Merry Everyone

Thanks for listening, bestest wishes and a Very Merry Christmas to you, I hope it brings you every excess.

Frightful

I have now realised something about myself.

I am a total wuss.

However, I am currently a total wuss with no broken limbs to my name. This fact does vaguely take the sting out of my wussiness, and helps me ignore the horn-toots and yells of "get out of the way you fat wanker" when I'm walking in the road in an attempt not to slip, fall and break my bottom on the pavement.

In case you didn't realise, it's icey out.

Not that I didn't leap out of bed with all the enthusiasm of a puppy in field of slippers when it snowed. But then it squashes down, freezes again, melts a bit, freezes again, gets drizzled on and freezes again. At which point my enthusiasm wanes faster than if I attended a party where the buffet is entirely Marmite based.

I like wandering about, it's easily the most relaxing way to travel and this will continue to be the case until fellatio becomes a mode of transport. So knowing that wherever I choose to wander will involve neither a purposeful stride, manly strut or sedate amble, but instead an undignified penguin waddle interspersed with sudden lunges towards fences, car mirrors and old ladies as my feet skid on some frozen stuff removes the relaxation like it's a bloated appendix. Fences are fine to grab onto of course, but there is little hope that a wingmirror will survive a plummeting bear. And as for landing on an osteoporosis riddled old lady I fear I'd be describing the feeling of 206 aged bones shattering beneath me to an army of therapists for many years to come.

Presumably this is covered in a deleted scene of 'Holiday Inn', in which Bing Crosby falls on his arse, much to Fred Astaire's hilarity. At which point Bing picks himself up and totters towards him, eerily intoning 'White Christmas' through clenched teeth before burying a tap-shoe in his cheery face.

Meat me in some fun disco

It doesn't happen very often but last night I visited a certain royal-sounding burger establishment. Being that I hadn't eaten since the previous evening I was particularly hungry so chose the largest burger on the menu.

Behold, 'The Triple Whopper'.

Yes yes, I know I'm a greedy bum so there's no need to tell me.

I suppose the warning signs were present when I plucked it from the bag and realised I needed two hands to haul it out. It may have looked like three meat patties in a bap, but the BK chefs may as well have simply trotted out of the kitchen to an adjacent field and glued half a bun to each side of a perplexed cow with mayonnaise, then wiped its bum and hearded it into a paper bag with a portion of fries clenched between it's buttocks.

Not that it wasn't lovely, after all it was meat in bread, but it was a hard slog. When my friend suggested we leave the restaurant I was forced to tell him "I'll need a minute I'm afraid" accompanied by such sighing and rubbing of tum that I could have been mistaken for a heavily pregnant lady. When we did finally leave and we said our goodbyes I was enduring a beef-overload and was so incoherent I could merely moo and wave a hoof as a vague 'farewell'.

Actually, since I mentioned pregnant ladies earlier, have you seen this symbol on wine bottles?

Now I know it's saying that it's not recommended for long haired darts players, but doesn't it just look like a flimsily adapted 'No Pregnancy!' warning? Maybe it's a Chinese ad-agency and they simply replace what the woman is holding.

I wonder how many times they've gone for the Viagra contract.

Must be spoiling us

Ooh, chocolate, yum. Munch munch sick. That's how chocolate works isn't it? Stuff yourself with brown morsels until your ateries are furrier than a bear's bottom, whilst shoving phrases such as "I really shouldn't" past the masticated gunk collected in your face-hole. Everyone loves chocs.

Which brings me to Ferrero Rocher. You see, there are posh chocolates (have a quick glance around here) and there are cheap chocolates (Cadbury's Misshapes for instance) and then there are chocolates that think they are posh but really aren't. Ferrero Rocher does not stand alone in this category, 'After Eight' was a trailblazer, and Toblerone have recently joined in by releasing the skinny and all really rather pointless box of slices known as 'Tobelle'. But Ferrero Rocher are synonymous with attempts at upmarket affordability, due in no small part to one of the most famous advertising campaigns in the history of advertising: 'The Ambassador's Reception'. You remember the one, lots of glamorous society types are attending a ball when suddenly a butler appears carrying a stack of chocolate treats on a silver platter. Everyone gasps, says the ambassador is spoiling them and treat themselves to a foil-wrapped orgasm.

However, as the saying goes, times change. People change. Interest rates fluctuate. In these days of politicians fiddling their expenses in ways that the rest of us would never DREAM of doing, we are no longer persuaded to behave like them. "Eat these, they are all eating them in Whitehall" is a statement that carries as much persuasive power as X-Factor finalist Stacey Solomon's post-performance chat contains coherance. So where to go from there? Well, we live in an increasingly secular age, so the logical route to take is religion.

Obviously.

A modern take on religion of course, nothing antiquated. So therefore the new Ferrero Rocher campaign involves Greek gods sat on mount Olympus munching the eponymous nut/paste/wafer/chocolate/more nut layered ball. They then drop it like the butter-fingered boobs they are and we're back in Prometheus territory. Sadly we do not then get to see anyone being lashed to a rock while their inconveniently re-generating guts are eaten daily by a hungry bird of prey until the end of time. Which is a terrible shame. "Oh Zeus" the eagle would squawk, "with this liver you are truly spoiling us".

Nothing says 'eat me' like ancient Greek mythology now does it.

Wise

Someone at work left early in order to see her daughter's nativity play. The daughter in question was playing 'The Disco Diva'. This is new to me, I’m not sure where she fits in to the story. Presumably they have written in a fourth Wise Man who brings the gift of funk.

Festive Spittery

What are you doing for Christmas? Are you going over to Jamie Oliver's? Of course you are! In fact, we ALL are. Invited that is. However I imagine the reception we would receive if we were to turn would be remarkably different to that implied by the trailer (for new series 'Jamie's Family Christmas'). Rather than curled up by his fireplace thrashing his Nan at Monopoly, we'd be sat at home watching the Queen's speech on haemorrhoid cushions having been violently rimmed by his fat-tongued dobermans.

