Department of Hate

Change you can bereave in (Or, How I learned to stop worrying and hate the Democrats)

2008-11-07T13:22:00.001Z

And breathe out.

The people have spoken. Their votes are in, they’ve been counted, we think, and faith has been restored in the system. Barack Obama has been elected president without incident and Big Bad Bush, barring some last-minute presidential term extension act that all the Democrats will vote for, will head back to his ranch in January. Or if not his ranch, then perhaps the 100,000 acres of land he bought on an aquifer in Paraguay. (Note to self: I wonder if Paraguay still has no extradition treaty?)

So now that the country’s all fixed up sharp again and the sense of urgency and panic are gone, ol’ Snotty here, yours truly, would like to pour a tall brandy, take a deep breath, bring the volume down a level and just get real witchew.

I get that Obama’s intelligent and very charismatic, and his election certainly affords a feeling of empowerment to the black community. He’s also got more people than ever before to engage in the political process (though, you could argue Bush has done just as much toward that, as well, by being such a villain). What’s more, Obama should substantially improve Americans’ image abroad. These are all positive things, and for that reason, Barack Obama’s election is better than John McCain’s.

But what is all this change he done talked about? Obama said it himself: “Most of the bills I voted for in the Senate were from Republicans and President Bush.”

Every single Democrat, save for a handful, has been a fucking collaborator with this current criminal administration. For the first four years the Democrats were enablers, an opposition in name only that was so terrified of the political climate it let the Republicans pull whatever got damn atrocity they wanted.

But by the time we reached the second four years the Democrats smelled an opportunity, and they moved from enablers to active collaborators. The political landscape in America became a bizarro world where traditional Republicans like Sen. Dick Lugar, of Indiana, and Sen. Chuck Hagel, of Nebraska, called for an end to Iraq, while the Democrats, nearly in unison, voted for more funding for that unlawful war. Some did it to boost their conservative credentials; others did it because they knew that the longer the war goes on, the more it hurts Republicans.

Democrats have played with people’s lives for the bullshit excuse of political opportunity, and I find that inexcusable. You might say, I hate that. Some say Obama and Hillary and others had to vote the way they did because the country was too conservative and they needed to get elected at this important time so they could one day enact that change that always seems to be just around the corner!

Bullshit. For two reasons. Firstly, we’re not talking about a farming bill. They were voting on war and torture and civil liberties and the future of Roe vs. Wade! By 2004, the war in Iraq was no longer popular (which is why Democrats keep extending that Republican-branded holiday), the nation was appalled by waterboarding, the people were fearful of being spied upon by their telecom company, and justices Alito and Roberts weren’t supported by a majority of the people. The Democrats, Obama and his ambitions at the forefront among them, voted for every single one of those! Abortion rights, which is a sexist issue not a religious one, have been put in danger because Obama voted to confirm justices who vehemently oppose a woman’s right to choose. Why does Obama hate women?

Finally, secondly, aggravatingly and unconscionably, if the country really truly is that conservative (New York and Illinois were really that right wing?) and you’re forced into a position where the only way you can retain your seat is to vote against your better conscience… then fucking resign! Become Cindy Sheehan (who Democrats now brand a ‘traitor’ for running against Pelosi). Become Jesse Jackson. Lead people in protest outside the halls of Congress rather than capitulate within them. The only reason one wouldn’t is because of hubris.

I know what a Republican does. Like a giant turd in the grass, I know what to expect when I set foot on their side of the yard. But the Democrats should have been better. What does it say about them that a former Ku Klux Klansman, Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, became the moral conscience of that party? At the very least, when the Democrats got their majority in Congress they could have thrown a dart at a wall full of crimes and chosen one, anything the Bush junta has done, with which to impeach this administration. But no. Obama and Hillary said it wasn’t the right time, given the nation was at war. Or was it that the longer an unpopular Bush was in office, the more it benefited the Democrats in the long term come this election year? Pelosi went further and flatly said impeachment was ‘off the table’.

Assholes. Big, shit-encrusted, rubbed-raw, dysenteric sphincters. They’re even worse than Republicans; they lure you into the grass with your bare feet on the promise of no more shit, only for you to discover that all that morning dew is actually piss.

The Democrats could have done something to stop it all; in 2006 they finally had the political capital they complained they didn’t have when they were forced to vote for the Iraq war, but they didn’t do a thing to make it right. They’re collaborators, and they’re just as guilty.

Obama eloquently invoked the spirit of King in his inspiring speech the other night, but if he truly in his heart wants to be a reformer, he applied for the wrong fucking job. In the last eight years, the Democrats have shown themselves to be the left arm of a right-handed vigilante. Change, however vaguely or specifically they wish to articulate it, will never come from a Democrat nor a Republican in the political system we have today. It will only come when they foreclose on that old white house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC.

Bot Fuck

2008-09-24T21:57:00.002Z

McCain Suspends Campaign to Help With Bailout

Comment by Jody Groves
September 24th, 2008 at 2:58 pm

Good for Senator McCain!!!

Comment by Mark
September 24th, 2008 at 2:58 pm

Good Idea… I hope they can straighten this out without it becoming another reason for more pork barrel spending

Comment by Peter Sahd
September 24th, 2008 at 2:58 pm

This is why McCain should be president.

Comment by Ripley
September 24th, 2008 at 2:58 pm

This is incredible. Now THAT’S what I call Presidential. Good for him. Obviously ONE of the candidates cares what happens to this country, even to his own detriment.

Comment by Tax Payer
September 24th, 2008 at 2:58 pm

Now that’s a representative for the people !!!!

Comment by KSD
September 24th, 2008 at 2:58 pm

He must be about his country’s business. This is truly necessary. Good decision.

Comment by She Tries
September 24th, 2008 at 2:58 pm

Now, that is leadership. Go Johnny Go!!

Comment by Jon
September 24th, 2008 at 2:58 pm

Good bull!

Comment by Jeff in Bend
September 24th, 2008 at 2:58 pm

Great move by Senator McCain. Contributing to decision making is far more important than a debate on Friday.

Comment by Nan
September 24th, 2008 at 2:58 pm

What a novel idea - a senator who would rather do his job than campaign. Just watch, though. The libs will say he’s scared and backing down from the fight.

Comment by Tina
September 24th, 2008 at 2:58 pm

I think this is great this is McCain putting country first!

Comment by Snotty McShot
September 24th, 2008 at 23:01 GMT

And so on.

Guest Post from the FUTURE

2008-09-15T13:54:00.002Z

It is the year 2508. My name is Jeff Titor. And in another pointless exercise of justifying my meaningless existence I have just celebrated my birth with a few of my future friends, drinking cold beer (we drink it cold in future England) and splashing out for some pizza, that one-time peasant fare that your generation ironically adapted into party food. It’s cruel, in a way, but even my enlightened future self has to agree: it’s pretty damn tasty. By the way, I can tell you this about the future: your scaremongers are right. Up here we’re all Muslim, and everybody’s gay. And I can tell you that we pray each day for your souls, five times, right there with our O faces pushed flat onto our plush rugs.

Yes, I am addressing you, naïve savage of 2008, from my gentle dominion of the future because I have an urgent message to convey: amongst you walks a titan of sense and understanding, a man wasted in his current environs… you might say a sharper file clerk than your Albert Einstein. For this man, our gracious host, Snotford Richard McShot, in 2006, the Year of the Bore, ejaculated his rages into the ether, leaving for posterity not just insights into the flaccid thinking behind the actions and decision-making of your unruly age but, most importantly, this conduit for communication from my pedestal to your shit pile. Like your vast cemeteries of nuclear waste, Blogger’s login and password have stood the test of time, and with its ultra-cool Refresh button (you’ll need to wait about 400 years for it), my boyfriends and I can finally have this conversation with you. Now stop wallowing, piggy, and listen to me:

I’ve got a secret for you. You, you ghastly barbarian, are a cunt. You don’t think so, but you are. Even the best among you. Even your mom.

You see, at the end of any story or in any backward glance at history, there always seems to be one moment that sums up all the flaws of the characters involved, the error in their collective judgment, and this moment can be argued from the distance of 500 years to be the portent for how it all went so horribly, unbelievably, sadistically, cockstompingly wrong for you. I’m going to save the explanations and the long lectures and the moral poking and prodding and leave that to you – mostly because I want to go stuff my gender beam into some hot man butts while they’re still drunk in my living room. So, in short:

As you read this, dear pagan, chieftains of your tribe in Colorado have declared ownership over water that falls from the sky and into your living spaces. Think about this. Coloradoans, in your present time, may no longer collect rain in barrels and buckets as they have for hundreds of years because some company has claimed first dibs. Presumably this means you may not even collect the drips in saucepans that filter through the leaks in your roof because your ruined economy and current unemployment do not allow you the financial breathing space to have it repaired.

Why can you no longer collect rainwater? Because that water has been “allocated” by your chieftains to the executives of water companies before it even leaves the clouds. To collect and store rainwater for future use eats into the future profits of these water companies and the future bonuses of their executives. Everyone worries about the future, but in the future we just worry for your souls.

I don’t believe there’s a lot more that I have to point out here. The absurdity should be overwhelming, the response obvious.

The blinding success of this Colorado initiative has spread to other “States” and nations. Soon none of you will be able to collect rainwater because someone else owns it, and none of you will have noticed they had taken it away. It’s not even in your newspapers, that slowly dying animal on the roadside of the information superhighway. No one will notice, but in the future we see it clearly. We see an archduke doubled over and bleeding from his abdomen. We see Helen of Troy being sexed. We see the first large, primordial beasts that failed to run from primitive man. We see an advanced culture shrugging its collective shoulders and giving up on itself. We see it look at each other, from pig to man and back again, unable to recognise a face in the crowd, and choose a lifetime of private masturbation over the symbiosis of a loving, committed relationship with lots of hot fucking.

I will not engage here at this time in a protracted discussion about your ridiculous pagan belief that one man can own water or land. Maybe in another 200 years you will be ready to listen to that one. But for now, your now, as you collect your buckets and barrels and meekly store them back in your shed, just be aware that we here in the future, when we’re not pounding ass and praising Allah, we’re laughing at you.

But remember, please: in the future we don’t hate you. We just hate what you’ve become.

- Jeff Titor

Anniversary Hate

2008-09-11T21:39:00.002Z

You know what I hate? I hate 9/11.

Not the event, you understand; the event was far too interesting to be subject to the simple gnawing monotony of hate. It was spectacular and horrifying and amazing and awful and everything else between and beyond. It was a colossal crime and a heartbreaking tragedy, sure, but it was also totally exhilarating, especially for the billions of us who were mere spectators, who didn’t lose anyone in the glorious Technicolor collapse. Stockhausen was right.

Nah, what I hate about 9/11 is all the pampered little shits that keep pissing on about it every fucking year, without fail, like they have suffered uniquely for having watched people die on TV that one time. I’m being slightly disingenuous, of course, for the victims were not just any people. No, these were people with whom our emotionally wounded chums shared naught but a vast landmass, an accident of birth or circumstance, and a vague subscription to an abstract concept called “America”. If it were otherwise – if these had been the citizens of, say, Iraq – we surely would not still be stumbling unawares across these unreasonably tedious festivals of boo-hooing all these years later, these little narcissistic landmines strewn across an internet that already has its fair share of poisonous hazards.

One such hazard is InstaPunk, a group blog written by a big bag of wilted dicks and named for its founder, of whom the word “punk” only applies in the sense that Harry Callahan meant it. It’s no surprise to find that they have milked their precious little tear ducts to produce this classic example of the Remembering Where I Was On 9/11 genre – an utterly contemptible yawn-factory every bit as dull as the Twin Tower collapse wasn’t.

Like practically all of these rambling, self-indulgent snoozefests, it is 6 million words long, yet inevitably amounts to scarcely more than: “We watched it on TV, it reminded me of some movie or other, our phones didn’t work for a while, and we had a bit of trouble getting home”. Well, you know something? Me too, and so fucking what. It’s like those couples you meet who tell those long and skullfuckingly boring stories about how they met, and they’re telling it in that allegedly cute tag-team fashion, and your fucking blood is boiling and there’s just the ripped red and ragged frayed fibre of your last fucking nerve standing between their cooing pusses and the soon-to-be-broken fat end of your beer bottle and they can’t tell that behind your quivering grimace you are silently screaming: “YOU MET AT FUCKING WORK LIKE EVERYONE ELSE, YOU GODAWFUL PRICKS”.

You know what I mean? That’s how I feel about these 9/11 bores.

Go ahead. Read it and tell me I’m wrong. And while you’re at it, think about what an incredible fucking luxury it is to be able to piss and moan about 9/11 for seven years as if it was the only thing that ever happened on the goddamn planet, while the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, made to pay for the Worst Event Ever a thousand times over by a different accident of birth, suffer a new atrocity practically every other day, with barely a moment in between to update their blogs or their Facebooks with mawkish, sentimental bullshit, and without the luxury of thousands of miles of television cable separating them from the horror.

I still hate you

2008-09-04T10:02:00.000Z

That's right. Ol' Snotty's been down for more than a year, battling ulcers caused by the stress of your putrid existence. But I'm back, I'm bipedal, I'm biding my time, biased as ever and bygones will not be bygones. By God, watch this space.

A Trip to Work

2006-12-12T13:37:00.000Z

Beside me: a woman, asleep, mouth open, huge teeth, copy of Lonely Planet Morocco on her lap. Same woman that was on the train home last night, sitting beside me, asleep, mouth open, same book.

Opposite me: young bloke, gangsta, legs as wide as he can get them, backpack on, hand crassly down his grey sweatpants, won't budge an inch for the person that tries to sit down next to him.

On the platform: a guy in a grey and pink scarf huffing because someone's trying to get down the stairs into the crowd. He had trainers that exactly matched his scarf.

There's no hope for anyone.

Mailbag of Hate

2006-11-23T15:36:00.000Z

A reader writes:

Hello. I'm new to this whole Department of Hate thing, but I thought I'd chip in and share some things I hate. Not share as in let you have a piece of, no, that would be impossible although quite useful as then I'd have less of the things I hate in my life and you'd have more, which would be fine by me. Ha ha, no, that was a joke. Here is the real anecdote, trust me its very good and very full of hate.

So I am at work and I am doing my best to mind my own business, keep my head down, get on with the job etc but this guy keeps bothering me. He really annoys me, this guy. All day he's been bothering me. I mean, initially, he was ok. In fact, initially he gave me some money, which was nice, but then he just kept hanging around afterwards looking at me expectantly. It was a really awkward situation, what with the hanging around and the expectant looking and everything. So I avoided his eyes as best I could. After about half an hour or so of me avoiding his eyes as best I could, which I discovered was easiest done by shutting mine and singing in like a low voice and stuff? Well, after about half an hour of that he started coming right up to the counter and banging on it and saying that I owe him a hamburger and generally causing a ruckus. Having to deal with weirdos like this at work, this is what I hate.

'Listen,' I told him eventually, after he had gone on banging on the counter for an hour or so and my head was getting sore and the hamburgers behind me were rattling in their chutes. 'There are people here, mentioning no names, who are trying to keep their heads down and get on with their lives and so on and what you are doing is interrupting and spoiling it for everyone, i.e. me' . Unfortunately the guy had like a total lack of sympathy, or ability to empathise with the plight of others such as myself because at this point he started screaming and beating the counter with his fist some more and kept on with this whole crazy me owing him a hamburger thing.

As I am myself not lacking in the sympathy and/or empathy departments I felt sorry for him in a way, and not just because his face was slowly going a horrible red colour, possibly because he was tearing at his skin and rolling his eyes and making these low, weird moaning sounds as he pointed at the hamburgers behind me. I remember thinking, as I munched on my own hamburger, that this guy really needed to sort out his expectations in life. All this unreasonable hamburger-wanting was bound to cause unhappiness and anger and/or distress. You need to reassess some of your goals and priorities viz hamburger ownership, I told him. You need to move 'hamburger' from the box marked 'want' to the box marked 'can't have'. Then you'll be a lot happier. Sadly, he was too busy punching the large plastic clown that stands in the corner of the entrance of my work and crying to even bother paying attention to the important advice I had to say. I suppose this just goes to show some people are just too selfishly wrapped up in their own misery to accept help no matter how hard you try.

I remain yours etc.

Name and address supplied

Do YOU have a hateful experience to report? Email the Department of Hate at deptofhatemail AT gmail DOT com!

UPDATE! In comments, drooling sextagenarian troll Dave "Abe Simpson" Duff attempts unbelievably lame and predictable slight against the Department, appears to soil self in the process. File under colostomy bag mishaps.

In Memoriam: Jack Palance

2006-11-19T15:56:00.000Z

NON-SEQUITURS OF THE COMING DOOM

Sunday morning - there's a show on channel 5 about Sophie, the vicar's daughter. At dinner they stand on their chairs and sing "thank you god for this food, thank you god for this food, thank you gooooooo......oooood. Thankyougodforthisfood, dun dun du-dun". Sophie says when singing in the choir, make sure your voice doesn't drown out everyone else's. When the sermon gets too long you just "fiddle with your fingers". Her voice is that of a young Thatcher. She gets bullied because her dad's a vicar and wears a a dog collar. She prays for the bullies at church and tries to tell them that jesus loves them anyway. She has a guinea pig. She is only allowed eat sweets on Sunday at a particular time of the day as a special treat. She is only allowed watch half an hour tv a day and only on BBC programmes vetted by her parents. She only likes spiritual music. She knows "god's true" because "she has proved herself". The theme tune of the show is a strange drum and bass thing. The show was supposed to be about "Rosie, who has autism".

Nicholas Cage's face became odd and his hair became a wire wool wisp after he started calling himself Nicholas rather than Nick. Laurence Fishburne got fat and his face became more pock-marked when he stopped calling himself Larry. And Charlie Sheen's jaw got smaller when he tried calling himself Charles.

I don't trust people whose arms don't swing when they walk.

There are more mad people in Brockwell Park than Clissold Park. I saw a dude in Brockwell Park hiding in the bushes and hissing. He was holding a shower rail. A woman was talking to herself. I allowed myself a moment's hope that she was talking on a hands free kit. She had a bandage dangling from her leg. That was yesterday

Abandoned petrol stations should be a thing of joy, but they are not.

Recently I found myself being genuinely appalled when a newspaper article informed me that DfES was considering allowing kids to write english exam papers in text speak so long as it was clear they understood the material.

Snakes shed their eyelids.

There is a warning on the packaging of Mothercare "fun dough". It says "Remember, babies and young children have no idea what is dangerous or potentially harmful"

Condoleeza Rice. Paula Radcliffe.

Chris Cornell sings the new bond theme song.

Celebrity scissorhands. Sunday Grandstand's theme tune. The Nativity Story hits cinemas on December 9th. "Now... experience the first christmas". Your chopping board harbours 50 times more bacteria than your toilet seat. Peter Andre and Jordan have a single out. It's a cover of "A Whole New World" from Disney's Aladdin. A stylist knows that before something hot touches hair, it must be protected. A diver scared rigid by sharks undergoes shark therapy tonight at 6.30 on Channel 5.

Inside today's Mail on Sunday... a Madness CD called "The Edge of the Universe and Beyond"... Part 1.

Christopher Hitchens. Marmite. Allo Allo.

My brother once put pickle juice on his chips thinking it was vinegar. There's an undertakers in Streatham that looks like a burnt pub.

Someone, somewhere, right now, is giving someone a brazilian wax. That is their job.

Quiz Time: How Rotten Is Rumsfeld?

2006-08-31T13:16:00.001Z

I hear that Donald Rumsfeld is having trouble sleeping. Time for a quick game of "fill in the blanks", I think.

FALLON NAVAL AIR STATION, Nev. (AP) -- Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday that he is deeply troubled by ________________.

"That's the thing that keeps me up at night," he said during a question-and-answer session with about 200 naval aviators and other U.S. Navy personnel at this flight training base for Navy and Marine pilots.

Any guesses? Here's a few of his greatest hits to get you started:

Answer here.

Good Idea. How 'Bout Some Sort of Armband?

2006-08-17T13:27:00.000Z

For the love of fuck:

A new Gallup poll finds that many Americans -- what it calls "substantial minorities" -- harbor "negative feelings or prejudices against people of the Muslim faith" in this country.

...

Almost four in ten, 39%, advocate that Muslims here should carry special I.D.

Hey ho. Welcome to fascism, meatheads!

Of course, there are many out there that would snort with laughter at the idea that our sophisticated industrialized societies (not unlike a certain "advanced political community with a highly trained, tightly disciplined police and civil service bureaucracy" discussed here) could possibly be responsible for such mass hatred. Luckily, these will be the same hysterical fucking halfwits that believe that "The West" is under any serious existential threat from a couple of dozen teenagers armed with some funky shampoo and no fucking passports, so their arguments can be safely disregarded like the racist ballhair they are.

Roy Edroso has some more 39-percenters for you in case you’re not depressed enough yet.

Thoughts on Animal Welfare

2006-08-15T14:37:00.000Z

A Proposal

So I was sitting on the can earlier thinking about the terrible plight of animals worldwide and it occurred to me that, while humans may continue to make improvements in the way we treat animals, the problem mainly stems from the way that we view animals vis-à-vis ourselves. And that will not change unless we stop crapping in little cubicles.

Since the second world war, during which, studies later estimated, only 15-20% of soldiers actually fired their weapons at the enemy, American military planners have recognised that in order to get your soldiers to kill you must encourage them to view the opposing force as less than human. The opposite is true for the relationship between homosapiens and the rest of the animal kingdom, but the principal is the same: in order to justify our cruelty we must de-animalise ourselves.

Clearly, for real change to occur it is necessary for this state of affairs to be tackled directly. This is why I am proposing, to Peta or the WWF or whoever, the following two-pronged campaign strategy for 2007:

1. We will lobby for the cubicles in all public buildings must be dismantled. No more shall we deny our essential identities as members of the animal kingdom, and no longer shall we be allowed to hide our basic bodily functions in shame. This will force us to confront the disgraceful dichotomy between the respect that we afford our own species and the lack of same that our brethren in the "non-cubicled" animal kingdom have suffered under for so long.

2. We will campaign, by way of petition, for a new UN resolution which will officially recognise human beings as pissing, shitting animals.

Alternatively, we could run a "Cubicles for Cattle" campaign, maybe, or at least get the other animals some trousers. Whatever, I haven’t worked out all the details yet, but in any case I am proud to be able to count myself as the first to add my name to this campaign.

Will you join me?

Just, Uh, Y'know - Be Careful

2006-08-11T23:51:00.000Z

Israel wants hastened shipment of US rockets

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Israel has asked the Bush administration to hasten delivery of short-range anti-personnel rockets armed with cluster munitions, which it could use to strike Hizbollah missile sites in Lebanon, The New York Times reported on Friday.

