatsoever, and all of the evidence supports evolution. You get caught because the guy you're talking to is also Irish and he rings the police. You've blasphemed, mate. Down to the courtroom. Ker-ching! Twenty grand, please, do not pass go. What else? Will you be fined for owning a copy of The God Delusion by well-known idiot-basher Richard Dawkins on the grounds that your religious neighbour once came round for coffee and was offended when she saw it on your bookshelf as the title is blasphemous? Ker-ching! Another twenty grand, just for having a book!

I think that it is a fundamental part of freedom of speech that we are allowed to criticise everything; government, law, the media, religion, everything that tries to hold a position of power over us should be held up to the same scrutiny by the people and be prepared to stand or fall on its own merits. I'd personally go one further and say that before any religion gets to be taken seriously by anyone, they should have to actually present the case for the existence and factual basis of their religion in a court of law and have it proven beyond doubt that their religion is completely factual and is in no way based on half truths, myths or outright lies - and they're facing Dawkins on the other side of the argument. Otherwise it's bullshit and they should shut the fuck up crying to the state when people call them on it. The Irish government is basically legitimising religion's brand of mindless thought control by silencing dissent in a not dissimilar way to how Stalin silenced political dissent in Soviet Russia. When you make opposition illegal, you're on a very, very slippery slope indeed. It's quite funny to watch religious folk flap about with their fingers in their ears shouting "I CAN'T HEAR YOU! NYAH NYAH!" when faced with evidence, that proves them wrong, it is chilling in the extreme to see the atheist strapped to a chair with tape over his mouth whilst the religious stand around in front of them spewing their braindead bile about how atheism is the work of the devil, and aren't atheists all evil people, and atheism is the rot at the heart of our society - because let's be brutally frank here, atheism isn't protected by this new law. Oh no. If some pious cunt says to you that you're an evil monster who isn't fit to walk this earth because you're a vile, queer-loving atheist, you can't take them to court for offending your 'beliefs'.

Basically, the Republic of Ireland, by creating this anachronistic law, has just cemented itself  in the position as Europe's Village Idiot, complete with a stupid straw hat and dogshit smeared around the mouth. It doesn't take a psychologist to work that out, either, Ireland, so stop pulling that face and telling me that you bet I know what you're thinking. Fucking dunce.

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...