The series looks like standard Oliver fayre so fingers crossed it barely grazes my eyeballs. One difference is that this time he genuinely seems to know the people he's cooking for. They are his family after all. Previous instances of his Naked Cheffery generally involve the camera crew loitering around his kitchen until his wife calls him to say she's bringing some chardonnayed-up friends over, and could he rustle something up. "Yeth of courth I will thweetheart" he blurts and away he goes. They then 'arrive' and we enjoy some clumsy ad-libbing where he asks how their night was. Their mouths say "it was lovely" but their eyes say 'I'm sorry? My agent said I just needed to walk through the door, eat the food and not laugh at your face. I wasn't expecting to be one of Paul Merton's Improv. Chums'.

I admit I can't deny his success, he has cornered an entire area of the culinary market so I applaud him for that. Personally I always preferred herbs finely chopped rather than pulled apart by sausage fingers and emptied on top of my dinner like the contents of a flymo basket, but what do I know? Actually, since you ask, I know that the likelihood of my Christmas dinner not having a spittle glaze is significantly better than at the Oliver house.

'My wife is the biggest gravy fan in the world' his face flaps at us. Words escaping his lips like someone strugging through a carwash, fricatives misting the camera lens like a greenhouse in Autumn. Well yes Jamie, we know. She hopped on that train sixteen years ago. Didn't you notice? To quote Nick Griffin, "it was in all the papers".

Doubles Enstandards

Years and years (and years) ago, a family member tried to buy a t-shirt bearing the legend 'Kentucky Fried Rat' complete with an image of an appropriately prepared rodent. He couldn't in the end because the mail-order company went out of business . That's what happens when you sell clothing that makes passers-by vomit, leap in front of buses and squander their final moments twitching in a lagoon of bile and incontinence.

Not so long ago, Ratatouille hit cinemas and grown-ups were being dragged by both tiny and not so tiny ('special') hands into multiplexes to weep into their disappointing popcorn at the antics of a rat that worked in a restaurant. Those were tears of joy that were blazing a trail of mirth down their rosy cheeks by the way, not tears of glum. And that's just the parents. The fat little cherubs parked next to them were enjoying it so much they exploded. Then they swept themselves up into a Cineworld Ratatouille dustpan, dribbled Fanta over themselves to form a putty, reformed their putty into something vaguely resembling a child, only to explode all over again. That's how much they loved this film. Then they would leave the cinema to visit Mcdonalds and have a Ratatouille branded Happy Meal. Now, did they look at the panicking rat on the box (pictured sprinting across a tabletop) and think "ooh, they wanna get the departmen' of 'ealth in der"? Did they fuck. They smiled at the box, smile at the cherub munching on his Ratatouille fries and Ratatouille beef burger, slurping his Ratatouille coke and wiping the Ratatouille grease away from his Ratatouille face and thought no more than "ratatouille ratatouille ratatouille ratatouille ratatouilleratatata". Curiously, the Ratatouille Happy Meal contained no actual ratatouille. Then again Mcdonalds are often guilty of these misnomers. 'Beef burger' for example.

Time does march on though, and now a family have complained after visiting their local KFC and seen a rat running around the restaurant. The rat was no doubt startled by this negative response. I bet he trotted out the kitchen door, pockets bulging with Ratatouille party favours expecting to entertain the kiddywinks, and instead of spending the afternoon making Pixar balloon animals he gets chased away by irate mums screaming "eek, rat!". As he ran back into the kitchen he must have been wondering why they didn't say the whole word. That's before he had too much cheese and beat his wife of course.

Britain, make up your bloody mind.

The Beard of Woe

Recently I have been unwell, and unable to shave because of this unwellness. So, whilst lurking in the catacombs of my house wearing a white mask and causing chandeliers to drop unexpectedly, I had grown a beard. For a generally non-hairy face this is quite an arduous process. It's like a contest in which you have to spend every waking hour with someone standing next to you, prodding you and throwing itching powder in your face. If you succeed in neither clawing your face off or killing your annoying companion, you win your health back. My face had been relentlessly pushing dead protein-sticks through my follicles like brie through a lazy cheese-grater, hoping in vain that I will take the hint and slice them off. I didn't.

The trouble is, after a while I found I actually quite liked it. Maybe a watershed moment crept by lacking the common decency to make itself known. All of a sudden, it stopped itching. I ceased clawing at my face like a man convinced a more attractive one lies beneath the unattractive layer of putty currently in place. But could I be a beardy? I really didn't know. On the positive side I enjoyed running my fingers through the chin whiskers when wishing to appear wise. On the negative side, two hours after dinner I'd go to the bathroom and whilst washing my hands would notice a sweetcorn kernal nestling amoungst the foliage of my upper lip like a tiny yellow woodsman, or less pleasantly, a gangrenous Chesney Hawks mole. I remember an episode of 'Police Squad' where a large man ('Al', who's so tall his head appears off-screen) is told he has food stuck to his face. He dislodges it and a chicken leg hits the desk. If I kept my face-fuzz, would that be me? Would a polite colleague mention a little lunch had remained and was currently lurking in my cheek-Sherwood like one of Robin's merry men, would I in turn dislodge it and suffer the shame of an eight-foot lasagne farting from my face as if from a furry tv-dinner dispenser? I don't think I could survive that embarrassment, if for no other reason than it being difficult to appear wise whilst wiping bechamel sauce from my keyboard.

So, I was forced to choose. A sage's beard or dinners large enough to host music festivals that rival Glastonbury. A tough choice, but one my razor was all to glad to resolve for me.

Oh, and that's dinner. Parmesan?

Lie in which wardrobe

Sat in my room in a hotel near Leamington Spa, I am delighted to see that there is a small safe in one of the desk cupboards. My delight stems from the warning label on the door stating 'danger of suffocation exists'. I love the idea that a couple might contemplate putting their child in a safe so that noone steals it when they go for dinner. Why didn't the McCanns think of that?

When I say the warning's on the door, more specifically it is on the inside of the door. As if the tiny new inhabitant would watch the door close, light a candle and then see the sign. A baby's first words, unheard by its parents: "oh...crap".

Sensible positioning or not, the label seems awfully specific to me. 'Danger of suffocation exists'. Yes, yes it does. So does danger of fire. Danger of being run over. Of being mugged. Of getting your heart broken. Being stabbed. Beaten. Poisoned. Electrocuted. Why not include all the dangers that await me rather than just one? Then put it on the room door so I see it when I cross the threshold into the snakepit.