Sourcing its report to two American officials, the newspaper said the request for M-26 artillery rockets, which are fired in barrages and carry hundreds of grenade-like bomblets that scatter and explode over a broad area, is likely to be approved shortly.

But the newspaper said some State Department officials want to delay approval because the rockets, while likely effective against hidden missile launchers, would also likely cause civilian casualties if used against targets in populated areas.

...

The shipment might be approved along with a directive to Israel that it must be especially careful about firing the rockets into populated areas, a senior official told the paper.

No News Today

2006-08-11T15:50:00.000Z

lenin:

…the first allegation of a threat of a potential attack in Britain at some unspecified point in the future, and suddenly we are encouraged to luxuriate in the fantasy prospect of annihilation ... The Blitzkrieg is upon Beirut, but we are supposed to imagine that little Nazis are flying over our heads

Channel 4 news last night was basically 50 minutes of Krishnan Guru Murphy standing in front of Heathrow pulling shit out of his arse, repeating over and over the scant details that we think we know, and going live to the C4 reporter waiting anxiously outside Scotland Yard every now and then in the hope that he might have even half a story yet, and what struck me about the whole affair was what a disgustingly privileged bunch of cunts we really are. "Luxuriate", says lenin, above, and that's exactly what's going on. We are positively wallowing in this shit. Isn't it all so fucking exciting?

Of course I realise that all of this sound and fury bullshit is intended to frighten me and my quaking bowels into crap-panted acquiescence, but honestly? I've never felt so fucking safe in my life. An entire programme dedicated to something that DID NOT EVEN ACTUALLY OCCUR is a fucking luxury indeed, available only to those who don’t have to wake up every day and deal with the rubble and ruined bodies of their friends and relatives. The two or so minutes of air-time they managed to find for images of smouldering Lebanon – no thrilling potential threats and close-shaves there, just actual daily death and destruction - only served to underline that fact.

Even terrorism of the unhyped variety isn’t a threat to us if we’re already good as dead.

Duty

2006-08-04T16:10:00.000Z

Marthambles:

An unspecified illness, "known as the marthambles at sea and griping of the guts by land" [NC]. Patrick O?Brian is said to have seen the word on a pamphlet of the era by the quack doctor, Dr Tufts. It appears to be contagious and deadly to Pacific islanders.

Drunken Blogging (Remix)

2006-07-24T21:46:00.000Z

While waiting with great excitement for JOEL F KINNEY to deal most severely with my quivering ass, I decided to fill the ridiculous clown void by paying another visit to Drunken Blogging, home of chubby idiot j0nz and indispensable one-stop shop for those of us who like to know what's going on inside the tiny minds of all the slope-browed bigots that shuffle amongst us.

Unsurprisingly, there ain't much going on at all, if j0nz's latest is anything to go by.

Here, in attempting to deal with the complexities of the conflict in the Middle East, he reveals his method in admirably stark and honest terms: "I've been searching the net for hours for a good comment piece that reflects my feelings (I am woefully inarticulate and lack a public school education!)".

Translated from the arsehole-ese, this means: "Because I am basically a total raging moron, I have been hitting Google up for thoughts and opinions that I can cut and paste on to my blog as if they were my own". (And no, I've no idea why he thinks that articulacy is dependent on a public school education, either.)

The part about seeking an article that "reflects [his] feelings" is merely a neat update on the old playground ruse that goes "Wow! I was just about to say that myself", and the "feelings" that he's referring to are essentially just his prejudices and bigoted beliefs, although he would no doubt prefer us to believe that he is referring to his carefully considered philosophical musings. Just have another look at his fucking face again, and you should be disabused of that notion pretty goddamn sharpish.

Once he has found a suitable article (in this case, one that attempts to pre-emptively justify further civilian deaths not only in Lebanon, but also in Syria and Iran, through the "attacking targets of strategic value to Hezbollah which are located in non-Hezbollah areas") he then lifts it wholesale, without comment or criticism, and drops it like a hot turd right on the front of his blog. His only contribution is, quite unbelievably, to FUCKING COLOUR IT IN. If he could, he'd probably fill in the enclosed parts of the letters with a chewed up pencil, too, while desperately trying to conceal a spontaneous erection underneath the desk.

It also comes as no surprise that j0nz is so fucking stupid that he even needs his racism explained to him in pictorial form. He points to the following "diagram" in an effort to explain the staggering difference between Israeli and Lebanese casualties:

I'm not going to sit here and explain why this picture fucking sucks a bunch of cocks, but it's probably worth pointing out that it's not much use hiding behind a pram if your opponent is just going to bomb the shit out of everything in site anyway. Indeed, I might humbly suggest that the huge discrepancy in casualties maybe has a little bit more to do with, y'know, massive aerial bombardment by Israel of civilian areas in Lebanon than it has to do with any sneaky cartoon baby buggy hiding techniques. But what the fuck I do I know? Maybe I'll look for some guy on the internet who says something about this and borrow his shit, then you'll be sorry.

It's not all bad news, though. Maybe j0nz isn't such a lost cause after all - I'm thinking that the more altruistic among us might use his obvious preference for pretty pictures to try and communicate with him a little. By way of getting the ball-rolling, I thought I'd remix the right hand side of his picture to more accurately reflect the reality of the current situation.

See, it's all about talking to them on their level. And hey, j0nz? If this approach doesn't work I have a picture of my about-to-be-sued ass that you can print out and kiss.

"I Am Not A Rube", Says Rube

2006-07-22T21:50:00.000Z

Now in session: JOEL F KINNEY v MY ASS

JOEL F KINNEY is a grown man who spends a significant amount of his spare time pretending that he is fighting in the Vietnam war as 2nd Lieutenant of a made up platoon. Despite this, JOEL F KINNEY takes himself very fucking seriously indeed. In 2003, Rube Watch, the embryonic Department, posted an uncharacteristically restrained bit about the faintly disturbing practice of war re-enactment (which is essentially just like the children’s game of Cowboys & Indians, except with outwardly sane-looking human adults, real guns (or so I am reliably informed) and an absurdly inflated sense of self-importance) during which the rubism of one JOEL F KINNEY was briefly highlighted.

In keeping with his habit of fighting his battles many years after they have actually ended, JOEL F KINNEY has finally returned fire on the now defunct Rube Watch. He writes:

As humorous as your page may be, it is truly sad that you do not get the purpose of why many of us participate in War re-enacting. You actually have no right to make an educated judgement when you obviously have no expertise in the area and know NOTHING personally about myself or anyone associated with my organization. Although I am sure there are a few re-enactment groups that live out some sick fantasy, I assure you ours is not. Do not let your ignorance get in the way of enlightenment as there is a little truth in all things. You obviously have no clue what truth is or you would check yourself and shut your mouth. If you would actually take a second and read our mission statement, you would see that we are hardly Rubes. We wish to honor those who have not been honored. Our group does rifle firing details (that is a 21 gun salute for idiots like yourself) for the Vietnam Veteran's War Memorial every year. We would not do what we do if it were not for the support and endorsement of Vietnam Veterans themselves. The battle re-enactment is just a very small portion of what we do. We volunteer our time and services all the time for special events, parades and memorials. All of which is for free and without re-embursement of our time away from work and family. I ask you... when was the last time you took the time to give of yourself to something bigger than you, or are you too busy making fun of people who you know nothing about to make you feel better about your ugly face? You couldn't be farther off course. Our events are for our Fathers and brothers! One last thing, OUR GUNS AREN'T FAKE, THEY ARE REAL YOU IDIOT! I will give you one chance to remove my name from the site or I will sue your ass! I have several Vietnam War veteran friends who are attorneys who would love nothing more than to sue you for defamation of character just out of principle!

This is, of course, fucking great stuff. I would like to thank JOEL F KINNEY for brightening up my hangover by being such a giant polesmoker, but I am a little disappointed that Rube Watch’s first threatened defamation suit is for such a relatively tame piece. I mean, where is JOEL F KINNEY defamed in Slitzy’s post, really? Where’s the false statement about JOEL F KINNEY which causes him to suffer harm? That he’s an "asshole"? Is that it?

Well that's just an opinion, and one which I happen to share: I think that JOEL F KINNEY is a fucking asshole and pompous fool. So what? What harm have I caused JOEL F KINNEY to suffer? JOEL F KINNEY’s lawyer friends should probably tell him to stop going around making pathetic threats of lawsuits against stupid 3-year old blogposts, but then they are Vietnam war re-enactors too and therefore clearly a bunch of fucking idiots, so who knows kind of fucked up advice they are giving him. In any case, they are more than welcome to contact the Department’s lawyer, Professor Lovehandle, at deptofhatemail at gmail dot com.

Slitzy could have gone much further. For instance, I imagine that JOEL F KINNEY is the sort of man who, like our old buddy (and real marine) Partisan Pundit, doesn’t like to have his sexuality questioned. So Slitzy might have pointed out that any grown man who puts that many photos of himself looking like America's Next Top GI Model on the internets is clearly a giant homosexual. In fact, JOEL F KINNEY’s macho poses are merely a boner shot removed from those of original Military Stud Jeff Gannon (notwithstanding the fact that JOEL F KINNEY is, himself, a fucking boner). Both Jeff and JOEL F KINNEY are basically trying to get other men to look at them, because you can guarantee that no self-respecting woman is ever going to spend any amount of time looking at pictures of a bunch of po-faced clowns squatting in a forest pretending to listen out for imaginary gooks. In fact, just ask JOEL F KINNEY: "Our events are for our Fathers and brothers", he tells us proudly, just after admitting that he frequently gives of himself to something larger than him.

"JOEL F KINNEY is posing for the boys", Slitzy might have opined, but of course he did not. Neither did he point out the inherent gayness of a bunch of guys running around in the woods blowing the shit out of each other, but none of this would have amounted to a case for defamation anyway, so JOEL F KINNEY can basically stick his lawsuit up his fucking cunt.

Case dismissed.

UPDATE! Slitzy responds!

Bloggers 1, Military Industrial Complex 0

2006-06-29T12:57:00.000Z

Daily Kos guy speaks:

MY GIRLFRIEND JUST FOUND OUT ABOUT ALL MY BOYFRIENDS

My girlfriend doesn't read Daily Kos, and probably never will. She depends on me to tell her what's going on in online news, what actions we need to take, what new ideas are out there, what issues are percolating.... My girlfriend didn't know that I had posted a diary awhile ago and I was too chicken to tell her. (That's how far outside my comfort zone it was!) Well, I told her about a week ago and she was really excited! Even though she's not even an infrequent lurker, she knows Kos. She knows from bits and pieces - from other articles she's read, from things on the radio, and mostly from me and my daily news briefings over dinner. Anyway, she knew it was a big deal. So I showed her my diary and of all things - she cried! (I didn't expect that....) She was moved by the great support of the community, she was moved by my heartfelt Thank You, she was moved by all of the relationships - known or unknown - that Daily Kos has fostered. And she was moved by how far I've come in terms of my own awareness, my own informed citizenry.

In your face, Cheney! Prepare to have your gate crashed, motherfucker!

Fucking Journalism

2006-06-15T12:41:00.000Z

The Sun exclusively reveals that the entrance of golden ticket housemate Susie Verrico into the Big Brother house may be a fix. Nestlé are distancing themselves from the affair, and a Big Brother spokeswoman denies the charges, but refuses to comment on whether or not Susie was subject to the regulation police check. Investigative journalists Sara Nathan and Ian King are doggedly pursuing the case, aided by Emma Cox and Colin Robertson. This explosive story could blow up like a pair of grotesque fake tits at 30,000 feet.

Meanwhile, in a dark corner of the internet, crazy conspiracy theorist Greg Palast reports on that other Big Brother:

But how do I know Kerry won? The whole BBC team did an incredible investigation, and we found 3.6 million votes cast but not counted. It was called "spoilage" - and that’s everything from hanging chads to paper ballots that have extra marks, and are junked and thrown away – you name it.

But it’s not just anyone’s ballot that doesn’t count. Whose votes are they? We did a precinct-by-precinct analysis of whose votes were thrown away. If you are in a black majority precinct, the chance that your vote will be thrown in the electoral dumpster is 900% higher than if you’re in a white precinct. If you are Hispanic - 500% higher than if you’re in a white precinct. This also includes something called "rejected provisional ballots," a whole new gimmick. A million people were shunted to back-of-the-bus ballots called provisional ballots. And over half a million of those were never counted – never counted. And who made the decision not to count them? The Secretaries of State, like the Secretary of State of Ohio, who is also the head of the Bush reelection campaign.

Whose votes are thrown out? It’s black voters and poor voters. That’s why the Armed Madhouse subtitle says "Dispatches from the Front Lines of the Class War." Vote theft is class war by other means. Not everyone’s vote gets thrown out. In fact, do the arithmetic nationwide. 54% of the votes in the electoral dumpster are cast by black voters. Another third cast by Hispanic voters? Something like only one in five lost votes is cast by white voters, and those are the poor white voters. The electoral dumpster is filled with basically a Democratic pile of uncounted votes. That’s how they did it. And they’re planning to do a better job of not counting those votes in 2008. It’s the non-count of the vote – it’s not the count – that picks our president.

...

ChoicePoint is the biggest data mining outfit – it basically has the biggest data mine in the United States – at minimum, 16 billion records on Americans. It’s illegal for the U.S. government to keep those records, but ChoicePoint as a private company can. Then the U.S. government simply dips into the data mine and pulls out the nuggets it wants. We saw this in 2000, with them falsely attacking people as felons.

In 2004, completely unreported in the U.S. press, but big news from our BBC investigation -- and it’s in Madhouse -- are the caging lists, in which again we know hundreds of thousands of people were tagged as having so-called suspect addresses. Suspect addresses, in case you’re wondering, causing people to lose their vote, included page after page after page of black soldiers sent overseas, so that their home address was now suspect.

If they've got the databases, they’ve got the election. And they’re getting the databases from the war on terror and the war on immigrants. 3.6 million votes were cast and not counted last time. Look for 5 million in 2008.

And:

What about black soldiers? Here's what they did. They sent, we found out – here's now what we've just found out. They sent first-class letters to the homes of African-American soldiers shipped overseas. They wrote on the envelopes "Do not forward. Return to addressee." Well, of course, they're shipped overseas, so the letter can't be forwarded, to Baghdad or Germany, or wherever. Letters are sent back to the Republican National Committee, filtered back out to the state committees, and then elections officials are told, 'These people don't live at that address. We have evidence that they're falsely registered.'

...

I mean, the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, called, by the way, for a criminal investigation when I began showing this evidence. I don't give them my sources, but I do give them the public evidence, with the BBC's approval. You'll see it in the book. They did vote for criminal investigations. This never got reported in America. The reaction of the Justice Department was to completely ignore the demand for a criminal investigation, and George Bush fired every member of the Civil Rights Commission that voted for the criminal investigation. Do you like that?

Here's hoping Palast will stop wasting his inquisitive mind on this trivial nonsense and join the Sun's crack team to work on the golden ticket scandal. Season 7 could be the best one yet!

Fucking Boss

2006-06-14T13:44:00.000Z

Ben Metcalf:

Before I attempt to fill these pages with my disgust, which the odd reader who knows me will surely expect, I am obliged to address a preliminary concern, which that same odd reader may safely ignore. Some time has passed since I last raised my voice to the multitude, and whereas literary taste does not seem to have advanced much in the interim, and I assume is still arrayed so as to engage only the weak-minded and dull, I find that I am no longer able to discern with any accuracy where the bounds of simple human decency lie. This would bother me even less than does the taste issue were it not for the fact that ground gained or lost in the theater of decency tends now and then to affect the law, and it has long been a personal goal of mine to avoid capture and imprisonment.

I am therefore led to wonder what the common citizen is allowed to “say” anymore, in print or otherwise, and still feel reasonably sure that some indignant team of G-men, or else a pair of gung-ho local screws, will not drag him away to a detention center, there to act out, with the detainee as a prop, that familiar scene in which one hero cop or another is patriotically unable to resist certain outbursts against the detainee and what were once imagined to be the detainee's constitutional rights. Because I am loath to violate whatever fresh new mores the people have agreed upon, or have been told they agree upon, and because I do not care to have my ass kicked repeatedly in a holding cell while I beg to see a lawyer, I almost hesitate to ask the following question. I will ask it, though, out of what used to be called simple human decency:

Am I allowed to write that I would like to hunt down George W. Bush, the president of the United States, and kill him with my bare hands?

Read on!

Put Your Money Shot Where Your Mouth Is

2006-06-09T18:58:00.000Z

I will tell you right now as Snotty McShot, as a man who doesn’t like to mince her words, that this blogging business has me a bit uneasy.

Like white people felt when all those far-off countries started developing The Bomb, blogspot’s made it possible for any old crepuscular shitheel to see his words published, and because it’s in the same format as the online Telegraphs, Chicago Tribunes, Financial Times or Le Figaros, it’s somehow equal in weight, depth and scope.

To blogs is extended the same thought behind television that, if it’s being broadcast, it must be real. And with that extension has come the ubiquitous comment board, allowing people to create a small, insular community they believe to be Pangea. I submit that this false sense of community gives just enough positive reinforcement for many to adopt the distorted notion that their links to the Guardian or National Review are modern muckraking and are changing the world one link at a time.

I can only hope I articulate this as well as it sounds in my misty medulla at the end of an afternoon and evening of drinking, but blogging – blogging to make a difference – is like these self-serving Saturday anti-war marches through permit-secured side streets, state-sanctioned "get it off your chest" zones, after which we all go home and watch "Strictly Come Dancing", our civic duty fulfilled. Meaning well just isn’t enough anymore. Like chronic drunks and masturbators, that energy needs to be channelled into more productive emotions for it to be worth its expense. Not to say that a good beat-off won’t clear the mind, but it’s only with a little tactical patience that you’ll fuck something up. Turn that energy into outrage. Into hate.

Anger is the greatest litmus test we have, but we tell ourselves we must suppress it. Show no emotion. More often than not we are most honest with ourselves and others when we fly off the handle. Hate is anger, anger is pain, and pain is information. And that’s why the bad guys are always more successful. I always rooted for Darth Vader because he gave into his hate and he was at least being honest. If those rebels a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away were part of today’s crowd, Luke would post on a blog he ran from his sustainable farm in Degobah, Leia would play bass in an emo band, while C3PO would be the queen. No one would be fighting the empire.

The distant, impersonal nature of blogs has neutralised the editless spontaneity of natural outrage. Anger should not be diluted with links. It should be read on the face, not on messageboards and leaflets. Our crimson cheeks are the most meaningful scarlet letters we have.

These blogs make it easier for us to stop testing ourselves. If we can come home from work and post 300 words after dinner about how Rumsfeld’s comments in The Guardian contradict his pre-Iraq press conferences, and we know that, because of the great vastness of the internet, these words can potentially be read by billions, we feel like we’ve done our part. In reality, however, we’re just one guy standing in the vast expanse of space, turning on a flashlight for an hour everyday at 7:30 in the midst of all the other stars who believe their words, too, are celestial.

And in that sense blogs really suck an ass. They’ve turned civil disobedience into something private, like masturbating in the work toilet. Something a lot of people could know about, and should know about, but they don’t. Blogs are, though well intended, a collective tug at the cock of commitment. Like a Saturday march through police-approved zones that disrupts no corporate trading, a blog post offers the safe middle ground of posing no threat to its targets and no sacrifice to us.

And so to Jason and Jessica and every other asshole like me, I ask, how committed are you? If they took the blogs away, what would we do? How far would you go to secure the ideals you write about under your funny nickname?

Let’s say your phone rings right now and a raspy growl says, "It’s Dick Cheney." Mr. Cheney, you gasp. He says, "We need you in Washington. A plane is ready. Your driver will be at the door in five minutes. Pack a few outfits." What gives, you’d probably say. "The world depends on it."

Like me, you’d probably go, if anything because despite his propensity for ordering the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of people, you wouldn’t expect the vice president of the United States to order yours.

You arrive in Washington and Cheney, decked in his jacket and tie (for the cameras) and Puma track bottoms, is waiting on the tarmac and levels with you.

Still smiling at the flashbulbs, he squeaks through gritted teeth: "George is a bit unstable these days. The drug cocktails are less effective everyday. He’s more paranoid than ever. He wants to nuke the world’s financial capitals and all of Europe. He’s got the missiles programmed, and these days it’s all a matter of distraction. But he’s got this strange fetish he mentions in his sleep that we think might help us subdue him. Can you help us?"

Doing what, you’d probably ask.

"The fate of the world depends on it. Does it really matter?"

Why me?

"Because you’re his type."

I would look at him quizzically, but that’s just me.

"We need you to lie on the grass in the Rose Garden - Kentucky bluegrass, very soft and delicate - and allow the president to stand over your neck and chest. We need you to take his penis into your mouth and fellate him with your tongue and slight pumps with your hand over his shaft until he begins reciting Bible passages, which are actually just Creedence lyrics he’s come to believe are the word of God. He is now about to ejaculate. You will need to stimulate his testicles with your fingertips, which will encourage the president to release the contents of his bowels onto your sternum."

You will look at him blankly.

"The world depends on you."

Why me? you would probably reiterate.

"We’ve read your blog. You’re a sensitive soul. You’re kind. You care. You stand for freedom of expression, and this is something the president really needs to express. Only when he has double discharged does the president see the world as an island of hope in an as yet undiscovered universe. Only then does he see the blind pursuit of power as fruitless and recognise that the true strength of man is the energy within us, the original life force that expanded with the initial atom and pulses through the hearts and minds of animal, plant and man. We are one, and we are free. But only if the president can come in your mouth and shit on your chest."

So if I don’t submit to this, the world ends, you’d repeat.

"The world as we know it, yes."

I’m guessing you would agree to this atypical nuclear disarmament. I would. I mean, for God’s sake, would you let your family die?! You can wash your chest and brush your teeth. You’d do it and the world would be thankful. You’d feel quite good about yourself. And so you ask Dick where you can get changed. For once in your life you’ve done something to make a difference.

* * *

You’re in the Lincoln bedroom of the White House and there’s a rap on the door. Dick Cheney pops his head in before you answer and sits down on the foot of the bed. He kneads the loose skin on your knee.

"Was it so bad?" he softly growls.

You pull the cover down from your face, and he smiles. The skin on his face is paper-thin and could tear at any moment. He stares at you long and intently. He knows you know something is up but he plays it off with smiles and more massage.

"You were very successful. The president played with his toy box all afternoon and never once said he wanted to be 'Parisless'."

You know there’s more, and that’s why Dick Cheney’s come to see you like this, so soon, so submissively. In your heart you know.