'Just so you know, danger of x; x; x; x; x; x; x; x; x; x; x; x; x; x; x; x...exists. Be careful big guy.'

Tuned in, turned on

Idle nocturnal channel hoppers invariably stumble, completely by accident of course, upon the programme 'Sexcetera'. I'm not going to go into any great detail as all it really is, is a show where reporting types tell us about various saucy activities/people/events/products/shows. So in any given episode there will be reports about Dita Von Teese and the art of...well...tease, erotic cartoons, swinger conventions, sex-dolls and bordellos. All mixed up in a smiling Kira Reed shaped bucket.

Basically it's post-pub nudity-filled telly, thus brilliant.

The reason I bring it up is related to the swinger parties I mentioned. You see, I saw it a couple of nights ago and there was a couple who organise parties for people that masturbate. I know it sounds strange, being that masturbating is essentially a party for one so shouldn't require much organisation, but they seemed keen. So keen they immediately advertised it in the personal ads.

"Tom and I put an ad in the personals asking for anyone that enjoyed masturbation to get in touch with us" said the female half of the couple. Now, I don't know if they are prepared or not, but by rights they should end up with approximately 6.794 billion responses.

That's a lot of cheese and pineapple.

Goodbye Mr Chips. Mmm...chips.

Theatre Royal Drury Lane, 25/10/09, Teaching Awards 2009.

"Blimey it's hot in here. I realise that it's an old theatre and as such exotic things such as fans hadn't been invented yet, and as such were difficult to install, but neither had that Wembley sized lighting rig and noone seems to have minded. They are probably why I'm so hot. Or maybe it's because of the (slightly unnecessary) warm-up man. Perhaps there is a market-gap for a cool-down man. Someone who shuffles unenthusiastically on to the stage making a few uncomfortable jokes, causing the audience to swallow any potential chuckles and instead shift awkwardly in their seats buttoning up their coats. Actually, I think Jim Davidson's already got this covered.

The Teaching Awards Chief Executive has just come onstage and spoken about "150 winners with us here tonight". I momentarily feel the ceremony stretching out before me like a vast ocean of polite applause, before I realise they have already won and we will see ten of them. My palms breathe a sigh of relief.

We are asked to spend five minutes clapping, presumably so that it can be inserted into moments when jokes fall flat and they don't have to broadcast a thousand-strong stoney-faced audience sitting in eerie silence. We also film the end before the show starts. This means that we sit down, watch ivory plinking thimble Jamie Cullum 'sing us out' with something forgettable while Christine Bleakley dances around an invisible handbag and Jeremy Vine sways the uncomfortable dance of the designated driver at a wedding. They then say goodnight, tell us what fun we've had tonight and walk offstage, only to walk back on two minutes later to tell tell us what fun we're going to have. Jeremy tells us it will all make sense when we watch it on telly. The fact that we are not at home watching it live on telly but sat in the theatre with him, frowning and sweaty, appears to have eluded him.

Jeremy Vine's microphone isn't turned up as loud as Chrisine Bleakley's. Presumably how audible you are is directly proportional to the quality of your legs. She booms like an Irish Brian Blessed, he whispers like an ashmatic ninja.

Speaking of booming voices, Patrick Stewarts presenting an award later. I never really thought about the quality of his legs, I suppose it's always the quiet ones. Or rather, not.

Jamie Cullum presented 'SEN Teacher of the Year' and told us how passionate he is about music in schools. His new album's out on 29 October. You may not know that, but I do because Jamie C is very passionate about music in schools. It's called 'The Pursuit' by the way. Oh, and he recorded it in LA. It's his "usual mix of Jazz and Pop and all teh crazy stuff going around my [his] head". Oh, and he's a mop-headed pug that needs to be left in a car on a hot day. He didn't mention this but I read between the lines.

Thank you speeches are a curious thing. I wonder how many people would still say "this isn't really my award, this is for all my students and colleagues" if the awards host leaned over and plucked the trophy from their hands muttering "I'm terribly sorry, there must have been some mistake" whilst scribbling out their name."

Normal service, whatever that may be, will resume.

Give them enough rope...at least that's the theory

If you missed it last night, you really should go to the BBC website and watch Question Time featuring British National Prick, Nick Griffin. It was easily the most life-affirming bit of telly I've seen since I stopped watching 'The Secret Millionaire' for the sake of my tearducts life-expectancy. So, for that, I thank the Question Time audience.

Griffin manages to plumb whole new levels of odiousness, chuckling into his fleshbeard as he's reminded of his holocaust denial ("oh me, what am I Like, hur hur"). Yet, at times, you almost feel sorry for him. He just seems rather out of his depth. See, usually he’s either not standing alone on his hateful platform, or he is preaching to herds of mooing racist imbecilic homophobes that hang on his every word. He’s rarely found sitting alone in a room full of people that would rather just hang him (and his every word).

It was the way that to ‘prove’ his points, he would simply make up facts, surveys and opinion polls. When asked where he got this information from he would simply say “oh…it was in all the papers”. I’m not sure what is the worse possibility, that he was either woefully unprepared, or that he bases his entire party manifesto on stuff he reads whilst shoving bacon and eggs into his fat f***ing face and pulling his pud over Jan Moir’s Stephen Gately article (of which click here to read Charlie Brooker's critique).

Also, he's got funny eyes, like he's part-chameleon, and he's using his independently rotating eyes to keep watch for homosexuals lurking insidiously in the shadows, ready to leap out and bum his children.

He's probably brilliant at pub quizzes though.

"Team Blacksout, for the burning cross trophy, what is the German for 'My Struggle'?".

Revisting familiar Dens

It's never nice when something repeats on you. Least of all when it wasn't much good the first time around, like doner meat and chips, or episodes of 'My Family'. Happily this is not the case with Dragons' Den as laughing at people that think they've come up with the solution to the eternal problem of cucumbers going rotten, or children not being excited by wellies, never gets old. Just in case it starts to though, those magnificent folks at the Beeb have come up with their own invention: 'Dragons' Den on Tour'. Yes, I know it's been on for ages but it only recently dawned on me that this was a thinly diguised way of re-cycling the series you're still watching on Dave. I'm quick like that.

The basic idea is that our beloved Dragons are travelling the country, catching up with both those that they laughed in the faces of and those that they invested in. I say 'invested in', but they invariably say 'took a punt'. This is slightly misleading as 'took a punt' kind of implies some form of jovial 'yeah, I'll have a go, it's a laugh innit' basis. But it isn't, its foundation is actually 'I'll give you some money that I wouldn't miss in order that I own 75% of your pointless, desperate soul. If I end up losing my doubloons, I will carve your soul from your unemployed shell with my gold-plated talons and remove my percentage thin slice by thin slice'. Happily it also provides the opportunity for those they laughed in the faces of to (sometimes) laugh back at them. Such as the fellow who lost out on investment in his online diamond retailer but has since been quite the success. True, the business operates out of his kitchen, but from little acorns grow great...er...diamond retailers. This is the new material. The rest of his segment deals with his original pitch where he was asked what the biggest seller on his website was and he replied "I don't know, cds or dvds I suppose". Yes, he had misheard the question and thought he was being asked what sold the most across the whole of the internet. The Dragon's thought he was mental and refused to part with a bean.

So this is the format for the entire show, fifteen minutes of old stuff for five minutes of new stuff. But what of the 'Tour'? Well, between clips you see a bus with the legend 'Dragons' Den on Tour' running down the side. I would really like to believe this is how the Dragons are getting about, every one of them couped up in the back feeling car-sick, Deborah Meadon giving the boys a sucky sweet and telling them not to sit over the wheelarch, then trying to cajole them into a chorus of 'One Man Went to Mow'. The thing I like most about thinking this is how they travel is because I can actually see Duncan Banatyne exiting the bus toilet waving his hand in front of his face and mumbling to Theo "ye might wanna give it a few minuts", causing Theo to crease up his little dormouse-face.

Sadly, the bus is utterly and completely irrelevant. Obviously the Dragons don't travel by bus, they arrive by limo, dusting off their noses, sweating champagne and zipping themselves up while an unseen model in the backseat wipes their mouth. Because that's how millionaires travel. Not stuck in a bus eating Fox's glacier mints in the hope that it distracts them from Banatyne's smelly poos.

Elsewhere, I notice that Beyonce has warned her fans not to be fooled by her music videos. “There are a lot of tricks involved, such as stretching legs. Anyone can look beautiful with tricks” she says.

This is presumably why Paul Daniels won’t die a virgin.

Tubular Bell-ends

Like the graceful rhinoceros that I am, I stumbled over something the other day. Specifically, this video of a church attempting to cure a teenager of being gay.

By exorcism.

Of course they deny that it was an exorcism. That would be ridiculous. No, this was a straightforward casting out of spirits. Presumably the spirits of a dead motorcycle cop; a dead Indian; a dead construction worker and a dead cowboy.

I have read about attempts to ‘cure’ gay people before, for instance Anthony Perkins' (actor who played ‘Psycho’s Norman Bates) biography referred to him visiting someone that specialised in curing/conning angst-ridden homosexuals.

Amazingly, it didn't work.

The standard way for morally bankrupt bigots (or 'Therapists') to solve the problem of people having the audacity to find their own gender attractive is (predicatably) aversion therapy, be it through electro-shock treatment or nausea-inducing drugs. So for instance, should a gay man successfully have this therapy, be standing at a urinal and find a man next to him waving an erection around like an Orange user trying to find mobile reception, the man would promptly be sick onto it and wend his merry way.

So why exorcism? Seriously guys, I know you are devoutly religious and therefore prone to thinking that anything you don’t like in a man (like another man’s penis for example) is down to Beelzebub’s unholy meddling and not due to something as ker-azy as nature, but is exorcism really the most logical way of dealing with it? Do you honestly think the act accomplishes ANYTHING?

“Your problem is solved, hooray!”
“Hooray! So how did you manage it?”
“Well I shouted for a while, waved my arms around a bit and here we are. Sorted. Bob’s your uncle”
“Don’t change the subject. Now how about a cuddle...”
“Begone Satan!”

Perhaps they just prefer traditional methods. Which makes me wonder how they dry their ducking stool, inside by the radiator or outside by the pyre?

Either way, my favourite part of the story is actually where they say the church had taken care of the boy, providing him with clothes. "He was dressing like a woman..." they said. Well if they provide him with dresses what do they expect?




NB: This is all irrelevant really, since it wasn’t an exorcism was it. It was a casting out of spirits. Which reminds me, are you hungry? Fancy a sandwich? Oh, sorry I’ve not got anything for making sandwiches. Would some ham and mustard between two slices of buttered bread be ok? Excellent.

Breeders

What has 100 teeth and guards a monster?

The zip on my trousers.

Tee hee! That’s a joke you understand. Admittedly it’s a joke so old it should be in a home for the terminally bewildered, so its kids can start selling off its assets. It’s been around for so long it couldn’t even present ‘Strictly come Dancing’, and you have to be bloody old for Bruce Forsyth to seem like the sensible option. Honestly, have you seen this bloated glitterball of a programme lately? It’s a truly stupendous display of presenting ineptitude. Watching him read an autocue has been compared to watching an elderly waiter struggle through a crowded bar with tray full of drinks. Suddenly the hypnotically awfull slow-motion car crash footage of Mick Fleetwood and Samantha Fox presenting The Brit Awards doesn’t seem so bad (available here in glorious cringe-o-vision).

Also, every episode opens with Forsyth trotting down the stairs and tap-dancing towards Tess Daly, winking looks of ‘I’ve still got it’ at her. It’s like watching Lionel Blair on the pull.

Anyway, I digress. I believe we were talking nob-jokes. So that joke’s been around since the nickname ‘Tripod’ was first bestowed on a well-endowed caveman previously known only as ‘Ug’. I was reminded of it recently when my housemates were channel hopping and alighted on a programme called ‘Underage and Pregnant’. Unsurprisingly, this was about underage couples who were fortunate enough not to find each other utterly repellant and had proceeded to rut themselves raw. Staying true to Bill Hicks' observation that “it’s no more a miracle than having something to eat and turd popping out”, these relations resulted in pregnancy. Not being environmentally conscious, they elected to keep the bundle of joy/smells and we are treated to bizarre footage of the mother pushing a pram with the father gliding next to her on a skateboard while his voiceover mumbles a declaration that he’s “gon’ do rite by ‘er”.