"But he’s getting bored with his toys."

Can’t you get him new toys? you’d say.

He shrugs his shoulders and fondles an autographed Texas Rangers’ baseball on the nightstand next to you.

"What do you get the man who has everything? Listen, we need you to visit the president everyday at lunch. It’s the only way."

The only way?

"I’m sorry."

I’m guessing you would clasp your heart with your trembling hand, touching that defiled hole in the centre of you.

It will be dirtied and soiled no matter what choice you make.

Manifesto Destiny

2006-04-28T20:12:00.000Z

Seems like every arsehole in the place is writing his own piece of shit manifesto these days, so I made one too.

This Is Pete Doherty

2006-04-24T19:40:00.000Z

Pete Doherty is poop.

He's a grating, flaking, chafing, stain of cum piss pushing his way through the arse side of the pants that shield society's dicks and assholes.

His music sounds like the grotesque caterwaul of a cauldron of boiling apes.

His hair looks like a regurgitated breakfast of day-old coffee grounds and rope.

His face simpers like ours might had primates evolved into Mongoloids who learned how to snarl and smoke cigarettes.

His sentences pillow fight each other for the crown of most puerile.

This modern troubadour, as he is billed, eats away a little piece of my crotch every time he vomits a lyric. I only hope he lives a long, fruitless life in Cell Block D getting raped through the holes in his arms by murderers and tax evaders, alike, because the moment the drugs liberate us from him, though we will have won the drug war, the victory will be Pyrrhic. We need no more rock martyrs, least of all this dickshit.

Fuck forever? Fuck you, Pete Doherty. You're a big steaming pile.

The Ugliest Blogger on the Internets

2006-04-19T23:47:00.000Z

Extract from Minutes of Departmental Meeting
19 April 2006

Snotty: Below is a picture of "j0nz", the guy in charge of all the crazy random font sizes at spoof Muslim-baiting website Drunken Blogging. He effortlessly lampoons the current trend in hysterical "Clash of Civilizations" arse-piss with fiendishly economical satire such as this:

"There's a lot of Toonophobia going around in the world at the moment, Toonophobes coming out of the woodwork everywhere. We must combat Toonophobia with all our might." [Emphasis his]

Snotty: Devastating stuff, eh? In three lines he makes you realise the fucking balls-aching stupidity of the entire "terrifying Muslim threat" cock-knockery.
Hugs: Uh, okay sure, but ... but, holy fucking fuck. His face is so big he has two dimples on each cheek.
Snotty: Yeah! And that little mouth with the cheeky little pursed-lipped smile. He looks like someone's just slipped a finger up his arsehole and he realises he’s enjoying it.
Hugs: "Carlsberg don’t do literacy tests, but if they did..."
Snotty: And he misspelled Carlsberg.
Hugs: Yeah, that's what I meant. You know what though? I appreciate that little beard that delineates where his face stops and where the rest of the planet starts. It’s very considerate.
Snotty: Makes him look like a sumo wrestler at a Craig David fan club convention, though.
Hugs: Or the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in a Backstreet Boy costume.
Snotty: And who does he think he’s kidding, by the way, wearing that jumper? You wear a jumper with a design like that, you know people are gonna stare at your breasts. He’ll probably complain when somebody does, too. Bloody typical.
Hugs: I don’t know, man. Are you sure this guy is joking?
Snotty: Well, he’s fucking gotta be, right? Anybody that posts the lyrics of The Housemartins’ "Caravan of Love" under the heading "Most Poignant & Moving Song Ever?" is bound to be taking the fucking piss. Aren’t they? Huh?
Hugs: ...
Snotty: Ah shit.

Ridiculous Asshole News

2006-04-18T09:39:00.000Z

Australian Creationist Hosts Genius Convention

Bishop Wayne Malcolm, leader of the Christian Life City church in Hackney, east London, disputes the scientific evidence for evolution. "There is clearly an absence in the fossil record for intermediate levels of development. If a frog turned into a monkey, shouldn't you have lots of fronkies?"

Well, it’s hard to argue with a quip like that, but I note it’s not a new one.

The Book of Genesis tells us that everything was created by God—nothing "evolved." Every creature was given the ability to reproduce after its own kind as is stated ten times in Genesis. Dogs do not produce cats. Neither do cats and dogs have a common ancestry. Dogs began as dogs and are still dogs. They vary in species from Chihuahuas to Saint Bernards, but you will not find a "dat" or a "cog" (part cat/dog) throughout God’s creation. Frogs don’t reproduce oysters, cows don’t have lambs, and pregnant pigs don’t give birth to rabbits. God made monkeys as monkeys, and man as man.

The Living Waters site features other killer arguments, which are apparently meant to be taken seriously. Like this:

The banana -- the atheist's nightmare

Note that the banana:

1. Is shaped for human hand
2. Has non-slip surface
3. Has outward indicators of inward content:
Green-too early,
Yellow-just right,
Black-too late.
4. Has a tab for removal of wrapper
5. Is perforated on wrapper
6. Bio-degradable wrapper
7. Is shaped for human mouth
8. Has a point at top for ease of entry
9. Is pleasing to taste buds
10. Is curved towards the face to make eating process easy

Christ!

EXTRA!

SUPER BONUS RIDICULOUS ASSHOLE UPDATE!

George W Bush gives us the skinny on presidentin':

"I hear the voices, and I read the front page, and I know the speculation. But I'm the decider, and I decide what is best"

Great stuff. Anybody wanna shop any more assholes?

Profit & Loss

2006-04-13T19:26:00.000Z

The Ideal Citizen Show

2006-04-03T23:19:00.000Z

Bunch of Monkeys

2006-03-02T21:54:00.000Z

I was just reading the judgment in the Kitzmiller v Dover case. You know the one, the latest in a string of cases going back to 1926 and the Scopes trial representing the ongoing battle between good and evil. Evolution and creationism, or vice versa, depending on your viewpoint.

Easy, there, ya fuckin bible wielding bum smeller, I’m not going to get into it. We’ve done that before. Yes, smelled bums. Suffice it to say that the judgment is well worth a read if only for this cheeky as fuck quote from Judge Jones:

“…ID and teaching about “gaps” and “problems” in evolutionary theory are creationist, religious strategies that evolved from earlier forms of creationism”

What a beautiful man.

Anyway, he goes into a pretty damning case-history of the attempts of the fundamentalists to oust evolution, from banning it being taught in schools to getting equal time for creationism in science lessons, to “creation science” to intelligent design. All of which responses to the ever sophisticated arguments against creationism as a load of hooey. Yes, you heard it, Mr. O'Toole Goes to Washington. HOOEY! Luckily for kids in the US they have the Establishment Clause of the First amendment which pretty much fucks the creationists from the get-go. And the Supreme Court knows it.

Anyway, I thought I wasn’t going to get into it. I’m not. Here’s the point. The big difference between ID and creationism is that ID’s official stance is that they don’t say God is the creator, or intelligent designer. (Intelligent designer? Whoo…I can imagine all the hack comedians and their scrotum jokes already)

So, this begs the question. Who? Or, ok, what?

Two of the alternatives, on record, on fucking court record in the Dover case are: Aliens and, I love this…a time travelling cell biologist.

A time travelling cell biologist. Some ID heads believe that one, or at least suggest it to throw us off their cooky scent.

Let’s consider that and see where it takes us in our understanding of ourselves and the almighty. What they’re suggesting is a time loop of some sort that we’re in. In other words, they go back, we evolve to the stage where time travel is possible, they go back, etc. Thing is…it’s not about, say, the END of the world as we know it, as in Twelve Monkeys, for example, nor about something along the way, like Donnie Darko. It’s about the very beginning. That creates all sorts of logical problems that lead us to only one conclusion if we follow the path that the cell biologist believers advocate.

Time loops require a way in, so what you end up with is something that looks like this:

Or this, if the person goes too far back in time and steps in something:

The process suggested here, however, they think, looks like this:

But in fact, it’s more like this…and clearly nonsense:

So, if we look back to fig 3., the ID futuristic cell biologist proposition, we see that it could not begin in the first place without some bastard setting it up…a creator!

So, either they are full of pure, sweaty shite, or a further designer is required. And if he designed THAT world, the only solution is this:

God’s a dork.

FYI

2006-02-26T21:32:00.000Z

Further to the post below, I should probably point out that I had nothing whatsoever to do with this.

Personally, I suspect 'David Duff'.

The Gayest Blogger on the Internets

2006-02-20T18:53:00.000Z

The furore over the Danish cartoons has, along with acres of bogus "Clash of Civlisations" editorials, occasionally resulted in some really interesting and inciteful pieces. Few of these managed to top the deep analysis and culturally sensitive musings of Partisan Pundit:

I find myself wondering what would happen if these riots caught hold here? I have this image of a Korean shopkeeper on the roof of his store with a bulletproof vest and a .308. Next door is a black guy who owns a barber shop wielding a Mossberg in one hand and a meat cleaver in the other. A pissed-off muslim rioter cocks back a molotav, and suddenly a large exit wound blossoms in the middle of his back, as the pungent smell of gunpowder residue fills the air. Three, four more fall, and suddenly, rioting in the streets loses its luster. Defending Mohammed's honor against a cartoonist's scribbles suddenly seems less important than avoiding a face full of double-ought buckshot. A rock flies through a display window, and almost like a ricochet, an angry retired fire-fighter comes flying back out swinging a Louisville Slugger like to put a smile on Babe Ruth's face.

Beautiful. Inspired by PP's mastery of the issues, I took a look around his website to see what other gems I could unearth. Here, I was heartened to find that he has dealt with similar issues previously, and with the same thoughtful, rational prose:

The Black Community's attempts to be viewed with any degree of compassion or intellectual equality on the national stage is certainly not in any measure enhanced by the repeated actions of select portions of its constituency wilding through middle-class businesses like a bunch of Somali thugs hyped up on kat, careening through neighborhood streets in the back of technicals.

Guys, my fellow Americans of color, a word of advice from whitey: If you want us to listen to you like rational human beings, STOP BURNING SHIT DOWN. Stop throwing off the oppressive yoke of civilization at every hint of social instability.

...

Here's a newsflash for the Rainbow Coalition: If you smash in MY storefront, you’ll get a 12-guage welcome. Not because I’m behaving like a racist, but because YOU are behaving like a raving lunatic.

But from whence springs forth this well of humanity, this spiritual yearning for a better life for those who are persecuted? What fuels this one-man quest for justice and truth for those who have laboured long in the darkness? More specifically, what's the fucking story with this asshole?

My first guess would be the bullying: "People that hijack websites ... are the same ones who, in high school or the frat in college, would offer you a drink of their soda, only to find out it was the can they were using for their tobacco spit, or maybe even filled with piss". Jesus, he drank a soda can full of piss, the poor bastard. That would tend to make anybody a fucking sociopath. The experience has evidently also completely destroyed any sense of perspective, as he continues: "Ambush sites are terrorism, plain and simple. Maybe planes don't crash and burn, maybe buildings don't collapse, but the intent in the heart of the cyberterrorist is the same as any jihadist".

Are you listening to this, Mr Bush? After you are finished with al-Qaeda, PLEASE MAKE IT SO I DO NOT GET POP-UPS.

My second guess would definitely be the barely repressed homosexuality and attendant self-loathing. Partisan Pundit's writings are strongly obsessed with male sexual relationships, and he cannot decide whether he is as disgusted as The Party tells him to be or all warm and fuzzy in the crotch. In the tight-arsed and ridiculously homophobic world of right-wing bloggery this tends to result in a lot of dumb macho image reinforcement. To demonstrate, let's take a look at some of his other websites - see here, in a post in support of handbags for men, as PP wrestles with the issues:

Men need a bag, but a Manly Bag. Call it a tote. No, wait, I have it: men need a satchel. Satchels are not gay. Satchels are manly. John Wayne himself threw uncountable numbers of satchel charges into uncountable numbers of enemy pillboxes, usually doing so under a hail of murderous gunfire.

Quintessential manliness.

Even the WORD "purse" is inherently unmanly; you almost feel the need to lisp just saying it. "Satchel," on the other hand, is a virile, rugged, squinty-eyed-from-staring-into-the-desert-sun-for-too-long, fist-clenching, teeth-grittin', tear-off-a chunk-of-raw-meat-from-the-carcass-of-the-vicious-carnivore-you-just-killed-with-yer-bare-freakin'-HANDS kind of word. No lisping involved whatsoever.

Gosh. I'm getting a little hot under the collar imagining the tanned, rippling torso of rugged manly manliness conjured up by PP in this deeply erotic passage. I imagine him wearing naught but a pair of ripped jean shorts and white socks, clutching his macho manly man-satchel to his smooth, hairless chest.

Blowing my thesis out of the water, though, the same blog also features a post titled "Guys I'd Probably Like To Do If I Were Gay, Which I'm Not", a lengthy tribute to the mannish man-osity of Matthew McConaughey during which we discover that PP is definitely not gay, because he goes out of his way to tell us so, many times: "And that accent, I'm telling ya, if I was gay (which I'm not) that rolling, laid-back drawl of his would get me all a twitter. In theory, of course". Not gay, then. Got it.

PP has a third website, Don't Get Stuck On Stupid, the main page of which features the following heartbreaking farewell:

I saw myself as something of a crusader, trying to change people's minds by showing them the truth, as well as I was able. But you know what I realized? A great many people aren't interested in the truth. Changing minds is difficult when emotion is so wrapped up in a worldview that reason can't penetrate the folds.

To which he then adds, helpfully: "I'm sure I suffer to some degree from this problem, but hey". Here's some of PP's crusading truthful manliness, penetrating the folds and further establishing his unassailable lady-lovin' credentials:

Getting the icky willies at the thought of two hairy men going to town on each other's exit onlys, or getting queasy at the site of two guys playing tonsil hockey on a public park bench doesn't make me intolerant or homophobic.

It makes me heterosexual.

This is a firm admission that he is entirely adjusted to the fact that something "icky" happens to his willy whenever he kicks back and thinks about two hirsute men making sweet love to eachother. This is a sure sign of someone who is comfortable with his sexuality, and I whole heartedly apologise for ever having suggested that PP is anything other than a handbag-sporting macho racist arsehole with a soft spot for Matthew McConaughey's delectable accent.

To make it up to Partisan P for the entire tone of this post, I'll happily point out his keen scientific mind (whose ID-Evolution pieces are a veritable Algonquin round-table in the comments and feature such fiendish arguments as linking to a picture of a bacterial flagellum and saying "I mean seriously, come ON people").

Brains and brawn - quite the catch, eh ladies? Too bad he's, uh, married. What? What did you think I was going to say?

Oh, shame on you.

UPDATE: PP's obsessive internal struggle continues, as he battles to categorise everything in his life as either "gay" or "manly", as if he isn't a textbook example of the two co-existing relatively comfortably. On the "gay" list we have old favourites like "open-toed sandals", "frappucinos" and, of course, "anal sex" (apparently all anal sex is gay now), but there are a few new additions: base jumping is gay now, along with loofas and placemats. Oh, and lip balm is gay, but only if flavoured.

"Manly" stuff includes fixing the lawnmower, scratching in public and stupid bullshit like that, but because PP is over-compensating wildly we also get stuff like "claymores" and "concealed-carry". How gay do you gotta be that you need fucking weapons to reinforce your rapidly dispersing heterosexual smokescreen? Just suck a cock already, dude! It's cool, nobody gives a shit.

Let's end with a competition. See if you can guess which categories PP sorts the following into:

A. "Smashing that big freakin' spider"
B. "Cleaving Orcs in twain"

Yes that's right, both are, apparently, manly activities. Now, I'm not into this "gay/manly" game, but if I was (which I'm not), then statements about Orcs, in ye olde nerde speake, would definitely be in the GAY category. Really though, who could stand to live their life like this, constantly worrying about the gayness or otherwise of one's actions and possessions? Something's gotta give - watch this space!

Service Announcement

2006-02-19T11:55:00.000Z

Well ye'll all be delighted to learn that you are now the proud readers of Blog Of The Week Award-winning website, courtesy of Clairwil & Co over at A Mischief Of Magpies and, of course, you the voting public. It's a goddamn stamp of quality.

I hope you all enjoy it as much as I enjoy hardly ever updating it.

Glorifying Terrorism: Lesson Two

2006-02-16T14:20:00.000Z

Last time, we covered how to Glorify Terrorism with an indelible marker and a big piece of paper. Scary paper. Let's spice it up a notch.

EXHIBIT A:

We only have the Rebel's word for it that they're the good guys and the Empire are the bad guys. Even the least cynical can see that they might just have a vested interest in portraying themselves as heroic underdogs, fighting for freedom and apple pie. There are, however, enough publications for us to examine the evidence for ourselves. In order to maintain the necessary objectivity, the self-styled "Rebel Alliance" will be referred to as "the Terrorists".

...

It is common knowledge that Solo was up to his cute smile in debt to a particularly sadistic crimelord [1]. What is less well known is why. This information was revealed in a recent document [8]. He had in fact been smuggling a drug used as a particularly revolting truth drug manufactured in a particularly revolting manner. Let's get this straight. He was smuggling a cargo which he knew would be used for torture by a noted sadist, and was forced to dump it when challenged by Customs. This is one of the "heroes" of the terrorists. I believe the term "hero" is better used for the customs officers who, at the cost of their own lives, forced Solo to abandon the cargo so that it could do no further harm.

Later, after he had been completely corrupted by the terrorists, Skywalker attempted to recruit this same sadistic criminal (Jabba) [3].

Extra credit:

Surfing the internet, I came across an interesting article entitled "Eternal Jihad: The Way of the Mystic-Warrior" from a Sufi website:

"We are at the core a Movement of Jeddi; masters of Futuwwat ("the Way of the mystic-warrior"). We encourage adherents to train both physically AND spiritually, for their own personal edification and to enhance their knowledge and abilities in the STRUGGLE.

...

Notice the Arabic term "al-Jeddi" (master of the mystic-warrior way) along with another Islamic term not mentioned, "Palawan" (similar to Lucas' "Padwan" for Jedi apprentice) which were actual titles used by Muslim Knights!

EXHIBIT B:

They were proud desert warriors, poor but God-fearing -- occupied and exploited by heathen armies and foreign cartels for the fuel beneath their sand. Too weak to attack their enemies' high-tech military head on, they resisted through surprise raids and bombings. The imperialist oppressors called them savages -- even terrorists -- but they knew themselves to be freedom-fighters. And that one day God would send a messiah to unite their tribes and lead them in jihad.

No, not Osama bin Laden. Not any current Arab leader. And not even Lawrence of Arabia.

I'm talking about Muad'Dib, the messiah in Frank Herbert's epic sci-fi novel, Dune (1965). It is Maud'Dib who leads the Fremen tribes in jihad against a spice-hungry Empire. Spice is the fuel of the Empire. Without spice, interstellar travel -- and trade -- is impossible. Without spice, the galactic economy will collapse.

"The spice must flow!" is the cry repeated throughout this tale. Along with, "The one who controls the spice, controls the universe!" And in all the galaxy, there is only one spice source -- the desert wasteland planet named Dune.

Maud'Dib defeats the Empire by taking the spice source hostage, and threatening to blow it up, which would plunge all civilization into a new dark age. Talk about terrorism! (Anyone recall Hussein's threat to blow up the Kuwaiti oil fields?)

Oh yes, Dune has all the parallels. The hero even uses the J-word -- jihad. Of course, critics have long recognized that Dune was inspired by Islam, and that Herbert modeled Maud'Dib on Mohammed.

NEXT LESSON:

Good Dick Hunting

2006-02-16T14:13:00.000Z

BREAKING NEWS:

A man has shot his friend in the face with a shotgun. The friend is now recovering following the shooting and a subsequent heart attack. It appears the shooter kept quiet about the shooting for a full day to allow himself to recover from the "Worst day of his life". Thankfully, the shooter is now recovering after confessing his sins to the public. No criminal charges will be sought.

I wonder how the friend's day was?

UPDATE! Take the poll at Chase Me Ladies...

Freedom Of Speech In Your Hole

2006-02-15T20:59:00.000Z

Tony Fucking Blair:

Tony Blair's controversial plan for a new law to stop people "glorifying" terrorism has been backed by MPs.

The prime minister said the law would allow action to be taken against people with placards glorifying the 7 July bombers - which were seen in London during protests against cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad.

Placards. Fucking placards. Lordy, what brave defenders of our Western enlightenment values we’ve turned out to be. Let’s recap: gratuitously insulting and provocative cartoons characterizing Muslims as a pack of shifty, swarthy suicide bombers are published by a right-wing Danish newspaper, very possibly in cahoots with notorious racist neo-con asshole Daniel Pipes, generally adding insult to injury for a community of people being shit on from all angles. The reasonable complaints of Muslim leaders are ignored and dismissed for months while the offending cartoons are reprinted all over the fucking planet. A spate of tiny protests, some of which turn ugly, and every shitheel with a voicebox takes a break from yoo-hooing the PATRIOT Act or chuckling about Cindy Sheehan being manhandled over a fucking T-Shirt and instead gets all watery-eyed about his precious freedoms all of a fucking sudden. All of this despite the fact that not once in the whole case did anyone ever threaten censorship; despite the fact the cartoons in question have been more widely distributed than Charlie Sheen’s STDs and have been seen by nearly every PC-owning cunt on the fucking globe. We will never sacrifice our freedom of speech! We shall not relinquish the right to offend!

But oh, lord save us from the big scary fucking placards. Bunch of fucking pussies. If these guys with their new-found freedom-boners have any stones at all there’ll be a spate of sympathy placard posting all over the blog-o-place within hours, just like there was with the fucking stupid cartoons. After all, doesn’t that freedom extend to speech that one finds objectionable? Isn’t that what you all have been gasbagging about all fucking fortnight?

Man, I just saw the fucking megalomaniac on the TV just now, rictus grin in place. The new laws will send a message to those who wave big scary fucking placards all over the place, says Tony, and at this point I swear I heard a pause, a brief acknowledgement of the soupy irony of his next words. "We have free speech in this country", he says, "but don’t abuse it." Well I guess that's sound advice.

Free press? How come we hear so little from the same free press about European governments helping the US ferry people - on no fewer than 800 flights over four years, according to Amnesty International - to be tortured in places where it is legal to do so? How is it that nobody in the European free press is talking much about the fact that Iran stopped any further discussion of its nuclear program because the three EU leaders who were parleying with them reneged on their side of the bargain, by not ensuring Iran security in the event of a foreign invasion?

We hear nothing from the free press about the fact that the success of Hamas in the recent elections may have more to do with its schools and health clinics for beleaguered Palestinian communities (while the generous "international community" has abandoned them) than with its purported Islamic fundamentalism.