So that’s nice. After all, they are 13 years old, it’s about time they settled down and started spawning gremlins like a Mogwai with no watch and a penchant for showers.

But how does this happen, in these days where safe sex is not only promoted, but is given a huge raise and a beach-front property? "Obviously the condom split" states the father, helpless to fate's cruel machinations. Well it serves him right for having such a massive willy. Would he rather be hung like a quail and have to secure his sheath with duct tape and a belt just to keep it from sliding off and being carried away in the breeze, like a grim Autumn leaf? No. However on the plus side this would mean no babies. Split? Next time, use a veruca sock.

Islamobile

The following is absolutely true:

I went into town at lunchtime and passed a Muslim-looking girl wearing a hijab (headscarf, white in this case) and talking on her mobile phone. The thing is, she wasn’t actually holding her phone. It was pressed against her head, being held in place by her taught headdress.

Brilliant I thought, she’s on her Hamas-free.

DVDepressed

Yesterday I bought a DVD and upon opening it was greeted with a flyer advertising Blu-ray discs, with the words “LOOK WHAT YOU’RE MISSING OUT ON” shouting at me in large-but-bland lettering. Basically, I had bought something that couldn’t wait to tell me how shit it’s going to look as soon as I got home, how I was a prick for being too poor to buy a Blu-ray player, and how I would be better served breaking the disc in half and carving my face off with the shards of ugly low-definition plastic than subject myself to ninety minutes of awful picture quality.

What happened to just listing the chapters? Now you can’t buy something without it looking up at you with a weary expression, and saying with a sigh “just so you know, I’m going to be rubbish”. I don’t recall VHS tapes doing this. But then they were too busy grabbing their balls and reminiscing about seeing off Betamax to notice the DVD creeping stealthily behind them with a garrote.

Phobic

When I’m in company I have an near-constant worry that the person or people I am with are only present because they had nothing better to do. They don’t particularly want to be there, but an alternative was not forthcoming so to avoid absolute boredom they are sat staring at my fat face trying not to glaze over too obviously. Essentially, I consider myself to be roughly comparable to a wordsearch.
There are also pounding thoughts that echo around my cranium when I’m trotting down stairs that I will inadvertently hook one foot behind the other and tumble forward, flapping my arms like Icarus and messily smash my face into the edge of a stair, crunching my teeth into the back of my throat and folding my nose into my head and up towards my eye-sockets. But that’s just me. Aside from these concerns and an entirely sensible fear of spiders I tend to go about my daily plod in a fairly breezy manner, taking care not to step on drain covers and pavement cracks. I am fortunate in this regard.

Phobias interest me. For instance, I know someone who will happily rescue me from eight-legged peril but if a cranefly confusedly drifts through the window (I find it very difficult to imagine them traveling anywhere with any degree of certainty. They are like an old drunk in need of a wee, lurching from one table to another on his way to a mythical toilet) she will run away screaming “eek, a daddy long legs!”.

Incidentally, this is not a name that conjures up an especially fearful image is it. The image is more like…well, a tall bloke with a kid.

She also hates moths, but I can understand that as when you try to brush them off the wall in the direction of the window they cause a huge dusty skid-mark, leaving your wall looking like Tutankhamun has wiped his bum on it. Similarly I have a feeling my Nan might be slightly phobic about butterflies, but I might have dreamed that. I hope I didn’t though, the idea that my subconscious is incapable of doing anything more exciting than attributing feeble dislikes to people that may or may not have them is, quite frankly, depressing.

If you have a spare minute, you may like to go here, a website with a list of pretty much every possible phobia. It is amazing the things people can be scared of. From understandable fears like Ballistophobia (a fear of bullets) to more bizarre fears like Geniophobia (a fear of chins) and Dikephobia (a fear of justice. I believe Michael Barrymore has this one). My favourite is Ideophobia which, brilliantly, is a fear of thought (presumably this phobia is essential to work for The Sun).

Imagine that, a fear of thought.

Actually, don’t, it’s too scary.

Ooja Nicka Bollockov

"Gang 'tortures and murders rapist'" The Metro informs us, putting it's face an inch from ours so we can feel its breath cloud our stunned eyeballs. "death with scissors" it elaborates, allowing our minds to fill in the victim's previously scrotum-filled gap. Body "found in underground drain weeks after" it ghoulishly picture-paints. Correct me if I'm wrong (don't), but are there above ground drains big enough to squeeze a body into?
'Bit of a clogged gutter there Alan?'
'Yeah, bloody rapist still hasn't washed away'.

Tragically, the gang in question thought he was a pedophile, but (shock twist!) he wasn't.

He was just a rapist.

Shame, innit.








(incidentally, this is my 50th post. Does Hallmark do cards for such? Probably not. Either way, thanks for reading.)

Heart Stealers and Blood Kissers

Today I have two things I would like to draw to your attention. The first is the romantic tale of a burglar who robbed a couple and then later returned to ask the female half out on a date. Have a look at his picture. I applaud his optimism, but he really ought to have got changed before going back. Or at the very least leave his swag at home. She probably recognised the candlestick.

The second story that piqued my interest comes from Italy, where fear of The Swines [eek!] is so great that religious devotees have been forbidden from kissing a vial of blood 17 centuries old. Now, you wouldn’t think this would be so bad. Seriously, I wouldn’t be that broken up about it…
“Look, here’s some antique blood”
“Wow”
“You can’t kiss it though”
“…what?”
“You can’t kiss it. The dusty blood I mean. Sorry.”
“Er…really? Right. Well that’s…fine. Honestly. No problem.”
Apparently the blood liquefies every year. I should make it clear that this is in fact a miracle, and is almost certainly nothing to do with chemicals present in the vial, or environmental factors. That would be ridiculous, and the scientists that say it is are clearly sent here to test our faith.

The best part about this story is actually nothing to do with blood-kissers with invisible friends, but is actually to do with another religious relic. One belonging to mad monk Grigory Yefimovich Rasputin to be precise, though most of us will know him as Ra Ra Rasputin, Russia’s greatest love machine. It was this aspect of Rasputin which the relic was related to.
Being a lover of legendary ability, a group of Russian women in the 1920s took to worshipping a relic they believed to be his penis. He was assassinated in 1916 (thus the appendage was at least four years old), so if it was still recognisable as anything you’d want near you I suppose it is quite impressive and therefore maybe worth venerating. But I doubt it.