The "free" media in the West do not bother to investigate the events of September 11, 2001, or allegations that the Central Intelligence Agency itself may have been involved in the Bali bombings of 2002. It does not make any demands of the Bush administration to release the more than 1,700 pictures and videos of tortures and humiliations at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo that the Pentagon has kept away from the public eye.

We have to hear from bloggers on the Internet about the US forces in Iraq kidnapping women and girls related to suspected insurgents. Needless to mention, no dead American soldiers are shown on the TV screens of the Western media (though there is no bar on showing those killed by suicide bombers in Baghdad). How often is it remembered, not to speak of responsibility taken for the fact, that genocidal UN sanctions prosecuted by the West killed more than a million innocent people in Iraq in the 1990s? The free media in the West keep secret from the public the fact that the US has for years given asylum to proven terrorists such as Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada, wanted by Latin American governments for blowing up planes and suchlike. They are exempt from the "war on terror".

Above all, the media do little to ask for the impeachment of the consummate liars and mass-murderers who occupy elected positions in more than one Western democracy today, even as they pretend to teach lessons in political morals to less fortunate countries.

Free press? Or cowardly media eager to please the wealthy masters?

If any of you chest-beating chunderheads really give a shit about your freedoms, I reckon now would be the time to start making a proper fucking fuss.

Two Wrongs

2006-02-14T18:14:00.000Z

In a truly courageous act of bridge-building in the face of rising world tensions over the Danish cartoons, the BBC has taken it upon itself to equal things up a bit, by gamely attempting to piss off some Christians too. At least, that's the only sane explanation behind the recent announcement of this astonishing pile of shite.

The BBC plans to mark the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ this Easter with an hour-long live procession through the streets of Manchester featuring pop stars from The Stone Roses and Happy Mondays and featuring songs by The Smiths and New Order.

In the programme, called Manchester Passion, a character representing Jesus will sing the legendary Joy Division anthem Love Will Tear Us Apart before dueting his arch-betrayer Judas on the New Order hit Blue Monday, according to senior church sources involved in the production.

In retrospect, it was only really a matter of time: many noted social commentators have, in the past, pointed out the almost uncanny similarities between the crucifixion, death and eventual ascent into heaven of the Son of God in early Judean times, and the 'Madchester' music scene, circa 1990.

'People often think of Jesus as just being all about the sandals and shit,' said a BBC spokesperson. 'But in many ways, he was the Shaun Ryder or Busta Rhymes of his day. After all, Jesus had long hair, outspoken views and a gang of rowdy mates. So did the Happy Mondays.'

But aren't they worried people will be offended by the choice of songs?'

'It's uncanny how easily some of these songs fit,' replied the BBC. 'Especially if you tweak the lyrics a bit. We're hoping to include the Arctic Monkeys 'I bet that you look good on a two-by-four' for the actual crucifixion scene.'

And what of rumours that if the show is a success, further biblical epics could be produced in a similar vein? 'Absolutely,' confirmed the BBC spokesperson, 'This thing could run and run. We've already got plans for a hip-hop Moses called, 'It Takes A Nation Of Egyptians (To Hold Us Back)'.

UPDATE: infinite muppets ups the pun stakes something fierce. But um, the Department still has the purty pictures...

Because A Muslim In His Home Is Not A Photo-Op

2006-02-08T13:42:00.000Z

TO THE PEOPLE OF NORWAY AND DENMARK: WE ARE SORRY

In the middle of all the mayhem surrounding the Danish cartoons controversy, a group of Arab and Muslim youth have set up this website to express their honest opinion, as a small attempt to show the world that the images shown of Arab and Muslim anger around the world are not representative of the opinions of all Arabs. We whole-heartedly apologize to the people of Denmark, Norway and all the European Union over the actions of a few, and we completely condemn all forms of vandalism and incitement to violence that the Arab and Muslim world have witnessed. We hope that this sad episode will not tarnish the great friendship that our peoples have fostered over decades.

The problem with media representation of such issues tends to be that the media only picks up the loudest voices, ignoring the rational ones that do not generate as much noise. Voices that seek tolerance, dialogue and understanding are always drowned out by the more sensationalist loud calls, giving viewers the impression that these views are representative of all the Arab public’s view. This website is a modest attempt at redressing this wrong. We would appreciate it if you could forward the word to as many of your friends as possible.

We will note that we find the cartoons to be incendiary, insulting and very abrasive. We also take issue with the general stance of the Danish Newspaper Jyllands-Posten, which has a reputation for publishing inflammatory material. Yet, it would be wrong to take away their freedom of expression, regardless of how horrid their material is. We affirm our belief in freedom of expression and people’s right to express whatever opinions they hold. However, at the same time there is a need to realize that freedom of expression is a responsibility that should not be used to gratuitously insult people’s beliefs.

When confronted with such a situation, we deplore the use of violence in all its forms, as well as threats of violence and derogatory and racist remarks being thrown in the opposite direction. We condemn the shameful actions carried out by a few Arabs and Muslims around the world that have tarnished our image, and presented us as intolerant and close-minded bigots.

Anyone offended by the content of a publication has a vast choice of democratic and respectful methods of seeking redress. The most obvious are not buying the publication, writing letters to the editor or expressing their opinions in other venues. It is also possible to use one’s free choice in a democracy to conduct a boycott of the publication, and even a boycott of firms dealing with it. Yet an indiscriminate boycott of all the country’s firms is simply uncalled for and counter-productive. We would be allowing the extremists on both sides to prevail, while punishing the government and the whole population for the actions of an unrepresentative irresponsible few.

We apologize whole-heartedly to the people of Norway and Denmark for any offense this sorry episode may have caused, to any European who has been harassed or intimidated, to the staff of the Danish, Norwegian and Swedish Embassies in Syria whose workplace has been destroyed and for any distress this whole affair may have caused to anyone.

There is a strong tradition of friendship and cooperation between the Norwegian and Danish people and Arab people. Of most note is the continued support that these governments give to the Palestinian people in their struggle for freedom and liberation, and the brave stance that these governments have often taken to defend Palestinian rights. We sincerely hope these special bonds will not be broken. We hope that our Scandinavian friends would not be convinced by the actions of a few to believe that this is how Arabs and Muslims feel about them. There are racists, bigots and criminals in all countries, and it is the duty of the respectful and reasonable to reach out to each other.

Let us hope that instead of emboldening the bigots, this sorry affair will bring all open-minded, tolerant and reasonable people from the Arab, Muslim, Norwegian, Danish and European communities together to unite in a continued struggle of reason against prejudice, open-mindedness against bigotry and humanity against racism.

Time For Your Two Minute Hate

2006-02-07T22:53:00.000Z

Wooooooo! OH NO!

OCEANIA IS AT WAR WITH EURASIA. OCEANIA HAS ALWAYS BEEN AT WAR etc.

Of course, as enlightened readers are no doubt aware, the hyped-up scare-fest above is merely cover for the antics of the real villains. You know who I'm talking about:

This Much I Know: Mick Hucknall is the World's Biggest Penis

I am one of the best singer-songwriters this country has produced. Ever. If people don't like me saying that, tough shit. People should deal with facts.

Tom Jones told me only a few singers have got the pipes and he's right. He has. Sinatra did. I have. I can still hit the high notes from when we started in 1985, but I've got the bass now, too.

A mate of mine had this band once, and they were looking for singers. I got to drunkenly interview this one candidate, a real turd. I asked him: "What notes can you hit?" He said: "I can do the high 'galileos' and the low 'galileos'".

I never figured out what the school bullies meant when they called me 'Puppet head'. People are racist about redheads in a way they'd never dare to be about black or Asian people.

Yes, that's right. They can burn 'em, lynch 'em and enslave 'em all they want, but they'd never dare call a black guy a "Puppet head". That's crossing the fucking line.

I've loved being a bachelor. They threw me in the candy store and I ate the lot! If I go out and get drunk and end up in bed with two women what's wrong with that? I had a great time. If they want to tell their story that's their problem. They're the ones who end up looking like cheap whores on the front of a magazine with their tits hanging out.

Naming alleged rapists is appalling. I've been through it. Even if you're found completely innocent it's on the internet for the rest of your life. You're almost guilty by implication.

Tony Blair's a friend. I've said to him, 'You should have waited on Iraq'. He listens.

I want children. I think it'll happen. I've had a bit of a journey in my life and I'd like to think I can pass some good on.

Jesus. What a fucking rapist.

Overheard, between 5th and 3rd

2006-01-27T14:29:00.000Z

SUIT 1: What really annoys me is when I get in to work at 8 or five past 8, and others wander in late throughout the morning and sit in my office and just whine. And when I'm still here at 7 and beyond, they've all wandered home hours earlier. It really fucking pisses me off.

SUIT 2: Who does this?

SUIT 1: Oh, not you, Ewan, you've never done it.

SUIT 2: But who? Who's been whining?

SUIT 1: Oh you know ... corporate oiks.

SUIT 2: Well, I suppose they see you as some sort of... receptacle for...

SUIT 1: ...for crap.

Me too, Shitsack, me too.

As God Is My Witness...

2006-01-25T01:42:00.000Z

...there is no one I loathe more than that bearded flamboyant troll Russell Brand who hosts Big Brother's Big Mouth. His long hair and stubble and PLO scarf fucking kill my last nerve. Jesus, look at him:

He's actually even worse now than he is in that photograph. He's more like this:

...but with a beard. And more velvet.

I fucking hate that guy. He makes me want to puke into my asshole and shit it back into my mouth.

I'll Show You the Life of the Mind

2006-01-24T12:07:00.000Z

Did I turn off the alarm or just turn it down? That song was on, the one by Santana, and then I...I what.

...

...with a handle in your hand. You go back, Jack. Do it again... Is that Santana? ...Wheel turnin’ round and round, you go back, Jack. Do it again. How can it still be six minutes? My watch has turned over five times since it was at seven.

...

...

...

I wish I hadn’t worn these pants. The tag is itching me. It always itches me.

...

Why don’t I cut out that tag? I always say I’m going to cut it out. Why don’t I ever do anything? I do nothing I say I’ll do. I gotta do something with my life. This fucking tag.

...

Maybe if I lean this way.

...

...

This fucking tag. If it wasn’t so dark, I would’ve grabbed the Homer Simpsons. They should’ve been just on top. Seriously, why do I live here?

...

The ass material is getting a bit thin in those Homer Simpsons. I should look into replacing them. It’s soft, though, the ass. They’re nice to wake up in on Saturday.

...

If I was a girl, would I put as much thought into my underwear as they do? Do I not care because I’m a guy, or is my apathy stronger? Was it written in my dad’s spunk that I’d be a slob no matter who I was? Really, though, I can’t figure why girls think it matters to us what pants they’re wearing. It’s not the ultimate goal to see the pants.

...

Panties sounds like a really dirty word. Maybe that’s just because I feel funny saying it. Panties. Panties. Nope. Not gonna start.

...

...

...

What the hell is that jumper?

...

Oh Christ, here we go. The platform is almost vacant, and you stand there. Right there. With your inward grunts as you inhale that bacon baguette into the warm vacuum on your face. I can see up your nose, you hog. Licking your lips. Num num num num, that’s it. Keep it going for the next four minutes; they’ll fly by.

"Num num num num."

Look at your little shoes. What are those? Is there a Ken doll barefoot somewhere?

"Num num num num."

When did you reach the point that you stopped caring what a fat fucking swine-breathed slob you are? Did you trap some harelipped hag and get complacent or did you just give up? God, I can smell his heat! It's Beck's and aftershave.

...

...

"Num num num num."

Crisps, too?

"Num num num num."

What do you contribute to this planet besides methane?
...

'The train now approaching platform 1 is the delayed 8.38 service to…Cannon Street.'

...

That’s it. Step closer and crowd me. Gotta be first, gotta be first.

…

Jesus, look at their faces. They look like someone told them their father killed their mother and they realised they don’t care. You know, dude, you can take all the little steps toward me you want. I know you’re there.

"After you."

He must’ve seen there are plenty of seats.

Dangerously Ugly Phuckers II: An Observation

2006-01-19T12:38:00.000Z

What is it with politicians' busted grills? The Department has already exposed that particular breed of figurative and literal ugliness that is the DUP, but New Labour are no less repulsive.

Figuratively: War, missing weapons of mass destruction, dead folk, limbless children and all that unpleasant brouhaha.

Literally: Have you ever seen that face that Gordon Brown pulls between sentences? The one where it looks as though he's had a stroke of the lower face. Well, if there's anything that the recent sex offenders in schools fiasco in the UK has taught me it's that Ruth Kelly does the EXACT opposite. It's as if her jaw is on a sprung hinge, snapping her face shut between talk. The sooner her flobby fizzog is off my telly the better.

Gordon Brown

Ruth Kelly

Buenos Dias Doritos Amigos!

2006-01-16T22:20:00.000Z

On behalf of the colorful people of Latin America I would like to say a big muchas gracias to all the fine muchachos at Walkers Crisps!

For years, we have hung our heads in sadness at the stereotypes of our proud (and passionate) people: lazy wetbacks in dirty sombreros, big-butt latin honeys and cute little street urchins were all we ever saw.

But now we have Doritos Latinos! A true reflection of the diversity of Latin American culture and tradition in a foil-fresh bag! Whenever the passionate (and vibrant) people of Latin America miss the Chargrilled BBQ delights of our homeland we can simply rip open a grab bag and savor the flavor of thousands of years of civilisation in corn-snack form!

Surely, there can be no people on this earth that would not wish their culture to be represented by a bag of crisps. We thank you from the bottom of our swarthy hearts for the privilege of being the first, but we are a sharing (and proud) people and we would like to see others recognised in the same way.

We humbly make the following suggestions to add to your esteemed product line:

Walkers Negroes: inspired by the graft and optimism of our colored brothers! Available in Fried Chicken and Cornbread flavors!

Wopsits: Experience the mozzarella burst of our spaghetti-shaped maize snacks - now with extra grease!

Like Doritos Dippas? You'll love Nippas! Try your favorite ethnic snack with our "dericious" sushi flavor condiments!

Can't get enough of Walkers Max? Try our new Walkers Micks! Fight the famine with our famous deep ridge potato crisp! Now in Guinness'n'Shamrock flavor!

Doritos Multi-Paki: choose six great tastes of the east - now available at your corner store!

Please excuse the quality of our suggestions, we are but a humble, yet proud (and also colorful), people. I know you will do better than these. I hope you will take this opportunity to bring the world together in unity through triangle-shaped savoury treats. My fatherless child is weeping tears of joy down his cute little urchin face!

Vaya con Dios!

Juan Diaz

Hot Celebrity Action!

2006-01-06T00:03:00.000Z

Further to my last post, The Sun has just clarified my point. American minds will put out and accept a substantial amount of drivel. There are, after all, 283 million of them. But I dare you to find a respectable Yankee executive who would "done" give a record deal to or make a biopic of the life of a big bag of tits and sperm like Jordan. She and her paper-cut-anus-with-a-moustache-faced husband would be so far away from a camera and a microphone that 400 million years of glacial movement couldn't level the mountain they'd have to climb to stand in the public eye.

Britons are so desperate for celebrities they'll grab the cock of any horsefucker with a hard-on for fame. And when that Big Brother contestant turns up 20 years later on some web site linked to by Pop Bitch, swallowing a blast of hot come from the phallus of some man-titted ex-con with grey chest hair, I would like to believe the face of every British viewer and celebrity hound is on the front of that groaning head we cannot see, delivering 30 million apologies into the belly of our reality star for ever giving enough of a shit and bringing down the island's collective intelligence quotient. That's my great hope.

UPDATE: Oh great, now I get to re-imagine the above scenario starring George Galloway. Thanks a lot, George.

Knock Knock

2006-01-05T23:28:00.000Z

Who's there?

The most unfunny people in the world are.

The most unfunny people in the world are who?

The British!

Ha ha!

You know, for all that the Americans don't get about satire (though some of the best satires I've seen are American), the British have this rotten tendency of lionising shit as being more meaningful than it really is. And without fail they always start with that Herculean humour of theirs that fails to impress most peoples of the world, including those they didn't conquer and suppress for five centuries.

Everywhere I go I hear nerds praising the great British sense of humour (please; and the Nazis were great dancers) and arguing that Spike Milligan and The Young Ones are examples of comedic genius that changed the British psyche and British television. Maybe it changed television, but that doesn't mean that it's genius. That doesn't even mean it's good. Personally, Snotty finds Spike Milligan's jokes obvious, puerile and tired from centuries of being kept awake by dim-witted drunks repeating them loudly at ends of bars.

'Ha, I said a word that sounds like boobs, but I wasn't really talking about boobs. Anyway, here, look at these boobs!'

Cue some naked chick to walk past. It really gets on my tits that this gets passed off as ingenuity, let alone humour.

And The Young Ones? Darling babies of so-called 'edgy' British television?

Honeychile, c'mere. Sit down and tell mama why that's funny. Tell me all about it. I promise mama won't get mad. But that Young Ones be so damn unfunny it liable to shove mama's uterus out 30 year too soon due to mama's dry heaves.

Now ol' Snotty here pays no attention to flags, and Snotty wouldn't be so upset if the British were just a little bit more humble about the depth of their sense of humour. Hell, Snotty wouldn't care so much for British bombast and pomposity if they left it at that. But far too often, Britons like Channel 4 have told Snotty McShot that British comedy is so much more sophisticated than that of the simple Yanks. Oh, those poor, misguided souls. Those simpletons rally behind a moron like George Bush, they invade countries for no reason and they have no sense of humour.

Apart from The Office, Peep Show and anything roughly associated with Chris Morris, what bile can British television cough up that stacks convincingly next to American offerings like Seinfeld, The Simpsons, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Cheers, All In The Family, Family Guy, MASH, early Married With Children, early Saturday Night Live, even I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners and, at times, The Andy Griffith Show?

Red Dwarf? Dad's Army? The Vicar of Dibley? Steptoe and Son? The I-don't-be-leeeeeeve-it guy? That scene where Del Boy falls through the hole in the bar? John Cleese returning a dead parrot or beating his car with a stick? Anything John Cleese has said? I wouldn't even give Father Ted to the isle. Even the Bafta-winning Little Britain is about as humour-inducing as watching Ariel Sharon's pulsing sphincter try to drop a turd onto a glass table.

And it's not just television where the Americans prevail. The celluloid silver screen is Britain's other Yorktown. British cinema's idea of comedy is Hugh Grant- well, Hugh Grant. Or occasionally in film a man will - gasp! - dress like a woman. And they don't even call her Prime Minister. Or Judi Dench.

In fact, yes. I've seen funnier films from Iraqi insurgents than I've seen come out of Great Britain in the last few years. Of course, those films have been largely driven by American creativity in the region.

Still, the point is: Americans are assholes, for sure, and they'll shit all over the world and shit all over you. But when it comes to your TV screens, they rarely shit on the glass.

The Reason For The Season

2005-12-23T02:04:00.000Z

It's been a while since I was into all this shit, but I think this is about right.

NEVER FORGET.

The Greatest News Story Ever?

2005-12-15T10:21:00.000Z

Here's mine. Use the comments section to post your own nominations.

The Formosan macaque, a monkey protected under Taiwan law, has become a pest to farmers living near the mountains.

The monkeys are protected because they are unique to the island, but their increasing numbers have made them the dominate primate in the mountainous regions. They act in groups, and according to farmers in these areas, have become more and more bold and aggressive.

In Taitung County, located at the eastern end of Taiwan's Central Mountains, an owner of a chicken farm complained that the monkeys often harass his chickens. And he said they aren't doing it for food, but instead are just playing monkey games such as plucking the feathers of roosters and placing hens on branches high up in the trees.

A goat ranch owner in Fuyuan, Taitung County, said that a Formosan macaque arrived at his ranch this year and soon started harassing his goats, even sexually attacking the female ones.

He said he bought six dogs to keep the monkey away from his goats, but the monkey tamed the dogs within ten minutes. At first, the monkey stood out of the reach of the dogs which were kept on leads, and then slapped them in the face when they became tired of barking at him. Frightened by the monkey, the dogs became timid in its presence.

...

Another farmer who raises boars in Tama, Taitung County, said wild monkeys often tease his boars by riding on their backs like a man on a horse.

Ha ha. Those crazy monkeys. Whatever will they get up to next?

Merry xmas, motherfuckers.

State of the World Address

2005-12-13T14:17:00.000Z

A 200-mile wide toxic cloud of shit fans out into the atmosphere above us. I don't know exactly what's in it, but I know I wouldn't wanna roll it in a joint and smoke it in a hurry.

The rising levels of fresh water deposited in the oceans by melting polar ice caps appear to have caused the 30 percent slowdown over 12 years of the Atlantic Conveyor, threatening to turn Britain into fucking Siberia before we even hit the half-way point in this century.

The energy crisis looms, we're facing 50 years of the WAR ON TERROR!, and already conservative pundits in the US are urging Bush to take care of the threat posed by Russia, China and Latin America.

But forget all that. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is how I know that we are truly living in the End of Fucking Days:

In a trial certain to be welcomed by the estimated one million Britons who eat their lunch at their desks each day, Britain's biggest retailer Tesco will use technology similar to that used in singing greetings cards to sell musical sandwiches.

Opening the top of the sandwich box will activate a tiny sound module that plays a selection of music. This season's offering will be a medley of Christmas tunes including Jingle Bells, Santa Claus is Coming to Town and We Wish You a Merry Christmas.

...

"It's designed to provide busy office workers with relaxing music to make eating lunch at their desks more enjoyable than ever before," [Tesco Spokesman Jonathan Church] said, adding that the concept could be easily adapted for Easter, Valentine's Day or Mother's Day.

The Rapture Index has yet to be updated with this development, but you best believe it's time to repent.

Newsround

2005-12-11T22:08:00.000Z

Explosion in Hemel Hempstead provokes mass idiocy. "I thought it was a bomb gone off, or a plane crash or something" said one resident who has lived beside the enormous oil depot for fifteen fucking years.

Margaret Thatcher's short term memory fading. She cannot remember the beginning of a sentence once she has reached the end, reports pathetic jungle arsehole Carol Thatcher. Department of Hate spokesman, Snotty McShot, said, "Ah, Margaret Thatcher is a murderous aul fuck."

Comedian Richard Pryor in denial:

Eh, actually dude.

Harold Pinter is a Dude

2005-12-08T15:15:00.000Z

I haven't eaten since Tuesday.

I've just been violently sick after uncovering a three week old garlic chicken pasta in the fridge. Christ, the stench! It took me 15 minutes just to bag it up and get it out of the house whilst swallowing my own bile.

I decided against going to bed and decided as I hadn't seen daylight for 4 days I'd open the windows and get cleaning, not bargaining on vomit-inducing tagliatelle.

I don't understand Christmas music in shops. Why? Why would they do that? They don't have music in Tesco's the rest of the year round and I don't think anybody particularly misses it. I can't imagine anyone complaining about a shop having no Christmas music, just like I can't imagine anybody whose seasonal cheer quotient wouldn't skyrocket if they didn't have to hear The Chipmunks' version of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" while queueing to buy fucking tampons or whatever. It's a depressing enough experience lining up with everyone else to stare at the shelves of bland sandwiches at lunchtime without being driven demented by some tired and worn-out Christmas mix tape gurgling away in the background. Jesus, those things are on a fucking loop, too. There's currently a debate about a smoking ban in pubs, focusing on the rights of bar staff not to work in a nicotine fogged environment. What about the cashiers in supermarkets at Christmas? It's only a matter of time before one of them snaps from hearing Cliff Richard's "Millennium Prayer" six hundred times a day and brings a rifle to work, or unboxes a turkey carving knife for a slice'n'dice rampage. And if I'm in the shop when it happens I hope they fucking slit my throat, too.

Last night I saw these guys at the Garage in Highbury, with their huge, caustic, beautifully ugly mess. Craig Clouse is a madman. For the duration of the last two songs he climbed into the audience with the microphone, the cord all tangled up in the mic stand, and the crowd all stepped way back to the walls while he paced around swinging the stand around his head. We actually believed he would hurt us.

Back home, furiously drunk and humming with violent tinnitus, I stared at the television, not caring what came on and hardly comprehending what did. A man was on, talking straight into the camera, but I was so leathered I could see two men and two TVs, and my eyes struggled to marry the two images up. The man looked old and frail, but there was nothing frail about what he was saying. At some point I registered that the old man was Harold Pinter. I remember that he seemed, briefly at least, to be talking about his plays. But then he was talking about something else entirely, and it swiftly became the greatest single piece of television I have ever seen. It was fucking magnetic, and it felt like something that should never have made it into a national broadcast. I thought somebody must have made a mistake somewhere, somebody will lose their job in the morning. It was like a fucking portal had opened up and a freak dose of uninterrupted brutal reality was pouring through.

This morning I thought maybe I had hallucinated it all. But it appears I didn't.

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.

If such a determination is not embodied in our political vision we have no hope of restoring what is so nearly lost to us - the dignity of man.

This Christmas, the Queen's Speech should be replaced by Pinter's. This year and every fucking year.

I am so monumentally hungover today I am impervious to all external influences. And it feels great.

One For The Scat Fans

2005-12-05T22:03:00.000Z

Last night I’m afraid I was unfortunate enough to come down with – and please permit me to slip into medical parlance for a moment – a dastardly dose of the squirts.

Now you might be thinking, where’s the blogging mileage in that? Surely this isn’t going to be another redundant rant about this awful affliction of the arse? After all, what reasonable man has any affection for the runs? Well, if Snotty were your host this evening, he may well have taken you down that particular Hershey highway, but being of a generally more upbeat nature I’d like to take this opportunity to sing the praises of the miracle cure that is Imodium.

Ode to Imodium

Imodium must be, quite simply, the greatest over-the-counter medication of all time. One single tablet of this fabulous stuff, and no longer was I making the perilous journey to the jacks in the small hours of the night with my arms cradling my cramping guts, doubled over in misery and goggle-eyed and sweaty with fear. The only thing that would have been more effective than that one pill would have been to seal my sphincter shut with an acetylene torch (a remedy I would have seriously considered had Imodium not been available).

I remember when I first discovered this magical medicine as a child. I’d come down with a cunty case of swamp arse during the summer, such that I was incapable of enjoying any seat other than the porcelain throne for more than an average of 12 minutes before having to dash off to the smallest room to violently deposit the next foul colon-load of gravy. As you can imagine, after two or three weeks of this I was quite a sight. I had lost about four and half stone and my green, clammy skin hung off my protruding cheekbones like seaweed dangling limply from a weather-beaten rock. I was quite literally shitting myself to death.

One day, my father caught sight of my ghostly visage as I crawled from the can on all fours in grim acceptance of my imminent demise, and his brow briefly furrowed. A flicker of parental concern passed across his features, and he reached for the phone. Curious, I looked up at him from the floor as he called the local health centre. One of my kids has the gutter butt, he said. Is there anything I can give it?

Oh really? Y’know, I think I have some of that, he said. He hung up and disappeared into the kitchen, returning some moments later to lay a pale yellow box and a glass of water by my head, and as soon as I regained consciousness I promptly dropped one of the tablets down my parched throat. Well, I don’t mind telling you, that one pill went to work so quick you might as well have jammed it in my anus like a big fucking cork. One tiny little dimple-packed capsule and my watery ordeal came to an abrupt end, my young life spared.

There’s probably some kind of gruesome side effect of course, but as long as it isn’t penis cancer I think it’s a small price to pay for not having to suffer the indignity of existing solely as some kind of glorified organic autobahn for splashy effluent. In reality we humans are not much more than that, of course, but a few hours between bowel movements in which to pretend my life has a purpose is all I ask. Imodium, you have granted my only wish, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Unless it’s penis cancer. Oh god, what if it’s penis cancer?

Community Announcement: Part Two

2005-12-01T16:05:00.000Z

Here's a recurring fantasy of mine:

I step up to a pelican crossing in London, and there's a car approaching, a fat shiny Beamer. It's clear that the driver has no intention of stopping for the likes of me. He's an important guy, after all; a busy guy. He has clients to see and briefcases to carry - where on earth will he find the four seconds it takes to pause his journey at a crossing? Time is money, people! He could privatise five hospitals in those four seconds.

As he prepares to sail right past, he stares straight ahead in some needless pretence that he has somehow failed to see me by the road side. At the last possible moment, I step off the pavement and position myself squarely in his path, turning to meet his eyes.

The impact shatters the bones in my thighs, my kneecaps split apart, and there's a collective gasp from the bus shelter on the other side of the road. My upper body pitches forward towards the windscreen, a grin fixed on my face, my eyes still locked on his as they widen in shock. My face hits the glass and there's just the tiniest fraction of a second during which the two objects resist each other, until suddenly they both burst. My lips are ripped off and my nose collapses. One of my eyes is torn open and my jaw is snapped back under my chin as I am propelled through the ragged hole. The glass shreds my throat and I spray the leather interior with copious black jets of blood. That suit is gonna need some fucking dry-cleaning too.

Right about now, his reflexes kick in, and he slams the brake pedal into the carpet. There's a kind of equilibrium as my body just hangs from the windscreen, my face hanging just inches from his. He can't take his eyes off my jeering, lipless, semi-toothed grin and the blood-streaked vitreous humour running down my cheek. My tongue flaps limply from the bottom of my jawless head, razzing him as he sits rigid in horror. When he eventually steps from his car, shaking and green-faced, he'll realise that the substance in his mouth is a mixture of brain tissue, skull fragments and clumps of matted sticky hair, and that's when he'll vomit. He'll be missing quite a bit of work for the next while.

In other words: drivers, please stop at pelican crossings for pedestrians. Somebody's gonna get hurt one of these days.

Community Announcement: Part One

2005-11-28T14:21:00.000Z

The Facilities Manager at my place of employ has just forwarded the following police alert. He describes it as a message regarding a "particularly bizarre scam". I disagree with him on all counts.

eAlert Message from The City of London Police

Message Start

There have been a number of recent incidents of a male approaching members of the public offering to sell them cigarettes at discounted prices. The money is handed over and the male then leaves on the pretext of returning with the cigarettes, but is never seen again! This male is a convincing con-man, and has a likeable and amiable persona. He is very distinctive looking and has been described as an 'Uncle Albert' look-alike. He is 65-70, approx 5'0'' tall, chubby, with white hair and beard.

Message End

This is not a warning about a scam. This is a warning to all of us that there are dangerous idiots in our midst, and the only thing "bizarre" about this man's scheme is that it appears to work. It's a mystery to me how anybody stupid enough to be taken in by this stunt has survived long enough reach an age where they might be in charge of a wallet.

"Hey, uh, just gimme the money and I'll be back in a minute with the stuff, I promise - in fact, why don't I take your mobile phone as insurance?"

Be careful out there this winter, people. We are surrounded by fools.

Your Weekly Briefing from the Language Commissars

2005-11-27T20:35:00.000Z

Following our recent spirited back'n'forth, the Grand High Wizard David Duke, uh sorry, Duff, has made good on his promise and this evening presents his learned thesis on the problem of racism (or, more specifically, the problem of being repeatedly labelled a racist). G'wan have a looksee, and tell me if you think the UK craposphere's greatest ego clarifies where he stands on the issue.

Compare and contrast:

"I have been taken to task for admitting my habit of using slang expressions for other peoples, such as, 'Mick', 'Paddy', Taffy', 'Paki', 'Yankie', 'Jock', 'Froggie' and so on."

With:

"I don't call my Jewish accountant a 'Yid', not just because he's a friend but because I actually like and admire the Jewish people as a group."

Yes, that about seals it for me.

UPDATE: Larry over at Tampon Teabag duffs up Duff some more.

I Would Like To Give Thanks...

2005-11-26T15:35:00.000Z

...to money, because without money we would have no annual Thanksgiving ceremony.

A little Thanksgiving history, if you will.

The Thanksgiving feast actually began as a Thanksgiving fast. It was an annual ritual just before the onset of the harsh New England winters, through which the autumn harvests rarely lasted. People went hungry and died. And so to commemorate those who had died in previous winters and to express solidarity before the upcoming struggle, colonial Americans would fast for three days: the weekly Sabbath, the Day of Humiliation and Fasting, and the Day of Thanksgiving and Praise. At the time it began, in the 1600s, America was populated by Puritans and religious extremists (unlike today), so worshipers in the fast would humble themselves before the Lord and thank Him for sparing them the previous year. As immigration made the country more diverse, however, the fast gradually took a more secular bent.

A century later, once the American insurgency, bolstered by the French navy, sufficiently demonstrated that regime change starts at home, lawmakers in the new government moved to make the annual fast an official holiday. One wealthy landowner stood before the plenary session of the assembly and proclaimed that the country had grown beyond such sufferings. The country was gaining wealth and territory, it's people doing better. Surely, he said, this is a time to indulge.

And in a vote that few realised would establish the character and behaviour of the infant nation for centuries to come, lawmakers raised their drumsticks in support of indulgence.

The 'Aye's had it. Sure, they kept a fast day to appease the fundamentalist movements, but the fast largely lost its significance, lasting until the 1860s when President Lincoln finally emancipated our waistlines along with the blacks.

Which brings us forward to today. When I look at all that America has on its plate today, I am thankful that I am as far away as I can be from its table without having to learn a new language.

DUP: Dangerously Ugly Phuckers

2005-11-22T14:51:00.000Z

Inspired by the news that the Reverend Dr Evil Ian Paisley's own daughter Rhonda is threatening him with a sexual discrimination suit, I thought I’d take a wee stroll down memory lane and revisit some of the Democratic Unionists Party's finest moments of the last decade or so. You might perceive a lot of gayness in this post, but I want you Freudians in the back to houl' yer wheesht. Remember, these are the creepy God-fearin' weirdos that tried to "Save Ulster From Sodomy" in the eighties, and as everyone knows, you could barely get from your house to the bus stop in Northern Ireland back then without being sodomised at least twice. So come take my hand, and join me on this nostalgic journey of sports massages, biblical smiting and unbelievably ugly cunts.

Say a big gay hello to Ballymena councillor Maurice Mills, who just this month claimed that Hurricane Katrina was sent by God to punish the homosexuals. The hurricane hit two days before the annual Southern Decadence Festival (possibly the G-Man mistakenly consulted a 2003 diary?) then proceeded to completely miss New Orleans' gay district in the French Quarter, famously taking out a shitload of black neighbourhoods instead. If he’s so angry with the gay people, then why is he taking it out on the poor black folk? Maurice? Perhaps you can shed some light on this. "This abominable and filthy practice of sodomy has resulted in the great continent of Africa being riddled with Aids." Ah. Okay. Anything else? "Asia was hit by the tsunami because of the continent's people not being Christian. God had marked their cards." Righto. Uh say, Maurice, how come it looks like you’ve just dipped a thumb in yer arse and smeared shite on your eyebrows?

Well how do you do, Sammy Wilson, ex-Mayor of Belfast? Some of you may have had the misfortune to catch the front page of the Sunday World in about 1996 which gave unfriendly prominence to the glutinous gluteus of the disgusting monster on the left as he frolicked bollock-naked in France with his then girlfriend. You will understand, therefore, my trepidation upon entering the search terms "Sammy Wilson+naked" into Google in order to find news stories mentioning the incident, but as it turns out, the results are quite interesting. Why it almost seems as if people are looking for excuses to horn the word "naked" into any article they write that features our Sammy. For shame!

How's about ye, Arthur Templeton? Arthur became infamous last year after being convicted of the harassment of a gay colleague. Said harassment, in typically classy DUP style, ranged from the simple use of the word "queer", to bending over in front of his victim, patting his arse and saying "Here you are, John". I’m not even fucking kidding. Arthur later claimed to have been bending over to tie his shoelace, and rebuffed his critics with the immortal lines, "It's political correctness gone mad", and "Some of my best friends are gay". We can all be thankful that the only picture I can find of him is that one in the car, for the bloated Jabba the Hutt fizzog behind the wheel demands some kind of protective barrier between us and it, and your computer screen isn’t gonna be enough.

What-ho, Paul Berry? Unfortunately, Paul was but a lad when the Save Ulster From Sodomy posse were out rounding up rump-wranglers, which makes the following story all the more tragic, and by tragic of course I mean knee-slappingly hilarious. Four days before the general elections in May this year, Paul arranged a rendezvous at the Ramada Hotel in Belfast with a male masseur, whom he had met on a gay chat website (and who was, unbeknownst to Paul, an understandably furious gay rights activist). Demonstrating that he had at least some idea of what his political party are supposed to be about (they ain’t just bigots when it comes to homosexuality, no sir!) his first remark to "Gary was reportedly "I hope you’re a Prod". Then he said something about baby oil. The next thing was even better: the last time he had received a massage was in Barbados, he said, by a "wee darky girl". Berry later claimed that the incident was entirely innocent and that he was merely receiving a "sports massage" for an injury. According to "Gary", however, Berry's ailment involved a feature of his anatomy not normally associated with sporting activities outside of horizontal jogging.

And we bring the story full circle by introducing you to the charming Ian Paisley Jr, who looks all set to continue in the Big Man’s footsteps as Bigot-in-Chief, surprise surprise. Hello there, Ian? What’s twisting your melon? "Most people in Northern Ireland find homosexual relationships offensive and indeed obnoxious and I say that from the position of research I have done." (Uh, "research", eh? That's cool. Now why didn’t Paul Berry think of that? "Sports massage", indeed.) I guess it would be kind of a funny coincidence if all of this actually meant that the DUP were closet cases, because from the research I’ve done I can say that most people in Northern Ireland find the DUP offensive and indeed obnoxious as well.

So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen: the DUP. What a shower of absolute cunts.

Revisiting Scott, Department Mascot

2005-11-18T13:50:00.000Z

From one Scott to another: I hadn’t checked in with Scott "The Pout" Sala, Minister of Information at Slant Point, for a while - at least not since he pussied out and banned comments (for which read "dissent", for which read "ridicule") like a big girl’s blouse - but the other night I grew weary of smashing my face off the corner of the knackered Ikea tables in my living room and decided to stop by Scott’s place to really get some pain going.

The first thing that caught my eye was this post on the riots in France ("So, are the French Muslims the new Blacks?"). It’s no surprise that Slanty is firmly in the "Muslim violence movement" school of analysis (having obviously never seen this film predict the scenes in Paris ten years ago) but he makes some interesting comparisons between the French situation and the American civil rights movement in the 1960s.

"Stay tuned to the Arab thug after effects of the new revolution", he warns us. "Muslim Power groups, Muslim gangs and the equivalent of Muslim gangsta rap music".

Yeah, uh, okay. And all that other stuff, like employment and voting rights, a stab at equality, the freedom not to get fucking hung out of a tree – that sort of thing? Apparently not worth a mention.

It’s funny, I expected Sala’s anti-Muslim stance to be fairly bald-faced, but I have to admit that I was a little taken aback by how casually he reveals his disdain for the legacy of the civil rights movement in his own country. If only them uppity blacks were still in the cotton fields we wouldn’t have to put up with all those 50 Cent records, eh Scott?

Further down the page there’s a post beginning with this sentence: "First, let me start by saying Rosa Parks was a hero", a phrase which starts the alarm bells ringing immediately, being that it is an only slightly reworked version of that old classic, "I’m not a racist, but". Here he complains that black people have the audacity to raise the spectre of institutional racism, a charge that is "irresponsible" even if it is true (which, as Scott himself admits, is at least a possibility – although only after he has derided those that suggest so as "conspiracy theorists").

At this point I realize two things: first, that Scott Sala really is an unbelievable idiot, and second, that his favourite creepy Orwellian buzzword is "irresponsible", most frequently attached to some unflattering - or not sufficiently adulatory - media story about The Glorious Leader and The Party. Look at these search results, for the love of fuck.

Sala is the worst kind of apologist, engaging as he does in a mere pretence of critical analysis before dropping to his knees at the ass of Bush and the dick of Cheney. The most embarrassing recent instance of this was his enthusiastic endorsement of the Harriet Miers nomination, and subsequent enthusiastic endorsement of the Harriet Miers withdrawal, as if he had advocated the latter the whole time. The man has no opinions of his own, simply swallowing and regurgitating whatever The Party hands down without question, like a good little propagandist.

In summary, Scott Sala is a ridiculous fucking asshole, and I would’ve told him as much at his own place if he weren’t such a bitch to go with it.

I Know You Are But What Am I?

2005-11-16T11:15:00.000Z

Remember when you were a kid? When you were having an argument with another kid, and you realised you'd been caught talking a load of bullshit and the other guy was properly taking you to task for it?

What did you do? There were a few options. You could start throwing punches at the smart-arse little fucker. You could shit in your whips and run away. Or, if you thought you were a bit of an evil genius yourself, you could try this one on: "Ha ha", you'd ejaculate smugly, "I was joking. You thought I was serious". Then you'd point and laugh and all your idiot friends would join in. You'd get one over on your confused opponent and your buddies would think you were pretty cool, but a little bit of you would die inside every time you resorted to it. Remember that?

Well, the other day I witnessed a grown man use this very same technique. A grown man of some renown, too.

Look here. Scott Adams, creator of popular foreskin-headed cartoon character Dilbert, weighs in on the fabricated evolution vs. intelligent design debate. His central point (or so he later claims) is that each "side" misrepresents the arguments of the other, such that poor Scott can't work out who to believe. Therefore, neither side is credible to him. Aside from the fact that there is no shortage of credible sources of info on evolution, it should be noted that if you need to be taken gently by the hand before you can see the difference between a vacuous "god-did-it" argument that has not and will never produce a single testable hypothesis on one hand, and the most well-established and experimentally verified scientific theory in the world - the backbone of modern biology, and the product of 150 years of peer-reviewed scientific endeavour - on the other, then no amount of credibility is going to save you. You's a idiot.

Anyway, along the way to making his revealing point, Scott repeats a fair amount of creationist disinfo and ID propaganda (although always taking care to dissociate himself from the points being made: "Intelligent Design advocates point out..."; "Darwinists often argue that..."). And what a surprise! Someone calls bullshit.

In this case it's biologist PZ Myers, proprietor of Pharyngula, erstwhile Panda's Thumb contributor and all-round stout defender of science from the hordes of uninformed "both-sides-of-the-debate" slackjaws. He has the audacity to take Scott at face value, and with no small amount of irritation sets about debunking each one of the fundamentalist talking points that Scott has lazily rehashed. Fair enough, no?

Here's where our retrogressive schoolyard debating techniques come in handy. Scott's reply? It's a classic case of "Ha ha I made a trap and you fell for it!", much to the delight of the drooling ID yahoos that appear to make up the bulk of his fan base. He appears to think that the entirely understandable irritation of one scientist proves his contention that neither side of the debate is credible (further demonstrating a deep misunderstanding of the nature of empirical evidence and the scientific method).

There's some bullshit claims that PZ misrepresents him, although you can judge that for yourself by reading the relevant posts. For what it's worth, here's my favourite example (and I'll stick to direct quotes lest Scott accuse me of twisting his words):

Scott: Darwinists often argue that Intelligent Design can’t be true because we know the earth is over 10,000 years old
PZ: I have never heard anyone on my side of the debate make this argument
Scott: PZ declares that no one has EVER argued against the young earth argument to refute ID

Who's misrepresenting who? You decide.

As a result of all this tomfoolery Scott has indeed succeeded in demonstrating two things, neither of which I imagine he intended:

1. If you drop your bags and take a big old shit all over a man's professional discipline - a man who has to deal with the likes of this from people who have never produced one shred of scientific work in their life - he's gonna get fucking annoyed, whether it was all some big hilarious joke or not. This doesn't mean he is not credible, just that he has had it up to here with ignorant buffoons monkeying around with his life's work. A bit of a fucking no-brainer, really.

2. 95% of Scott Adams' commenters are soft-headed tits, stinking up the joint with a shitstorm of barely literate whooping and high-fiving. If the ultimate point of this exercise was to expose his readership as a gaggle of slope-browed knuckledraggers, then I take it all back. Scott Adams is a fucking genius. If not - well, the joke's on him, I'm afraid.

Inevitably, when the aftermath of one's prankery is one pissed off biologist and a wankstain of back-slapping intelligent design halfwits, there's a suspicion that Scott has already taken sides in this bogus debate. Yet throughout all of this, Scott has claimed that he doesn't believe in intelligent design (he even posted this nugget twice to make sure). However, he also says that he doesn't believe in "Darwinism" and has been very careful not to raise any points without qualifying them as someone else's opinion. I don't know about you, but it strikes me as a little cowardly, to exploit the sincere and passionate opinion of a professional scientist for yucks without having the cojones to reveal one's own point of view.

So, how about a little honesty? Why don't you tell us what you really believe, Scott?

Lord, Lay Hands On My Gay

2005-11-14T19:40:00.000Z

A short while ago I received the following letter to the Department offices and was most upset to hear the kinds of internal strife that people devoid of the singularity of hatred experience. The contents of the letter are rather disturbing, so please, read with discretion. And pity the weak for they are fucking morons.