Cut to 1994 when the penis, now a grim 78 years past it’s bean-blowing days, was subjected to “whatever the usual tests on detached penises purporting to belong to famous historical figures are” and found, brilliantly, to be a sea cucumber.

In case you don't know why this is so funny that they mistook a sea cucumber for a rotting cock, this is a sea cucumber...

...and this is a cock...

Can't buy me love

What is occurring with Peter Jones, has his precariously balanced noggin finally succumbed to altitude sickness after sitting atop Mount Jones for 43 years? Now that I regularly see him lumber around a computer generated supermarket where the shelves are filled with pound signs and interest rates, I fear he may have. Why has he sold his gold-plated soul down the river of advertising like this?

Honestly, it’s not like he’s Phil Tufnell who, upon being crowned ‘King of the Jungle’ on ‘I’m a Celebrity…’ (“appee daze”) became more closely linked with debt consolidation adverts than Carol Vorderman. This upset me greatly at the time because it was such a transparently cheap technique used by the companies to hook poor, debt-riddled sheep into eternal buggeration. After all, Carol Vorderman is good at sums so she wouldn’t give loan advice if it wouldn’t definitely be right for me would she. But then she was sidelined when a boozy cricketer won a reality show and was beloved by (an often fickle) public for minutes at a time. Out of the jungle he came, onto every available advert he went, then back off into obscurity he fucked. Having more than a touch of the ol’ apples an’ pears about him, he was trusted by the sofabound bewildered who were all too glad to take his advice and sign up to a loan that meant 10,000 easier monthly payments instead of 26 slightly-tricky-but-doable ones. After all, honest cockerney Phil wouldn’t lie to us. It’s not like he’s being paid to say these things, he honestly believes them. Look, he’s giving us the two thumbs up, just like he did in the jungle. He’s great, I must remember to buy his autobiography.

And now Peter Jones is pretending to go shopping for logos in his local Moneysupermarket. Bad times.

I don’t really like seeing any of the various Dragons from ‘Dragon’s Den’ (shouldn’t that be lair?) away from each other. It just feels like they come as a set, a collective. It’s like seeing Ant without Dec, Piers Morgan doing an outside broadcast without someone yelling “wanker” behind him, or a new U2 album without a pervading air of disappointment. Each comes with the other.

In case you have forgotten, ‘Dragon’s Den’ is the show where a handful of super-rich suits sit next to piles of fake cash in the upper level of a deserted warehouse (the ‘Den’) and have a succession of people trudge up the stairs to pitch business ideas; products or services in the hope that the super-rich ‘Dragons’ will be willing to invest their cash and expertise. Aside from Peter Jones, who is big in communications as well as being tall enough to graffiti light aircraft, the other Dragons are as follows:

Theo Paphitis, master of the ‘hilarious’ conclusion-bite (as yet unused examples to watch out for including: “This product is like a chocolate teapot: Brown. I’m out.” and “This business is like a freshly-castrated aroused male nudist: bloody pointless. I’m out.”). Theo also regularly peppers his comments with references to his family, specifically his wife: the coincidentally named ‘Mrs P’. These references are (like his conclusion-bites) invariably bizarre as they always accuse the pitcher of trying to vindictively steal his family's inheritance rather than simply achieve a modestly successful life for themselves. Most of Theo’s money comes from ladies’ underwear, which is presumably why his wife has such an amusing walk.

Deborah Meadon, who resembles a heavy smoking viper, but whom I’m not ashamed to say I actually quite like. Not in an attracted-to way of course, more in a she-would-be-the-best-PA-ever sort of way. She’s the sort of person who should be kept in a glass case with ‘In case of emergency, break glass’ emblazoned upon it in large intimidating letters. You would wheel her into all your staff meetings for use whenever you started to feel the message slip from your presentational grasp. I don’t think she’s necessarily the richest Dragon, but she is most certainly the scariest. I imagine her husband making love to her, giving her all his best moves at the best angles only for her to mutter “I’m out” and pull a face like a lemon sucking a lime.

Duncan Bannatyne, who until Peter Jones loomed into every available commercial break, was looking to be the most ubiquitous Dragon as he went through a stage where he seemed to appear on everything from Strictly Come Dancing to Ross Kemp’s Gangs, via Paul O’Grady, possibly to distance himself from the image of ‘dour Scot’ that he seemed to have been tarnished with. This didn’t quite go to plan as he is incredibly dour, and also, he is a Scot. This is possibly why he retreated back to the Den to continue matching his hair colour with every dining table in Harrods (he’s currently on mahogany), leaving the door open for Mr Jones to become an advertising Gulliver on Lilliputian telly.

And finally, James Caan, who sits with his shirt unbuttoned to his naval, thrusting his balls at the pitchers like an Arab Sheikh. You expect him to forget the cameras are rolling and to suddenly lurch forwards spitting “’ow much for dee woman?!” at any moment.I don’t know what his money is in, but I suspect he hands it over by playing a pungi and letting it dance into the recipients’ pockets.

If you haven’t seen it, you should give it a go. It’s really quite good, assuming you don’t get too hung up on presenter Evan Davis’ wonky eye.

Incidentally, one of the pitchers was once someone I (vaguely) know. I can’t remember what it was he was pitching, only that it looked like it had once been an integral part of a tumble drier, and it didn’t work no matter how hard he tapped it and gave it encouraging looks. He arrived being described as ‘serial inventor’, and left being described as ‘unsuccessful’. Shame he couldn’t have invented a tambourine.





(I love all the Dragons. Please don’t sue me. Thanks.)

Upset dents

Sensitive teeth are everywhere. In fact, these days you can’t even eat a sandwich without one of them getting upset. Fortunately help is at hand in the form of Sensodyne toothpaste, the advert for which tells the tale of a lady who discovered that her teeth were sensitive. How did she find out? Why she used her common sense and consulted an expert.

“I found that when I was eating, my teeth felt sensitive. I went to the Dentist and he diagnosed me with having sensitive teeth”.

Wow. She must have gone private for that opinion. Just like that he diagnosed her! Brilliant. Mystery solved. If only more experts were consulted in such a manner we wouldn’t spend our lives wandering blindly through a landscape littered with such enigmas.