Dear Mr. McShott

I've been putting this off for a long time so I'm finally writing you a letter. I’m the founder and chairman of Focus on the Family, a licensed psychologist in the state of California, a licensed marriage, family and child counselor in both California and Colorado and author of books such as "Bringing Up Boys". I also sponsor one day events that aim to cure homosexuality through the help of Jesus Christ Our Lord.

Getting to the point, I don't know if I have a serious problem or a passing (I don't know the word for it). All through my life I have acted and look much more like a girl than a boy. When I was little, I would always wear finger nail polish, dresses, and the sort. I also had an older cousin who would take us into his room and show us his genitals. I'm afraid I have a little sodomy in me. It was very hard for me to write what I just did. I don't want to be homosexual but I'm afraid, very afraid. That was hard to write too. Let me explain further.

Through my higher grades in school (I now have a Phd) kids always called me names (gay, fag etc.), and made fun of me. It was hard. I masturbated (I guess) but went too far. When I was little (not that little) I tried to more than once to suck my own penis (to be frank). That sounds very bad and looks even worse to read it. I pray that nothing is wrong with me.

Very recently I have done such acts as looking (maybe lusting, I pray so hard that I wasn't) at myself in skimpy underwear. Whenever I wear it I feel a like sexual sensation. Yesterday in the bathroom (in front of the mirror), I wiggled my body very rapidly, making my genitals bounce up and down. I get a little bit of that feeling mentioned above as I write this. After I did this, I immediately asked forgiveness of God, went in the shower but did it again there. I prayed more and felt very bad. I talked with one of my pastors and told him at that point I probably preferred a man's body over a woman's. Now that was hard to say! He said he didn't think anything was wrong with me (I don't know how else to say it. He apparently thought it was passing), but I feel very badly and want to know why.

Please help me.

Dr. James C. Dobson Phd

Now Hands That Do Dishes...

2005-11-11T21:11:00.000Z

…it’s an ulcer on the backside of my left eyeball, this biting cancerous rage that has my hands shaking, eyes wide and my frown stiffening and hurting and creasing my forehead, this offence, this insult, these dishes that clank and bash and screech, this water that thrashes about my waistline, this soapy quagmire that wrinkles my skin and makes everything feel like sand, this steam, this grease, this back pain, this smell of laboratory autumn apple blossoms, this clumsy knocking of an upturned sudsy glass, this leftover teaspoon. I hurtle bricks in my head towards imaginary people and walls. I scratch gouges in my terrible ears, I heave vomit into the sink and punch the surface with my bloodied fists, spraying disgust and rage over the previously gleaming tiles. I head butt the wine glasses, I shower myself in shards of hatred. I howl and gurgle and hiss, words so dreadful they fear to leave my throat, they loiter in my mouth and make unseemly animal noises and peer about my teeth for a safe route out, out and out. They rush together and it’s a frightful cry of abject misery and fear. I lean back and breathe and my shoulder hurts, this back pain, I’m having a heart attack. Hardened ketchup. Displaced sticky head hair and old mayonnaise and a slump of resignation.

Fabulous

2005-11-11T14:52:00.000Z

I like to consider myself an equal opportunities hater. The first thing I ask myself about any new government policy, bonehead publicity stunt, or Kate Bush record is "Do I hate this?" The answer is usually in the affirmative.

There are, however, three things that I hate above all (aside from, of course, this sort of bullshit right here) and they are all linked together like a circle jerk where everyone is ejaculating hot sticky plumes of fucking cold hard cash. In no particular order, then:

1. The fashion industry
2. Cosmetic surgery
3. Advertising

As far as advertising goes, I second what Bill Hicks said. And there's a London Underground poster for a cosmetic surgery clinic that sums up everything I hate about that shit: two identical, pneumatically-breasted brunettes, checking eachother out approvingly post-slice'n'dice, the message being "Hey you! Yeah, you! Fatty with the harelip and the crooked sneb, yeah, that's right! Now even you can look EXACTLY THE MOTHERFUCKING SAME as absolutely everybody else!" Honestly, it's fucking terrifying.

And as for fashion, just waft your weary eyes over this chilling shit. Unbelievably, it's written as a humour piece, but it is actually a fucking balls-achingly creepy tale of Dawn Of The Dead-style mindless automatons, "eyes glazed, jaws locked", written in that grotesquely self-important hyperbole that's so common in the industry. Hesitation, we are told, is "fatal". The protagonists are "steely, informed shoppers, who knew their quarry well" and ... oh, the whole thing just makes me want to shit broken glass.

I think the reason I can't quite put my finger on what exactly it is I hate about the whole pointless, vapid and self-congratulatory business is because I despise every single little thing about it. I hate the fucking pop-stars that go to the fashion shows and act like they are anything more significant than an exclusive club where the poor people aren't. I hate the constant declarations of such-and-such a smug superfluous scumbag as "genius" and "visionary". I hate that it is staffed by the idle rich sons and daughters of musicians and hotel magnates foisting their self-indulgent little hobby on the rest of us like it's anything but a giant waste of time and resources - like it's something important, something groundbreaking - and I hate they way we swallow that steaming arse-swill so readily, too.

So fuck J-Lo. Fuck Gwen. Fuck Tom Ford. Fuck this fucking asshole. Fuck the lot of them, and fuck us, too. Fucking cunts.

Matter of fact, the only thing I like about the entire fashion industry is Gianni Versace getting shot in the scone, but that was far too long ago. Might I suggest that when the US next fancy testing out their next lot of nasty, disfiguring weapons they give the women and children of Falluja a break for a minute and just wait for the next pampered pop starlet to open up shop in a Covent Garden store? A couple of blasts of that white phosphorous shit oughta do the trick.

Cheers, darlings.

This Is What Passes

2005-11-10T13:42:00.000Z

Hmmm. What are we to make of this?

YOU CAN'T MAKE THIS UP [John J. Miller]
If you were a novelist writing a political thriller set in Washington, and you decided to name create a character who was an African leader seeking a meeting in the Oval Office, and you named this character "President Bongo," you would risk being called a racist.

Today, in the NYT, there is a story about the chief executive of Gabon meeting Bush in the White House last year. His name? President Bongo.
Posted at 05:25 AM

UPDATE: What the fuck? He's still at it!

WELL, AT LEAST THE GLASS CEILING HAS BEEN BROKEN [Kathryn Jean Lopez]
in Africa.
Posted at 05:03 PM

NAME GAME [John J. Miller]
Too bad her name isn't Bongo.
Posted at 05:33 PM

Shut up, man!

Send In The Clones

2005-11-01T10:42:00.000Z

BONERS

Lies for Small-fries

2005-10-28T21:58:00.000Z

Tonight I took a spin around the Truth For Youth website, minister Tim Todd's sad and depressing source of fundamentalist disinformation, ludicrous scare-mongering and bald-faced lies. Yeah, yeah, but what's new? This particular internet dry heave is in RADICAL CARTOON FORM! Why read the bible when you can get yer book learnin' from the purdy pictures - with a generous dose of propaganda on the side. Allow me to present my discoveries (and click the pics for some funny shit written by less lazy peoples):

Here's our boy Tim on EVILUTION!

...on JIMMY HATS!

...on TERRIFYING FREAKS!

...on DEVIL MUSIC!

...on PAEDOPHILIA!

...on POLITICAL CORRECTNESS!

You might criticise the man's style, but goshdarnit he gets results. Bear witness to this:

FUCK ME. With conversion skills like that, maybe it's worth listening to this beaming cockheap. How about it Tim? Tell the people what you're all about:

Yeah, that's a big surprise, alright.

Beating Off All Comers: Presenting Dick Pound

2005-10-20T11:37:00.000Z

Dick Pound is the chairman of the World Anti-Doping Agency and former vice-president of the International Olympic Committee. In his role at the IOC, Dick Pound became known for both his business acumen and his outspoken anti-corruption stance. A former member of the Canadian Olympic swimming team, Dick Pound used his role to campaign for increased drug testing, and headed an inquiry into bidding scandals in the run up to the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympic Winter Games. Dick Pound left the IOC shortly after an unsuccessful attempt to run for president of the organisation in 2001.

In 1992, Dick Pound was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. In 1993, Dick Pound was made an Officer of the National Order of Quebec.

In addition to chairing the WADA, Dick Pound practises tax law in Montreal and edits his own tax law journal. Since 1999, Dick Pound has served as Chancellor of Montreal’s McGill University.

In 2004, Dick Pound wrote a book about his experiences with the International Olympic Committee. Here is the cover of Dick Pound’s book:

This, I’m sure you will agree, is the perfect way to honour an illustrious and dignified career such as Dick Pound’s.

The Department salutes you, Dick Pound!

What a Pack of Awful Arseholes

2005-10-17T16:33:00.000Z

It seems this big dumb "elitism" arseholery, reported to the Department previously, refuses to fuck off and die. The Corner is still being rocked by shockwaves as the various rent-a-gobs dissect what it means to be "elite", presumably in order to deflect the accusation that they may be a little elite themselves. I honestly cannot fucking tell whether these guys are taking the piss or not. Jesus, I really hope so - although if it is a joke then the only thing they are lampooning is themselves and their ilk. Which is fair enough.

This time, they've come up with the soul-raping idea of compiling a list of "Elite Markers" - signs that you may be dealing with one of the chosen few. Ramesh Ponnuru gets things started, noting that "the proportion of our population that consumes either wine or brie, or both together [gasp!], has gone up", and that therefore the old cheese'n'crackers smackdown might not have the devastating power it once had. Sadly, the same goes for the charge of "drinking bottled water", and so Ramesh concludes that "we need some new put-downs". Then he makes this rather telling parenthetical statement:

(Confession: I like brie and wine, have occasionally had a latte, and buy bottled water for my family--but that last point reflects the high lead content in D.C. water rather than a preference on my part.)

Aha! The real reason for all this limpwristed brow-beating is revealed. So we can't use latte-drinking either (unless frequent), and bottled water should not be invoked unless the reasons for drinking it are some sort of elite reasons (like a "preference"), as opposed to a simple desire to avoid all those nasty additives in the tap water. To do so would be to tag Ramesh - this man-of-the-people - as elite, and hey, that's just ridiculous. In summary, elititude requires you to do something the Corner-ites do not. Because they are not elite, see? No sir.

Fat Jonah Goldberg leaps in with an enthusiastic endorsement, and prints a colon-load of reader suggestions, including speed bumps, one way systems and hybrid cars (the latter "definitely a good example" - Goldberg), ignorance of NASCAR and, gawdhelpus, foreign fucking travel and listening to jazz. Amazingly, not one reader suggests that being President of the USA and son of a former President of the USA might tend to make one somewhat select. Or maybe they did, and Jonah just dismissed it outright as being totally silly.

All of this relentless arsepiss is effortlessly trumped by the Corner's Warren Bell, who neatly encapsulates the ball-aching stupidity of the whole endeavour with this risible entry:

Early ownership of a hybrid seems very on-target to me. I would also suggest the new style of hip eyeglasses that are like little rectangles. I don't agree with the NASCAR thing because I personally am not a fan, and I am not an elite, which I can prove because I frequently wear shorts to work. So there's a question -- what are the markers for non-elites? Here I would put love of WWE (which I quite like) and maybe even NASCAR, as it does seem to be a good non-elite marker, if not quite the other way round. Use of the word "divine" in anything other than a religious context would seem to be an elite marker (cf. Wolcott, James). Use of the word "freakin'" as an amplifier would seem to mark non-elites.

Of course, this may all be a big hilarious joke on veteran sitcom writer Warren's part - I'd certainly like to think so, if only to stop me from breaking out in tears of despair at my desk. He oughta be careful with this sort of thing though - it sounds a lot like irony, and as everybody knows, that's how them darned elitists get their yucks.

Meanwhile, of course, Fat Jonah continues to impress his readers by name-dropping Bertolt Brecht and Herbert Spencer, favourites of those for whom Dale Earnhardt was a hero...

UPDATE: Roy Edroso has the last word on Jonah G.

The Very Elitist In Fashion

2005-10-12T11:24:00.000Z

In a typically erudite and skilfully typed analysis of the Harriet Miers fiasco, our good buddy Scott "Slant Point" Sala of conjures up once more the foul spectre of "the elite towers of the Northeast Ivy League universities" and, for a fleeting moment, teeters on the brink of an amazing breakthrough:

"George Bush was Ivy League..."

I swear, when I read this I thought I was about to witness something truly remarkable. I was practically fucking cheering him on, all the way over on this side of the pond. Come on man, I said, you can do it! Connect them dots! The Elite is to Ivy League is to George Bush is to ... oh, bring it on home, Slanty! Say it!

Alas, I guess that's when the GOP-Chip kicked in, performing a partial birth abortion on the hapless Scotty's nascent epiphany:

“...and in many ways Bush despises the Ivy League”

Goddamn. So close, so very close.

What is this fucking arsewind about "The Elite" all about anyway? It's all over the place - particularly these days, what with all this Miers business – even the smug, tedious pisswhips over at NRO's Corner of Inconsequence are feeling the heat of the Elitism jibe for having the nerve to complain about her nomination to the Supreme Court of the US of motherfucking A, on the outrageous and unreasonable grounds that she is NOT EVEN A FUCKING JUDGE. Gosh, how very elitist of them to expect such a thing! True, non-elite conservatives – like Scotty, for example, and the more high profile shills spotted here – don’t require such high-falutin' qualifications of their justices, and have a million mind- and Bush-blowing arguments for why not, too.

But what the fuck? What the hell kind of definition of "elite" are we using here? Are you "elite" if you expect that those appointed to be judges in the highest court in the land might, y'know, have done a little judging here and there beforehand? Are you "elite" if you eat brie, or speak French? Christ, does this dread word "Elite" that so vexes these cats mean, simply, "smart people"?

Or perhaps – and I know it's a long shot, but bear with me - a person might be considered just a wee bit "elite" if he happens to be a Connecticut-born, Ivy League educated member of a immensely rich and powerful political dynasty, currently sitting at the controls of the entire fucking free world?

Nah. That's crazy - listen to his goofy accent, he cain't be no elitist. Yeah, it’s gotta be the cheese. That Ward Churchill, man, he’s so damn elite. I bet he’s putting Roquefort on a fucking cracker as we speak.

Political Correctness Gone Mad

2005-10-10T23:35:00.000Z

Late last night, on the way to a friend's new house, I found myself a bit lost. Not terribly lost – I knew where I was, but was fucking fairly clueless about where I was going. Standing in the light of some kind of swankyarse abortion of a modern vegan fusion restaurant in Stoke Newington Church Street, I consulted my trusty pocket A to Z. Despite this mild confusion, I was feeling pretty good. And I wasn't even drunk.

A tiny voice interrupted my sensitively lit cartographical studies.

"Trick or treat!"

Somewhat startled, I looked up and found myself staring at a miniature Satan standing in the dark street, complete with trident. It was a bit fucking alarming.

"Oh shit!" I exclaimed.

"Oh shit?" repeated the kid, a well-spoken girl of about seven years old.

Uh oh. Over her shoulder, I could see her mother approaching, merely a few steps out of earshot of the new word I'd inadvertently taught her daughter. No, no, no, my eyes implored the girl, for fuck's sake, shhhh!

"What's 'oh shit'?" she said, again.

There was only one thing for it. I immediately hotfooted to somewhere else, treating her only to a few compliments on her deeply freaky costume, hastily called out from over my shoulder.

At this point in my life, it is unlikely that I will stop swearing. I fucking love swearing, as a matter of fact – it's part of my heritage, my culture, and I think I'm pretty good at it. I'm not one of the greats (do a find-on-this-page search for "roaring purple vagina") but I feel I foul up my language certain amount of flair. So what's to be done about this? How can I avoid accidentally exposing innocent young minds to dirty words like this?

Well, don't fuckin look at me. It's the parents you need to be talking to, if you want my opinion. I mean, what the hell? How can this child not know "shit"? When I was her age I was honing my skills with the likes of Pishflaps, Cuntarse and Felchspoon, for the love of christ - and those were just my friends. "Shit" was a word for the little kids.

I honestly don't know what this country is coming to, when a person can't turn the air blue in the street without risk of making some precious little fucking bubble boy burst into tears, his outraged parents clamping their mitts over his unsullied little virgin ears. Fuck that! Parents, do your goddamn jobs! Clearly these kids aren't getting the education they need in the nation's playgrounds anymore, a sorry indictment of the modern era if ever there was one.

Please, I beseech you. The future depends on you, you sanctimonious fucks! Don’t go cleaning it up. Start your home schooling here.

I Kick Arse for the LORD!

2005-10-07T13:32:00.000Z

And from the Lord there did cometh the words of upright vigor and sow in the ears, those heroic incubators of compassionate businessism, of the prodigal son with seeds of the Holy Spirit, harbingers of times that layeth forth like doves from the mighty Ark, germinating from the ashes of youthful decay and rising like the phoenix with fervor and strength greater than the holy spirit on thine breath.

But LO, there were dark times, and the father and the son and the Holy Spirit, they did wait, as peace reigned and dresses were stained, seeping into the land, while the ungodly reaped what they could not sow.

YEA, but from the anus of the land slid the son to salt and seal the wounds, the Lord’s message he will delivereth, of weaponed peace of the Islamiac, of a land locked under the moral clarity of the Lord’s magnifying glassy eye.

LO, seeketh thine indulgences, enter thy womb, now thy holiest of temples, for thou temple of womb hath been united by the votes of none and locked for all time, and now we must prayeth. Prayeth with hearts bigger than the deserts of Iraq for thy safety and thy soul, for though the Lord giveth and taketh away, the son only taketh.

Take heed the burning bush, take heed, take heed.

On the Treasure of Our Tongue

2005-10-06T16:40:00.000Z

Snotty: You know what phrase I really hate? "All that jazz". Fucking shit thing to say.

Hugs: Yeah, and jazz implies saxophones, which are really gay. I hate saxophones. I think the one I hate most though is "at the end of the day".

Snotty: Aw yeah, sure. "At the end of the day" is a stone cold classic. But it seems like a some kind of almost unconscious affectation to me, or at least it's seen as no more than a handy stock phrase. What makes "all that jazz" worse is that the perps appear to know only too well that they are saying it, and what's more they think it's fucking charming and witty. People who say "all that jazz" are the novelty tie wearers of the verbal world. And possibly the actual world, too. They're the sort of people who do that faux-sarcastic thing where if you say you spent the whole day at work reading some deathly boring bullshit they'll chuckle and say "oh, fantastic" in an ironic tone of voice even though it is quite clear that they fucking GENUINELY DO THINK that it is fucking fantastic. Fuck those people in the ear. They are nerds. They are pissheaps, hosers, cocklumps and assclamps.

Hugs: And all that jazz.

Where I Discover the Reason Ireland was Colonised

2005-09-20T21:52:00.000Z

For its own good.

Because it is full of the most pig ignorant toilet ugly arse legends ever to have disgraced the planet.

If I am a racist so be it. Fuck it I'm also a self loather as I am, as it happens, unfortunately Irish and semi-responsible for this mess. I've returned to Ireland after a number of years away on Department business and discovered the terrible and irreversible source of my being.

"Is thash righsh is ish?"

YES! Yes it is you fucking embarrassment of a smell!

"Did you knooh...there's a pub faar evereh ate hoondret peepil in Gaalweh?"

YES, yes I did, and a fuckin chemist for every 2 of you fuckers, you bunch of hypochondriac cunts. There's no cure for Irishness, by the way. No matter how many Disprin you swallow. Shite face.

God help me.

One more year and I can return to the Department offices and go back to hating others. Right now, I am my nightmares. I am the enemy. I am Irish.

In Which I Ruin Free Speech For Everyone

2005-08-04T14:28:00.000Z

So it turns out that my good buddy Scott Sala, shitheel-in-chief of Slant Point, whose life and work I so tenderly summarised earlier, has installed a comment screener following a spirited back'n'forth involving yours truly and one of his less evolved visitors. Apparently he hasn't seen the funny side of any of the comments I have submitted for his approval since, for which I can only blame myself.

It's a doggone shame. I really thought I was in with a shot at the top spot in Scott's hilarious caption contest this week. It's a picture of Al Gore just standing there! How could that not be funny, huh? It's just a case of sitting back and waiting for the "I invented the internet" jokes to roll in. Anyway, I'm sure the winner will be a solid gold comedy classic and, as I'm sure you'll agree, the competition over there is pretty tough.

The one thought that claws at my conscience the most in this time of darkness is that I must surely have caused great offence to Scott for him to have taken this drastic step, for in the past he has shown himself to be quite lenient on some his rowdier contributors. Consider the commenters on this post, who received naught but a gentle admonishment from our boy, akin to a maternal finger-wagging or a light rapping of the knuckles:

Posted by: Anonymous on February 17, 2004 06:08 PM
QUEERS THATS RIGHT QUEERS!!!!!
YOU AIN'T NORMAL AND YOU DON'T DESERVE THE TITLE AS A MARRIED COUPLE. IT'S MORALLY WRONG.
HOPEFULLY PRES. BUSH WILL PUT A STOP ALL THIS CRAP.
THANK YOU!!

No no, thank you. A couple of old school classics come up next:

Posted by: Anonymous on February 18, 2004 07:36 PM
the only good queer is a dead queer

Posted by: Anonymous on February 18, 2004 07:37 PM
God made adam and eve not adam and steve

Adam and Steve! I must remember that one next time some o' them crazy gayfolk force me to take a husband. Next up:

This is disgusting that we even talk about it.
The want to marry, no problem there is a place for it.
The place we call Mental Institution.
And as per they were born this way. Well if your dog has rabies
You shoot it before it bites you. :)

I was nearly disturbed by the violent tone of that last fellow's intolerance until I saw that happy smiley face at the end there. Thank heavens.

Well, I guess I'll have to put the whole experience down to the difference between, on one hand, disagreeing with someone's ideas outright, and simply objecting to the manner in those ideas are expressed, on the other. If only I had've done some more queerbashing, then maybe we'd still be friends.

Anyway, the point of all this is that the Department is shutting up shop for a week and a half, while the staff take off to go camping in Scandinavian terrain. Browse the archives, foul the place up with abusive comments, or just fuck off. Oh, and I'm taking the fucking drinks cabinet with me you fucking little pukes, so don't even think about it.

Cheerio,

Snotty.

UPDATE: Thanks to penis_waffle, in the comments, for this...

You Are What I Say

2005-08-03T20:51:00.000Z

Mean, petty, rodent-faced, fake science peddling, bogus doctorate having, shit prodding, tongue gawking, guilt-trip inducing, shrill voice having, dangerous bullshit spouting, self-promoting, self-obsessed, self-aggrandising, creepy fucking scumbag.

My results are so fantastic - I'm sorry to sound immodest, but it's true - I wanted to take that to the masses. This woman - me - who is completely, brutally, totally honest. People like that. I'm real.

- "Dr" Gillian McKeith "Ph.D"

I'm Not Wearing Any Underwear

2005-08-02T14:37:00.000Z

“At first”, he said, “sitting there by the railings surrounded by the devout and the incredulous, I thought, ‘He’s waking up'. It seemed plainly obvious to me. You know how you might just open one eye and take a look around before deciding to get out of bed? You know?”

I nodded, looking up and trying to hold his gaze for as long as I could stand. His eyes were wild, wide-eyed and wet. I looked back at the cup of coffee cradled between my palms. A full minute went by before he spoke again.

“I wanted Him to see me sitting there when he woke up. I wanted Him to see me waiting. When the people come, I thought, and when the time is right, He will address us. And we will be saved, all of us. All of us who sat up with Him and watched over Him in His slumber - even those who laughed, because something kept them waiting there, something more than curiosity. They laughed because they were scared, and they were scared because they believed.”

He placed his hand on my shoulder, and I could feel him shaking.

“Like I believed,” he said.

Another silence. The steam rose from my coffee and I clasped my hands tighter around the oversized mug, trying to keep warm. Why was it so damn cold in here?

He rose from his chair, turning his back to me.

“And those poor sick children, the way they looked at Him, so hopeful. The old people, the mothers with their disabled sons, all with that same indescribable look. Decades of hopes and dreams and unanswered prayers right there, raw and exposed, on everyone’s faces. And yet, on His face, just that one eye. That one cold, dispassionate eye.”

Those last three words hissed through his clenched teeth, as chilling as the air in his one bedroom flat. Facing me again, tears streaming down his cheeks, spittle flecking his trembling chin. Unsteady, he wiped at his lips.

“You know what I realised? Huh? You know what it was that occurred to me as I sat there?” Shouting now. “That other eye was never going to open! Do you know how I knew that? Do you?”

Swallowing hard, and unable now to take my eyes off him, I shook my head.

“He was fucking mocking us! The sick! The lonely! The lost and the abused! All of us nothing more than entertainment, and that one eye another cruel fucking trick played on us, the faithful. That ultimate audience, that conjuror’s dream! The con artist’s dream! That one eye, that one lethargic eye, was the trickster’s sly wink at the hapless mark who knows he’s being duped but can’t help himself.”

Approaching me now - suddenly more animated, more confident in his steps - he raised an arm and pointed straight at me.

“And you! You with your reason and your science and your smug fucking cynicism! Who mocks you? Who denies you your prayers? Who keeps you waiting, repaying your devotion by denying for as long as possible your only reward?”

I was on my feet, my chair upturned on the kitchen floor and the mug lying handle-less in a pool of still warm coffee. He was calmer now, broken and sobbing, but still I edged backwards towards the door. He righted my chair, and sat down.

“This world”, he said, burying his head in his hands, “is fucked.”

I slipped silently out the door, closing it softly behind me. He sat in his cold apartment, and waited to die.

RUBE WATCH: Scott Sala of Slant Point

2005-07-30T23:20:00.000Z

As previously noted, there’s a tendency among certain types of self-styled political commentators to use the merest sniff of a scandal or atrocity to wheel out once more their own personal market stall of half-baked schemes, and proceed to "I-told-you-so" at tedious length. In the immediate wake of the first London terrorist attacks, the agreeably angry proprietor of Hell Is Other People alerted our attention to a classic example of this phenomenon courtesy of a perma-pouting New York Republican by the name of Scott Sala.

Scott is the enterprising brain behind Slant Point - a bustling hell-hole of right wing news and humour in NYC - and owner of a face like a horse dressed up as Tom Cruise.

But don’t let his equine good looks fool you - he’s a thinker too - and, like many in his chest-beating boys club, he has all the answers. There have been many solutions proffered of late to the age-old problem of terrorism, ranging from carpet-bombing the Middle East to tighter immigration laws and ID cards (as opposed to such lame, outdated ideas as, say, a bit of fucking police work – which as we all know is completely useless) and Scott is not one to let the action pass him by.

Scott’s own solution - outlined in his touching ode to London town - is racism… uh, I mean "profiling". Because nothing prevents against the dangers of communities becoming polarised and hostile quite like when one of those communities (the one with the guns) goes out of its way to hassle the other. It’s a super idea, Scott, really. Super, that is, if your business is recruiting pissed-off young men to assist in terror campaigns.

Elsewhere, Scotty has something to say about the tragic fate of Jean Charles de Menezes, the Brazilian electrician shot in the face by British police. Such events, our boy notes, "often split a community into those who back the police and those who defend so-called innocent victims". Hmmm. So-called innocent victims, huh? I wonder which side Scotty is on? The rest of this post is some crap about the "London Fog", and I almost thought it was going to end with a warning to us Londoners to keep an eye out for that old rascal Jack the Ripper.

But enough of Scotty’s wise words. Let’s hop over to the bio section and learn a little more about Scott Sala the man, shall we? Despite being a lifelong Repub, he "decided to enjoy some of the more liberal things in life between high school and my late 20s". As far as I can tell, the "more liberal things in life" could refer to nearly anything - from having gay marriages with aborted foetuses to, well, just not being an uptight self-important asshole about everything - but I guess that all depends on your point of view. Anyway, whatever the fuck he’s talking about here, he’d soon had enough of it, and "began to channel all [his] youthful frustration and idealism into realistic beliefs". Oooh! Take that, unrealistic liberals!

Then there’s some bullshit about how he was always a writer rather than a talker, but to be honest, with a mouth like that who can blame him? It’s like a slow-punctured rubber fuckdoll for caveman fetishists.

The key part of the paragraph is the last line: "I’ve finally been unleashed".

I’ve finally been unleashed. These words chill me to the centre of my spineless, terrorist-appeasing liberal core. No hold on wait... sorry. What I meant to say was: these words made me fucking shoot coffee out my nostrils.

Next up: blah blah blah 9/11 blah blah "political meat" (?) ho hum. Then: "I simply got tired of thinking how wrong certain people were and how much more I could say". Personally, I simply get tired of people thinking how wrong certain people are and how much more they can say, so I guess we’re on some sort of common ground here. For Scott, the opportunity to say more came courtesy of his "professional web skills", with which he started a blog. Yes, a blog, that most technically challenging of formats. Hundreds of thousands of people can now claim to possess professional web skills, it turns out.

We don’t have to read much further before we are reminded of Scotty’s talents, for in the next paragraph he promotes himself to "professional web designer and coder" – the "coder" part presumably endowing him with the know-how necessary to place thousands of those fucking irritating little buttons all over the goddamn place. To be honest, at this point I haven't a fucking clue what's going on with Scott's bio, since we’re learning much more about how awesome his website is – how it’s a "great balance of form and function", for example – than we are about Scott himself. I suppose we’re finding out a bit more about his rampant egomania, but it’s really nothing I couldn’t already glean from the squinty-eyed Zoolander-face on the front page. Which reminds me:

I’m afraid to say the story never really picks itself up again after that. There’s some stuff about how it "was time to take back our country", but since he started his blogging adventures in 2003 it’s awfully hard to tell from whom, since the USA was already firmly in the grip of the greedy, lying, power-hungry theocrats Scott seems to favour. It would be interesting to know exactly what he means right here. And as a professional web designer I feel qualified to ask such questions.

In the absence of further insight, however, it simply remains for me to congratulate Scott Sala and welcome him into the fold. You have been unleashed, Scott - into the Hall of Rubes.

RUBE UPDATE!

The Mind is a Terrible Thing to Taste

2005-07-29T14:10:00.000Z

I think it's fairly safe to say that I Am Matthew, a Department-affiliated site of timeless (some would say limited) appeal, is one of the weirder blogs on the hypernet. Part coming-of-age drama, part deranged road-trip-of-the-mind, its dense first person narrative tells the touching and tragic tale of a misunderstood and deeply disturbed naif, desperately searching for love and meaning in a world indifferent, indeed often hostile, to his unique obsessions and autoerotic urges. What begins as the somewhat scatalogical but otherwise unremarkable wank-diary of our wheelchair-bound protagonist soon devolves into a dark maelstrom of twisted psychosexual despair, all told in a bizarre perversion of the English language that can only be described as "Mattyspeak" - a constantly mutating series of tics and outbursts possessing its own skewed syntactical laws and internal logic.

(Yeah okay, so this is a plug, so what? Go on have a look already.)

One of the most remarkable things about the site, however, is the sitemeter - specifically, the record of search engine terms that bring in the traffic. The people who find themselves blindly stumbling from the likes of Google onto the pages of I Am Matthew are, to put it mildly, some really sick fucks.

Consider Exhibit A, below: a list of keyword searches for the last few weeks - I've highlighted a couple that I found particularly noteworthy.

You'll no doubt be delighted to learn that "eyecum" tops the charts every single goddamn time. Who in the name of christ are these people? Who asks Yahoo when they are going to die? Who thinks their mom's cock is nice? And, good lord, the less said about that gaping anus the better...

While ordinary, decent folk like you and I are understandably unsettled by the knowledge that these sort of people exist - and what's more, are web-enabled - I can console myself with the thought that Matty himself (now sadly deceased) would have taken great comfort in all of this.

It turns out you weren't so alone out there after all, Matt.

Thank You Racist Assholes

2005-07-28T20:16:00.000Z

What's that? You don't want to be a terrorist?

Shit, dude, don't you realise there's a war on? Nah, not that war. I mean right here, in these streets, in this very city.

Huh? You're not feeling that whole war thing, eh? Getting on okay with the other guy? Man, I'm not kidding here, the other guy doesn't want you around. You see this shit? And this? You think just because all that bullshit is happening over there that he's not thinking the same thing back home? It's just a matter of time, kid, and the time to act is now.

Still not convinced, huh? Think you're being treated pretty nice? Fair enough, buddy. Fair enough. Catch you later, alright?

...

POOM!

...

Oh hey, it's you again? Whaddy say, my man? Oh shit, what happened your face? You got beat up last night? Well fuck, guy, didn't I tell you it was war? You saw all this, right? And this crazy shit right here? And I know you heard about this poor bastard. Fucking war, dude, no joke. Jeeee-had and shit, motherfucker.

Say what? You wanna know what you can do about it? Oh ho, now we're talking. I know just the thing - in fact, we were just waiting for a cat like you to show up. Why don't you come inside and have a chat with the lads. Yeah, right this way.

And hey, bring that rucksack with you, yeah?

Brand Synergy, Department Style

2005-07-26T21:34:00.000Z

Once upon a time, a handful of trolls, baiters, cynics and all-round cheeky fuckers decided to consolidate their formidable talents for irritation under the "Rube Watch" banner, setting as their noble goal the exposition of "the threat of rubery worldwide".

In practice, this mainly entailed being absurdly mean and petty about complete strangers, bloated egos, whey-faced teenagers and, occasionally, inanimate objects. Of course, all of this required copious usage of the words "rube" and "cunt" and, needless to say, I fucking loved it.

I am delighted, therefore, to announce that I have succeeded in convincing the stout defenders of the unrube to return from the wilderness. My esteemed guest bloggers are at this moment scouring the scummiest corners of the interweb for the grimmest specimens, and rube watching will begin in earnest shortly. In the mean time, why not check the riotous frenzy of bile and busted links (the spring-cleaning of which will be an ongoing task) known as the Rube Watch archives? I have incorporated the infamous Hall of Rubes into the sidebar on your right hand side for your browsing pleasure.

Yeah alright, so it's old shit, but fuck it: it beats working.

Millennium Prayer

2005-07-25T23:41:00.000Z

You know I can fuckin’ see you, man. You think I don’t know something’s up? You think you can just sit there eyeballin’ me like I don’t know what you’re thinking? I could turn around any second now and catch you if I wanted, man, and you know you’d look away like a fuckin’ pussy. You always do.

But this day? This day you can stare all you fuckin’ like. You can give me the crook-eye so hard you bust blood vessels and weep like a holy fuckin’ statue, see if I give a fuck. I’m on fuckin’ fire tonight, motherfucker, just you fuckin’ watch me. Tonight I walk into the sun. Tonight I chew holes in the fuckin’ horizon and spit acid in the raw wounds of time and space. Tonight you’re gonna see some fuckin’ fireworks, you fuck.

So go on. Fuckin’ stare. Get yourself an eyeful, you miserable heel, you fucking cocksucker. Absorb it, take it all in. We’ve had our beef, you and me, but this right here ain’t about us any more. Not this day.

You see that storm cloud over yonder? You fuckin’ see that too? You wanna know how this is going to go down? Getting a little nervous, huh?

Well, shit. You ain’t seen nothing. I’ll be leaving in a minute, and you won’t want to see what’s gonna happen next, but you won’t have a fuckin’ choice. You’re going to follow me, right out that door and headlong into that storm. You’ve never seen a sky so black, like the entire fucking earth was being sucked right out into… into where? Go ahead, say it. Not space. Somewhere else, you know where the fuck I mean.

And when we’re out there, in that terrible, terrible mess, you’ll see the furious fuckin’ rain strip the flesh from my body, the lightning gouge my eyes from their sockets. And you’ll see the wind lift my dry bones like dust into the air, and you’ll feel it on your own skin and you won’t know anymore if what you’re seeing is happening to you or to me.

And for a moment you’ll lose it. You’ll feel like every atom of your being is bursting with a white heat, billions upon billions of angry solar flares, ground zero packed into each one of your screaming cells. Oh, it’ll be agony, motherfucker, pure sterile agony. Think razors, think napalm. Think a thousand Hiroshimas in your blackening gums alone, and then realise you have no concept.

And then, after you’ve lost yourself, you’ll lose me. When your eyes turn back into your skull, when you break off that stare, in that moment I’ll be gone. And in the calm that follows, as you collapse on your knees into the dirt, spent and broken, all the pain of all life tattooed with a hammer into your spine, you’ll open your hands and offer them to the quiet sky.

In your cupped palms, a shiny black stone. 14 billion years of dark matter, ripped cleanly from the ether and packed into that cold, smooth sphere. All the power of God, the Devil, Hell, Heaven. The very essence of me.

I am the past, future and present. I am the bleeding mouth and ass of history and the twitching corpse of tomorrow.

I am above disgust. I am beneath contempt. I am hate, and my voice is the voice of your God.

Hating in the Sunshine, Part 2

2005-07-22T22:21:00.000Z

Man, there was something else I hate about the summer that was gonna rant about, but it’s slipped my mind now. It was right there on the tip of my tongue a second ago, but now it’s gone. I hate when that happens.

Oh yeah, now I remember. Suicide bombers. Suicide bombers going off all over the gaff, that’s what it was. That’s fucking not cool at all. The London Underground is already a heaving hotbed of appalling manners and selfish behaviour, but detonating yourself in the middle of it really has to be the ultimate discourtesy.

The possibility of having your cosmic chips cashed in by a guy with a bad backback is fairly universally disliked, but it doesn’t travel alone, so I thought I’d mention a couple of the other not cool consequences.

1. Cops shooting people dead, five times (UPDATE: "yeah, well give or take few") point blank, in the middle of the fucking train. The full facts aren’t in on this one yet, and may never be, but unless you are one of those gung-ho blogger blowhards who sprouts a patriotic boner-salute every time they read about state powers exercising lethal force, I think it’s safe to say that this sort of thing is no good at all, and would certainly be an inconvenience on the morning commute.

2. The aforementioned gung-ho blogger blowhards. As you might expect, the tie-as-Rambo-bandanna nerds over at Little Green Fuckballs were a fucking treat on “7/7” – declaring war on Islam, and generally abandoning all pretense of not being softheaded fascist cumsocks talking tough and giggling at their own bravery from behind mom’s keyboard – but my prize for the most egregious fuck-knuckle of that day went to the NRO’s Jonah Goldberg. I was sitting at my desk that morning, not more than 500 yards from where they were still pulling limbless bodies from the tunnels, when I read this typically sensitive nugget from the ‘Berg:

"I wonder if this was timed to happen after the Olympic decision. If so, it would also be interesting to know if this sort of thing would have happened in Paris if they'd won -- or New York if we'd won. I kind of doubt it, but if these weren't suicide bombings, it would be nice if the culprits were subject to vigorous questioning to find out. Because if we could convince France that Paris narrowly dodged a bullet, that would be useful."

Oh wow. "Useful". This reminded me of that Seinfeld episode with the boyfriend in the coma, although clearly J-Go had no similar dilemma regarding how long after a terrorist atrocity you should wait before you wonder out loud how best you can spin it to advance your own personal political worldview and get one over on the objects of your petty grievances. Pretty much all the usual suspects of fist-pumping punditry have gone hog-crazy, using the attacks as an excuse to wheel out once more their own pet issues (most frequently the eviiiiil of multiculturalism), but this one made me pretty much shit my whips in rage.

There’s a whole truckload of other pretty hateworthy shit that we can probably expect in the coming months: racist attacks, ID cards, sniffer dogs, and oh, more innocent deaths, I guess. The Harry Potter epidemic among adult humans on public transport irritates me as much as the next guy, but even I wouldn’t advocate blowing up the readers of the new one on the way into work in the morning. At least not until they find out that Dumbledore dies.

THIS JUST IN: Oooops.

Hating in the Sunshine, Part 1

2005-07-21T21:46:00.000Z

Of course, the summer isn't all laughs and smiles and sunshine and waking up on the floor of your friend's bathroom with a damp crotch, oh no. There's plenty to hate about it too. For example, some people don't like the heat. "It's too hot", they moan, longing for the winter when they can moan about it being too cold instead.

I don't mind the heat, but what I can't fucking stand, for starters, are those nasty winged ant bastards that turn up halfway through the summer in mad directionless swarms all over the place. One minute you're enjoying your walk home, and the next there are a thousand fucking bad-ass ants flying into your eyes and hair. Flying fucking ants! It's as if the whole point of evolution is to maximise the potential for extreme irritation. Get out of the goddamn sky, ants!

No More Mr Nice McShot

2005-07-21T21:28:00.000Z

Oh yeah, I'm tired of being that guy alright. "Blah blah blah how come all the guys in my life are assholes blah blah". Because that's the choice you make, maybe? Because you go searching for drama and complication because you think it makes your life interesting and deep? Well here's a fucking newsflash: the aggressive alcoholic asshole is not the tortured, poetic soul that you think he is - he's just an aggressive alcoholic asshole.

You want torture and poetry? Ask the guy who has to watch you put yourself through this bullshit for no reason and be around and strong enough to pick up the pieces when it inevitably falls apart in your face. That guy could tell you a thing or two about drama, about complication. Sure he could blow up and go crazy just like those assholes you fall for, and maybe then you'd fucking pay attention. He doesn't, of course, but that doesn't mean there's nothing going on in there besides "nice". He ain't as fucking nice as you think - he just ain't an asshole either. You want assholes? Go ahead, take your pick - there's plenty of 'em about. But ask yourself how many "nice guys" you know, and then maybe think about recalibrating your value system, lady.

For fuck's sake.

Scorn's Out for Summer

2005-06-10T20:59:00.000Z

What you doin' inside hatin' fer? Git out there with thon frisbee, pour some Turbo Pimms and enjoy yerself, wha?

In the mean time, I think my good buddies the Soulless Rejects have been taking the brown acid. Hey, whatever floats yer boat, lads.

Later, haters.

UPDATE: Looks like them Rejects links is busted already. I guess they sobered up or something.

McShot's - Number one for bile

2005-05-05T13:46:00.000Z

The US is a particularly good example of this phenomenon. You ask someone where to go for lunch and they'll tell you that one place has great ribs, another gives you hot towels after the meal, a third does the most amazing Caesar salad and this last place has the best cheesecake. There isn't a single place which can be recommended across the board. Each establishment likes to be famous for one item, one speciality into which all the advertising dollars and creative effort is concentrated. It's more efficient this way, advertising and word of mouth bring the crowds and they'll all order the same thing. Makes it easy for the chef, the purchasers, the waitresses, everybody. You don't have to worry about the details or the garnish, just deliver on the one thing everybody expects and all else will be forgiven.

Of course, like Starbucks, SUVs and chronic obesity, all good things make the journey East. Take a look at this crazy shit from the UK.

100,000 Welcomes? That'll be 50 quid.

2005-05-04T14:17:00.000Z

Before I get going with this, I am no xenophobe. I despise all nationalities equally.

Yesterday a man called at my door. He was unable to communicate with me beyond handing me a small slip of paper where written in English was approximately the following:

"Hello, I am a poor student from Poland. I need money to help me etc etc, so I am selling these pictures which I have drawn..."

So far so heartbreaking. I skim to the bottom while fumbling in my pocket for the 2 Euro coin I know is in there somewhere...

"1 picture = €12"

12 Euros? That can't be right. I ask to see a picture, it’s an A3 photocopy of a poor pencil sketch.

"You want me to pay €12 for a photocopy? Sorry man."

Without remorse, I send him packing with nothing.

Its just another illustration that the cost of living here has now got way out of hand. Not only have I lost all perspective when it comes to the reasonable price for any given item, but now the door to door beggars are taking the piss.

Snotty McCross-Court-Shot

2005-04-27T14:09:00.000Z

So, I was playing squash yesterday and was doing really well, as well as a McShot can do in sporty ventures (my Uncle Tag McShot once shot his own eyebrows off shootin at ducks near the Hackney Downs in London and was arrested and spent five years in jail for owning an unlicensed weapon and animal cruelty and was called Whoopi the whole time he was being buggered) until I ran for this one ball that was running along the side wall, a lovely shot from the other side I must say, but lunged and caught it beautifully, WHACK, and smashed that ball back down the court, thumping off the front wall low and back crosswise to the far rear corner, my opponent hadn’t a chance. Thing is, I followed through and caught myself on my left elbow just in between the two knuckley bits with my aluminium/some kind of light weight metal fucking squash stick. Even the nail on my little finger hurt, a burning sensation ran through my whole arm. My vision blurred. I didn’t make a noise, just kind of made a face as if my upper lip was being hoovered into my nose and hoped I wouldn’t pass out or vomit. Or that my opponent would notice, because she was pretty hot.

Just sayin

I hate that

Tour De Force

2005-04-26T13:13:00.000Z

Unimaginative and lazy film reviews.