“I fell down the stairs and found that a broken bone was poking through my skin, pointing at my foot. Finding it difficult to pull on my jeans I went to the doctor and he said I had broken a bone, and recommended repairing it.”
“Brushing my teeth I poked the toothbrush into my eye-socket and found that my vision was impaired. I went to the optician and they said it was because I had a toothbrush in my eye-socket, so they recommended removing it.”
“I found it difficult to form cohesive relationships because of all the murdering I did. I went to the police and they said it was because I was a murderer, so they recommended prison.”
“Being a f**king idiot I found that I was wasting a lot of experts’ time. Beating a path to my door they said that I was actually a f**king idiot, and they recommended no longer being such a f**king idiot.”

At least we can dream...

De-reality

Sad times are upon an ever-decreasing audience, as the bloated toss-filled battleship labeled Big Brother creaks leakily into a disinterested port. I say sad times as now it only has a week to go in the current series, so there are only another 14 weeks (ish) of Big Brother…ever! (I’m thinking of hosting a street party). You see the audience is dwindling to such an extent that Channel Four are canceling the “show”. I put the word ‘show’ in airquotes because a) I’m an unbearable arse, and b) to call a programme in which a dozen unknowns walk around a plastic fishtank scratching their bums all summer a show is, quite frankly, ridiculous. This is a show. This is not a show.

Of course, when it began many moons ago I was one of the (if we’re being honest) majority who watched with (again, if we’re being honest) a surprising amount of interest as people were being filmed twenty-four hours a day. We had seen docu-soaps develop from the likes of Driving School and Airport, each making stars of Maureen Rees (seen here struggling with a particularly taxing left turn) and Jeremy Spake (seen here smiling through a particularly stubborn bowel movement) as they went, through to MTV’s almost-certainly-not-scripted ‘The Real World’. It seemed that as a public we were hungry for more details of strangers’ lives, so it was inevitable that sooner or later we would round up some free-range civilians, put them in a box and stare at them whilst they brushed their teeth and argued over tea-bags.

What made the first series curious was that noone knew where it was going. Once the exhibits from this human zoo were released back into the wild, what would become of them? Like beagles released from laboratories by animal rights activists, freed to stumble about the moors dying for a fag, Big Brother housemates generally perished but there are one or two survivors. Jade Goody being the most famous (okay, so I use the word ‘survivor’ loosely) and Aisleyne Horgan Wallace is still gracing the pages of Nuts and Zoo magazine every now and then. Aisleyne aside, not all contestants have taken part purely to be masturbated over. Some have entered the house in an attempt to prove something to themselves. This woman for instance used to be a man and wanted to prove that she can be accepted as a woman without people thinking that she looks like a Spanish bricklayer with tits. To the most part, she succeeded and won the show. She hasn’t been seen again, but this is to be expected since the credit crunch has seen many builders out of work. For her sake, I hope she can still afford Nuts.

Ten years is a long time, and now interest in ‘The King of Reality Shows’ is looking very unwell indeed. It may not have died just yet, but it is terminally ill and its grandchildren are already sorting through its jewellery. Its friends may smile sweetly and chuckle awkwardly at its wheezy jokes, but when its back is turned they shake their heads gravely at each other, knowing that their once strong chum is fading fast. Interest is at such a low ebb in fact that three people left the current series because they simply couldn't be bothered to carry on.

The days of post series ‘uncut’ highlights dvds flying of the selves are also at an end. In fact they ended around series 3 (we are now on 10). This could be because laptops are more common so people can watch proper porn without having to go to a sex-shop, and so the prospect of pert un-pixelated bottoms being soaped up and showered isn’t quite as alluring as it once was. Alternatively it could simply be because people were bored whilst the series was on so they see no reason why they would want to have a dvd to be bored in front of until their dvd player crumbles to dust and Death wraps his bony arms around their yawning bodies. This is naturally the more realistic option as pert un-pixelated soapy bottoms will never lose their allure. The very idea is, quite frankly, ridiculous.

The Horror of Our Times

Britain has a depressingly famous history of murderers. Much of this fame could be down to our delightful ability to attribute memorable phrases or nicknames to the killers in question. Look at the evidence:
George Haigh: The Acid Bath Killer;
Myra Hindley and Ian Brady, The Moors Murderers;
The Rippers (Jack and Yorkshire);
Harold ‘Doctor Death’ Shipman;
Fred and Rose West’s House of Horrors’;
John Christie of 10 Rillington Place.
Ok, so John Christie shouldn’t really be included as his ‘memorable phrase’ is actually just his address, but his address became so famous that the street was changed to Ruston Close, so I think it counts. I’ve not included Dr Crippen, though his is one of the most famous English moiders, as there is the possibility that he is actually innocent. He was also American.

In case you don’t know, Drippen’s case involved the disappearance of his wife. When he was asked where she was he said that she had gone to America, died and been cremated. Clearly a broken man, Crippen moved his lover into their house and she wore all of his wife’s clothes. Not all at once of course, that may have raised suspicion. They then hopped on a boat bound for Canada, with Dr Crippen dressed as Dr Crippen and his lover dressed as a young boy. So as not to raise suspicion. Meanwhile the Fuzz were trying to piece together the body that they had just found hidden in the walls of Crippen’s home. Identifying it as his wife, Crippen and his lover were promptly arrested and he was hanged later that year. New evidence has appeared however that suggests the human remains that were discovered in his walls were actually that of a male. His wife may have been many things, but she was almost certainly female. I am slightly curious as to how they ‘identified’ the body as his wife? Did they look at it and say, “it’s human alright, bring the bastard in”. This isn’t really ‘new evidence’, it is simply ‘evidence’. Evidence that may lead to him being pardoned. That must come as a huge relief to a man that was hanged in 1910. I imagine him getting the bus from Hell and arriving at the Pearly Gates.

“St Peter, hi, it’s Hawley Crippen. I’ve come to be let into heaven”
“Really? I thought you were a murderer?”
“That’s what everyone thought, but it’s all been cleared up now, so can I come in?”
“I don’t see why not. By the way, when you were caught who was that woman with you, the one dressed as a boy?”
“Oh that was my mistress”
“…”
“Peter?”
“Did you get a return ticket?”