The word "sumptuous" for example. The Guardian is a particular recidivist in this regard. Did a Guardian films search for sumptuous and had 54 results. Granted, some of these referred to Cannes fish lunches and theatre seating plans, but:

Donnie Darko? "Visually sumptuous"
A.I.? "Visually sumptuous"
Original Sin? "Sumptuous"
The Others? Kidman’s clothes…"sumptuous"
The Man Who Cried? "sumptuous"
Madame Bovary? "sumptuous"
The Merchant of Venice? "sumptuous"
Mira Nair’s entire body of work? "sumptuous"
The Bride with White Hair? "sumptuous"
All the Pretty Horses "sumptuous scenery"
La Reine Margot? Christ. "Sumptuous"
Gormenghast? Granted, it’s TV. Fuck it. "Sumptuous"
The House of Mirth? That’s right. "Sumptuous"

And now I tire, but to complete the Guardian reviews we have seemingly anything by Zhiang Yimou.

Hero? "sumptuous"

And what was along the side my 54 search results? A banner for "The House of Flying Daggers" on DVD.

"Sumptuous" said The Guardian.

***** said someone else

"Lavish" said some other knuckledragger

"A masterpiece" someone else probably said and "A tour de force" I’m sure was used somewhere to describe something or other about it. Or maybe that was "Tarnation" or something by Anthony Minghella. (Note the "sumptuous" locations in The Talented Mr. Ripley – according to the Guardian that is)

On the front page of the Guardian film web site even today you’ll find this. And it wasn’t included in my 54 results.

These people get paid to do this. And they get free movies.

However, in the spirit of fair play and just to show that it’s not all the Guardian and that, in fact, they probably aren’t the worst offenders but merely the ones I read the most, check this out.

The World through Mine Eyes

2005-04-25T21:11:00.000Z

I drew big saggy tits on Kid Rock because I hate him. It's that simple.

HAHA. TAKE THAT KID ROCK.

People of Earth. Wake up.

2005-04-22T11:23:00.000Z

The whole Pope saga has brought out the Catholic in my co-workers. The Irish have this peculiar interpretation that allows them to absolve the church of blame for its worldwide mega-sins. It’s payback for all the forgiveness that goes on over here. One guy says he got a general absolution from a priest years back no questions asked. He reckons that the church issues "guidelines" rather than dictats and that he can dip into the rules when necessary to discipline his children, but when it doesn't suit he'll sin anyway and ask for forgiveness later. "Hey, nobody's perfect," he says. He criticises the Africans for getting all fucked up with AIDS because they are following the rules too literally, that it’s a lack of common sense on their part. Another thinks that the world would descend into chaos if it weren't for organised religion. It's so bizarre to hear intelligent people talking like this. Our belief in gods is our weakness and limits our evolution as humans. It is a relic of our primitive consciousness when the finality of death seemed illogical and terrifying. Why can't we just grow up?

Like White on Rice

2005-04-19T23:02:00.000Z

I know you.

I see you everyday.

You are the girl sitting on the outside seat on the overground rail, blocking other passengers’ way in. You are the guy sitting next to her ejaculating beat samples from your ears. You are the guy sitting next to me with his legs splayed into my area to showcase your hose. You are the girl trotting in front of me in shoes you can’t walk in, your ass swaying like a fault line. You are the guy who won’t raise his umbrella. You are each of the three girls walking abreast in front of me. You are asking how I am when you give me new work before I’ve even turned on my PC. You are the sobbing toddler in the queue whose mother calls him, “Alvin, son.” You are Alvin’s mother. You are the fashion abortion wearing Ray-Bans in the rain. You are asking me a question with your phone to your ear. You are not listening. You are the voice of everyone who calls. You leave excreta floating in the only place where I can be alone. You are always leaving something there just to remind me you exist. You are talking beyond your knowledge. You are talking out of turn. You are turning out to be a real prick. You are the well-read moralist, reading tits on every third page. You are the well-fed writer, feeding off the un-educated. You are the well-to-do leader, not up to doing anything for any of the people I’ve mentioned above. You are hurting many people. You are killing me, man. You are the patriot in your mama's basement beating your keyboard to tell us history dictates we should impose ourselves. You are the historian who tells us history is an easily unpacked box that explains a people’s past and not a version of a story grounded in your political and cultural concerns, reshuffled and simplified to advance your contemporary agenda. You tut behind me. You think I don't hear. You look away as we transact a sale. You host a property program on TV. You bought the bungalow in Biarritz to accentuate your bigger boobs. You bark next door. You sell me Volkswagens. You sell me broadband. You sell me KFC. You sell me instant coffee. You sell me little gelatin candies. You sell me more KFC. You can sing a rainbow, too.

And me?

I, too, am an asshole. But I work for the Department of Hate.

And I'm on to you.

A Patch of Turbulence

2005-04-18T14:28:00.000Z

Air travel. Now there's something I can definitively say I despise at this point. I find myself in the grip of hideous jetlag having just returned from a week in the homogenised south-western USA. What used to be an exciting privilege is now a stressful and humiliating ordeal, an increasingly unnecessary evil.

The first stage is debasement. We are now treated like livestock in airports; queuing up between the barriers for endless security checks, shuffling though metal detectors in our socks while holding our trousers up, explosive puffer tests, swabs, wands, interrogation, x-rays, fingerprinting, mugshots, inspectors with latex gloves ransacking your baggage.

What I have particular beef with is that airlines have the cohones to tart this mode of transport up like it's some sort of luxury. Twee uniforms, pompous pilots with cock sucking first officers, first class, premier class, business class, DVT class. Just give me the drugs and pack me into a crate, I want to be unconscious throughout. There's no need for you to have to feed me crap and show me edited reductions of movies. There's no need for me to have to talk to the other hapless souls trapped in this tubular purgatory. Just get the fucking engines up to the max and get it over with.

I just want to sleep.

Blair and Howard up a Tree F.U.C.K.I.N.G

2005-04-18T11:48:00.000Z

Michael Howard is a Thatcherite demon. We all know that. Everyone remembers the Poll Tax and his other disastrous forays into government policy when Thatcher, that murderous evil witch, gave him job after failed job. Speaking of whom, when the fuck will she die? Christ, her son’s a criminal, her husband’s dead, her best friend Pinochet is a genocidal maniac, she’s reviled the world over…surely it’s time to slit her wrinkled wrists and fuck finally off.

Back to the election…what’s sickening about Labour’s election campaign this time around is that it does not recognise any other parties but the Conservatives. Their whole schtick is to frighten the voters with flashbacks of Howard’s record and the Tories disdain for everything normal people believe in. “The Labour Party: Britain, forward not back” Labour’s tag line for their whole campaign shows this more clearly than anything else. “VOTE FOR US OR THE TORIES WILL GET IN! THEN YOU’LL BE SORRY!”

But here’s the kicker – it makes no difference.

If you like the killing innocent people in illegal wars, detention without trial, fear-mongering, lies, big business before regular people and the environment, nepotism, despotism and fascism – vote Labour.

If you like all those things and you are also a racist isolationist homophobe – vote Conservative.

There are other parties out there, even if the big two don’t recognise them.

Master of the Universe, Deceased

2005-04-08T10:02:00.000Z

Today we lay to rest The Holy Father, Ioannes Paulus PP.II, Karol Józef Wojtyła. Third longest reigning Pope ever.

Meanwhile victims of his insane preachings on contraception die slower, poorer, more painful deaths all over Africa leaving their children infected or orphaned. Luckily for them the AIDS virus arrived just when old Karol was getting started.

Mr. Wojtyla’s legacy?

Misogyny and AIDS.

His epitaph?

Here lies Karol Józef Wojtyła. He got off easy.

A eulogy from Snotty? Sure, why not.

Fuck you. Fuck you eternally you crazy fucking bastard. Say hi to Hitler.

To Whom it May Concern:

2005-04-05T13:32:00.000Z

Folks, I've just discovered that you can download a hate charging dose of anger through the telephone lines. A recent change of address has required me to enter the call centre matrix. I am currently mainlining venomous hatefuel from the scumsucking dogs over at NTL at a rate measurable only in megawatts. The longer I am hooked up, the closer I get to becoming a Marvel super-villain.

"Thank you for continuing to hold, we appreciate your patience." If only they knew.

They tell me they need my cancellation in writing. They don't mean an email, they are talking paper and pens here. Apparently nothing can happen without my original signature, you know, for security. This tech giant, with their call centre out in India, requires me to write them a letter.

You know the longer I ruminate on the various transactions I have with these utility companies the more angry I get. It’s the dishonesty that I hate the most. Why don't they just have the balls to tell me that their service is specifically designed to maximise their profits and that my level of satisfaction is of secondary concern? I would respect that. It would like George Bush telling the world, "Yeah, I'm going over there to oust Saddam so I can control more of the world's resources. Damn straight I want that oil, what are y'all crazy?" It remains despicable I agree, but at least it's honest.

Give me my September Rage

2005-04-02T09:56:00.000Z

Hey Mom, I'm gay, and my wife is pregnant, but we're going to abort it ourselves, and Dad, oh Dad, I forgot to tell you this interesting anecdote I once read that turkeys are born with testicles in their gobbles and for the first few weeks after hatching they scamper around with a little scrotum dangling from their beaks until it whithers and recedes, and sister, your boyfriend called and said something about joining the army...the Iraqi Army...ho ho...ha ha...he he...and I forgot to tell you these things every other day of the year when I'm usually skulking and sulking from work to the sofa to bed to work to the sofa to bed to...ho ho...ha ha...he he...motherfucker, I'm a really funny guy, a riot, a laugh, a ham, a clown, a joker, a real nut-busting card, and get this guys, ready, ready- it's all a joke...ho ho...ha ha...he he April Fool...I kill me!

Jesus. All these conservationists of bland tomfoolery who dust off the prank phone calls, silly fibs and hokey high jinks every April 1st annoy the shit right out of my bowels. I hate hilarity. I don't care even if it is funny. Contain your merriment. Choke on all your emphysematous delight. That's what really cocks me in the back. Can't you see your laughter only makes me want to punish you?

If there's one thing I hate about people more than just being in my goddamn way all the time it's the tired hacks among them. People who stop you for a little giggle as you move your mind and body through one more agitative day with only the promise of another. Why are you telling me Mr. Don Key from the zoo called and I need to ring him back. That took seven seconds of breath you'll wish you had after I punch you in the stomach. Who are these people? What happened in their little pool of uterine soup that made them think this is right? Day after day I struggle with these people, and somewhere along the line they were given their own day? How about a day for me? February Fury's Day? The December Tantrum? September Rage? I have no days, no weeks or months, not even an hour when I can be me and say what I wanna say and laugh at your face and her gait and his wackiness. Wackiness turns my skin to nettle. Just give me an hour. In 60 minutes we can all celebrate what I feel inside and then go back to shifting through our pointless routines and appropriate responses like cling film over the umbrage and emptiness in us all. One hour, and we can once again dedicate our time to our decay. Like nothing ever happened.

I'm looking ahead, see. Thinking forward. Staring down this asshole of years provokes me like a hard bite on the cock, and giving me this hour really is better for all of us.

Hope Still Waits In The Wings

2005-03-29T23:04:00.000Z

Here is what I propose: there is a "What Every Woman Wants" of hatred.

Woah, hold on there. Get your mouse off that next blog button and give me a moment to explain myself. I don't just mean that I hate Mel Gibson's shitty movies (although you can take that for granted). I mean that there is a state of mind, a supernatural insight perhaps, that allows the habitual hater to see, or at least hear, the true sickening nature of the hatee. Underneath all the vapid bullshit and seemingly innocuous small talk that the average Joe Reasonable wouldn't think twice about, there are motherfucking demons.

Sounds crazy, huh? Maybe. But, as the Soulless Rejects might have it, peep dis:

Tonight, as I journeyed through the dark underbelly of this cursed city, coccooned in a filthy metal phallus... Wait, wait! Okay, so I was on the tube and shit. Two entirely regular looking city gents stood nearby, making polite chit-chat about their crappy new musical purchases. Gent No. 1 was schilling for The Killers (or The Whoever-it-is-these-days) with a spiel that sounded suspiciously like something he'd committed to memory from the blurb on the back of a Daily Mail cover-mounted CD.

"Yeah yeah, they're great, yeah, it's like if Duran Duran went on a massive bender with MC5, yeah...", and OH THANK FUCK for the sorry state of the London Underground, for at this crucial juncture a huge ear-piecing shriek peeled off the tracks and filled the carriage - an ugly noise for sure, but a sound far sweeter to my ears than the tedious jaw-flappery of these two lifeless cuntsocks. It couldn't last, of course, not even on the Northern Line, and as the relatively graceful music of angry grinding iron faded out, the gas-bagging of our two gents wafted inevitably back towards my hapless earholes.

"...slipping on a miserable rotting condom".

What the? Excuse me? Is this it? Have I broken through to the other side or what? Brothers, I believe I have! I believe I am the Keanu Reeves of hatred! I believe that with my new skills I can forge a new life for all of us - a better life where our children shall be free from the tyranny of arseholes, free from the vapours of cockspeak and, most of all, free from hate.

I believe... I... I believe I need some fucking sleep.

My New Favourite Website

2005-03-26T12:54:00.000Z

I have no idea what in the hell is going on here, but I know it's something funny. The best I can work out is that it involves some sort of "crew" coming up with some "shit". But the twist is that they are all CRAZY LUNATICS. Yeah, you heard me right. They are so crazy they can't even remember to put clothes on sometimes.

Meet Soulless, the leader of the crew:

"Soulless (Psycopathic Lune), is the HellBringer and Psycopath Extrordinar of the group, A lunatic without a cause, he's mentally deranged and has been in and out of mental wards bout ten times in the past three years. He's got issues no one can understand and death is his legasy and when it comes down to it, he'd be cut out to be a murderer at age thirty. He's the one with the weirdest ideas for the worst stunts, cruelst jokes and freakishly demented Videos."

Man, I love the internet. I don't know about you, but I'll be sure to check in on these guys from time to time. I hope they post some more pictures of their crazy adventures. And perhaps also some of their "shit", which I sincerely hope means "music".

I have only have one problem with this site - why have the comments been disabled? How am I supposed to give props and big-ups and suchlike? Please sort out the comments, Soulless Reject Posse! Thank you.

UPDATE: Soulless Rejects' "kick-it spot" uncovered! Site of much crazy "bud-smoking, blood-spilling and alchie-drinking" in fact contains soft drinks and tasteful crockery!

Detailed analysis here.

UPDATE 2: Reader nwa brings the Shotcallas' blog to our attention in the comments section below. I don't think I have a whole lot to add to add, except that, for the sake of my sanity, I am going to assume that it is some sort of joke. Although even if it is for real, it's totally beyond satire and has to be seen to be believed. Unlike the Soulless Rejects, however, they have elected to keep their comments facility, which I guess would come in handy if anyone felt like leaving any Shotcallas-inspired rhymes of their own. Fo shizzle.

Clown-faced Man has Book, Clothes to Sell

2005-03-24T23:35:00.000Z

Well, gee whiz, I ought to just hand the username and password to this blog over to Boy George immediately. He’s a funny motherfucker, check it out: “Westlife – I call them No Life”. Why, that’s comedy gold, Boy. I shall purchase your marvellous products forthwith.

Who else don’t you like? Rosie O’Donnell? A “tank of a woman”, you say? Gosh, I guess she is kind of fat! I hadn’t thought of it that way before. Who’s next? Which of our precious cultural icons will you skewer next with your razor-sharp barbs? Janet Street-Porter? She belongs in the jungle, you say! Cripes!

Tony Blair and George Bush? But everybody loves those guys, Boy! Good lord, is no one safe? Oh I do wish you would say something else outrageous. I have my credit card ready and everything!

You know who else you should take a pop at? Ageing, self-absorbed grotesques who spout tedious, witless, so-called “controversial” criticisms of soft and safe targets in a transparently lame attempt to generate publicity for their latest shameless vanity project. Those guys are the fucking absolute pits and I wish them all years – nay, decades! - of agonising bowel cancer, every last one of them. Fucking soulless, bottom feeding scum. Ain’t that right, George?

George? Hello?

The Future's Bright!

2005-03-21T20:11:00.000Z

Boy those Orange Film Commission advertisements that they have in the Odeon cinemas are hilarious aren’t they? You know the ones I mean. Some famous person is pitching an idea for a movie to the Orange funding board and then the board start going all “Hey let’s put loads of mobile phones into the movie and make it all about mobile phones” and the famous guy is like “No but wait this film is all about something else entirely” but the board don’t listen and the famous guy walks away in a huff and the board are all making wise-cracks about the famous guy’s movies to his back.

This is a great message because although the funding board are only doing their job trying to put as many mobile phones as possible into every film they still respect the art of films enough to ridicule the people who make them. But what I also like is how true these advertisements are because they show how movies will be in the future. In fact now that I think of it for more than 30 seconds they show how movies are made even today!

You might be thinking “Oh those crazy Orange Film Commission guys and their mobile-phone-centric ways!” but I assure this is exactly how movies are made. Although these commercials are hilarious they are also no joke! Not only can you not watch a movie these days without a mobile phone ringing somewhere in the audience you also can’t avoid an extreme lingering close-up of a Nokia mobile phone logo on the screen every 12 minutes. I imagine that these board meetings are exactly accurate or at the very least the script is sent back to the writer with a big note on it saying “NEEDS MORE MOBILE PHONES”.

Even when a scene does not call for a mobile phone film-makers now have to insert a scene saying why a mobile phone can’t be used because everybody in the audience is saying something like “duh why don’t you just use your mobile phone?” so now we see a big close-up of a Nokia mobile phone going “NO SIGNAL” or “DEAD BATTERY” which is funny to me because why would they want to advertise how crappy their mobile phone coverage is or how their batteries have no life especially when you need them the most! “Please buy our Nokia mobile phone and watch it let you down just when a crazy disfigured psycho is trying to kill you!” This is also funny because I believe most people buy mobile phones so they will have them when a crazy disfigured psycho is trying to kill them. And also for text messages.

In conclusion mobile phones in movies are here to stay!

...And John Kennedy Toole Killed Himself

2005-03-18T13:04:00.000Z

This morning I had a terrible feeling that I was softening.

On the escalator at the notorious King’s Cross there was a bunch of guys chatting and, criminally, standing on the left. “Fucks” I thought. “Ignorant fucks”

This lady came up behind them with a look on her face like one of these guys just farted in her eye. “When they realise how irresponsible and stupid they are they feel cheap and ugly” I thought.

“Oh, excuse me, excuse me” said one of the extremely affable, former enemies, and stepped out of the way. The lady said nothing and continued up the escalator.

“Sorry” said the guy as she passed.

But then something happened. A poster for Marian Keyes’ new book, “The Other Side of the Story”.

It wasn’t the book. If some drooling Harry Potterite wants to read that chick lit twaddle, fire away. It was the poster.

GIRLS! it said.

In pink.

CHOOSE SOMEONE WHO WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN IN BED!

I thought about smashing the back of my head into the tiled wall of the station and howling like a torn sheep. Then thought the better of it. Inside my pockets, though, I made fists and I closed my eyes and concentrated on holding it together.

Does my rage require an explanation on this one? I don't think so.

Either way, there's no softening when cunts like the marketeers at Penguin still roam free.

Next time: Gilette and how much fun a girl can have shaving with a pink razor

Tube Rules pt 2

2005-03-11T11:21:00.000Z

9. If I'm sitting on a seat and my arms are on the arm rests, do not, I repeat DO NOT try and wrestle me off the rests by slyly resting your arm next to mine in the vein hope that eventually you will push my elbows off the rests. Brother, it aint gonna happen, cos now I know your game and it IS a battle of wills. I will turn and look at you with a "what the fuck do you think you are doing" look on my face and then smirk at you with a "I can't believe you're actually gonna try it" smirk on my face.

DONT even try the old "push his elbows off from behind" trick, by snuggling your elbows at the back of the rest and let the g-force of the train accidentally push my elbows off, cos you know I will just rest them back on and now with extra vigour.

If you still try, I must warn you that I may have to accidentally kick your long gangly legs that are taking up the whole of the gang way when I walk off the train....(What do you expect me to do, jump over them?)...you have been warned.

10. "Simon says...get the fuck up". per Pharoahe Monch, circa 2000
Just cos you think you're pretty, bitch doesnt mean you cant get up if there's an elderly person on the fucking train! Get the fuck up for the people, at least way you can make up for being a bitch. Let's hope that when you're pregnant with some 3rd division footballer-wannabe's baby, someone as decent as you will have the courtesy to get the fuck up! Karma charmeleon!

When Monkeys Ruled The Earth

2005-03-10T11:25:00.000Z

Not wanting to harp on about my morning journeys, but we need to discuss Tube etiquette. Ok, my manners are clearly up my hole. I call people names and have no regard for the feelings of anyone but myself. I admit that. In fact, I am proud of it and I applaud anyone else whose behaviour is similar to mine.

Tube etiquette, however, needs to be discussed, because it is not so much an issue of manners and intelligence. That which sets some of us apart from the slackjaws and knuckledraggers. I have therefore devised a seven point plan for successful Tubery.

1. When they say “please let customers off the train first” this is not to be polite. This is because the laws of physics dictate that two bodies cannot occupy the same space at the same time.

2. When they ask you to please use all available space, point 1 applies. Christ almighty, pay attention.

3. Please have your ticket ready before you get to the ticket barrier. You know you’re going to need it. You fucking know you are approaching a big fuck-off machine that won’t let you through without the little card you’ve let slip to the bottom of your fucking Louis Vuitton purse you cow. Get it out or I will stand behind you and make fists and sweat!

4. When the train carriage is crammed and you want to get off, please realise that there are people coming from the opposite direction trying to get off too. There is no fire. You will be able to disembark eventually. The person you are asking to move cannot. Please calm down. Please just…fucking, will you wait you fuck there’s some guy trying to get past on my other fucking side, and you’re fatter than he is so he goes first…FUCK OFF!

5. If you are near the door and there is a packed carriage, please step out to allow people off and then embark again. This is very simple. People cannot leave the train with you in the way. Please see points 1 and 2. Point 4 refers to those occasions when you are stuck near the centre pole under some fat fuck’s armpit.

6. Make a fucking decision for the love of sanity. When stepping onto the platform, arriving at the top of the stairs, the bottom of the stairs, the top or bottom of escalators, stepping out of elevators, passing ticket machines, entering or leaving the station. Make a goddamned decision. Too many of you find yourself in one of those scenarios and stand there waiting for your bubbly brains to tick over and tell you where it is you need to go. If it’s going to take a while you fucking slug, get the fuck over to the wall and manipulate your thought over there. Then I can pass by safely without internal bleeding or ulceration.

7. When your ticket doesn’t work, looking at it does not help. Ever. If it does not work, simply go over to the bloke in the Blue jacket and ask him to let you by. Do not for fuck sake stand there, drooling and looking at it. Do not, under any circumstances, run the ticket through the machine again. Do not frown, do not tut, just fuck off.

Happy Trails

Feel free to add to my seven point plan. Eight point, thirteen point? I'm easy.