Now we have a new killer on our books, complete with nickname. A nickname to live forever in infamy…The Omelette Murderer [gasp!]. This isn’t someone who took against egg-based meals, so proceeded to pick them up in bars, take them home and…well…beat them. Oh no, this is a man who if there was a prize for ‘Most Unpleasant Boyfriend in England’, would stand a pretty good chance of winning. In fact, if Jack Tweed lived in France, our omelette spiking friend would win hands down. The hands that weren’t busy beating up his beloved that is. After all, this is a man who poisoned her, beat her, locked her and her baby in her house, and then burned it down.

That’s more than the Russian nobles did to Rasputin.

And what did this woman do to deserve such variety in her death? She had the audacity, the indecency, the impudence, the gall…to have a relationship with him. What a bitch. I bet she kissed him too, cuddles too probably. What an absolute cow. She had it coming really.

Such homicidal overkill reminds me of Sam Kinison’s comment about a victim of the Manson family murders (I should warn the sensitive among you that the following contains a swear)…

“The Police report said they stabbed this guy 51 times....bludgeoned him in the head with a heavy object 13 times and they shot him twice....so I figure this guy's by the door on the way out going....’you don't have to leave do you?!....you haven't shoved a chainsaw up my ass yet!’”

Suddenly I feel like quite a catch.

Watching the World Urn

Despite occasional evidence to the contrary, and assuming (optimistically) that I have remembered how to work out a percentage on a standard calculator, 71% of my relatives are still alive. This is not a gloat directed at any orphans that may have tearfully stumbled across this page, merely it is a statement of fact. It’s great having your relatives about, though you would be lying if you denied the amount of useful space that would be freed up if you didn’t have to remember so many birthdays. The usefulness of your presence at pub-quizzes would increase tenfold.

Everything’s eventual, and Bruce Forsyth aside (who will be hosting the all-cockroach ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ long after Nuclear Armageddon), we all have our lights extinguished at some point. Assuming we didn’t drive a mini-bus full of family members off a cliff, we leave people behind to handle the grief, memories and (more importantly) the remembrance buffet. Funeral arrangements are also to be considered.

“Would he like to be buried or cremated?”
“Well he did like gardening…but then he also liked warm holidays”

Should you choose cremation you are left with a decision: what do to do with the remains. Standard practice is to scatter them somewhere the deceased loved when they weren't dead, be it the ocean, the bottom of the garden at their childhood home, or over their grandchildren. It is also common for relatives to keep ashes on their sideboard like a ghoulish potpourri. The problem with this is that urns are pretty dull ornaments, even if you did used to kiss their contents. A quick tour around Urns Online proves this point (it also turns out that you can own a pet urn. I wonder what they eat?). So this raises the question, how can you keep your relative’s remains but not get bored of looking at the container? Simple. Keep the ashes in their head. Now really, why has it taken so long for this to be available? True, Ed Gein probably thought about it, but if he did he didn’t follow it through to retail.

All you need is a couple of photographs of your loved one and no sooner than you can say ‘what the…is that…oh good god’, you have your relatives head stuffed with your relative perched on your mantelpiece. They don’t even have to be very good photos as there is an extensive proofing process. Imagine proofing your Gran’s head! Of course, the best part is that you can scatter the ashes and be left with the creepiest nibbles bowl in town. Actually dip would probably be better. You could surround it with crudities and park it on the coffee table when your friends come over. It would be like the banquet scene from ‘Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom’.

In the words of Bertie Basset, it takes allsorts, but personally I would bloody hate it. Me sitting on the sofa watching Eastenders and eating crisps while my Mum’s decapitated head stares blankly down at me from the top of the television, as if saying ‘I used to like crisps, now…I am crisps’.

You can own one for only $2,600, which is equivalent to about £2,600. I would say ‘collect the whole set’, but that would make me feel like Charles Manson. These days, that’s frowned upon.

Eat Some More

Feeling good about yourself? No, didn't think so. Why would you? You probably think you're fat, or have a wonky face, or something else that is likely not to be true. This doesn't stop you thinking it though does it, and that is your right. Your priviledge. We are the free, and we celebrate our freedom with self-loathing. Hooray for how awful we think we are.

Channel 4 knows this, and strives to show us how much worse we could look. One example of this is 'Supersize Vs Super Skinny'. In this series, unsurprisingly, we compare the eating habits of a very fat person and a very thin person. Perish the thought that it's for the freak show value, that would be cruel, we are only comparing them to show that the fat one doesn't have to have their portions airlifted into their garden, and the thin one can...well...eat. It's presented by two people, one the kind of faceless presenter who may have done a property programme, been a Loose Woman, read the news, anything really, but as she has no discernable features it's hard to say. The other is Julian Sands lookalike Dr Christian Jessen, whom you may recognise from Channel 4's 'Embarassing Bodies' in which he reassures people with anal warts (or as I once heard them referred, 'speed bumps') that they just need some ointment and a bit of patience. He has a face (albeit someone elses) so we can listen to what he says without wondering if he was hatched from his pod prematurely.

In the most recent episode we compare a 'put the fork down' 27 stone DJ called Keith, and a 'risks blowing away' 6 stone poppet by the name of Tiffany (I should point out that for reasons best known to themselves, the Channel 4 website has increased her weight to 7 stone and his to 30). Keith is the kind of fat man that the word 'jolly' was invented for. He has legs like prehistoric oaks and forearms that look like they ought to be carved, crammed into a pitta and fed to drunks beneath chilli sauce, but has yet to suffer the inevitable leg-ulcers, heart disease, diabetes and eventual harpooning that comes as part of travelling the road more wobblesome. Instead he cheerily accepts that he needs to change, punctuating every sentence with hohos worthy of Father Christmas and wobbling his belly like a bowl full of jelly. His main problem seems to be that he works odd hours as a DJ, and is therefore forced to eat large quantities of fish and chips at 4am. I'm not entirely sure of his logic here, but he chuckled so it must be solid. Tiffany's problem is that she feels she is too busy to eat so only eats a couple of spoons of cornflakes then spends the rest of the day guzzling Red Bull. She is roughly the same height as Nick Nack so only needs to gain a stone or two in order to be a healthy weight. Keith on the other hand needs to literally halve himself, then keep going for two more stone.

The programme rolls toward a predictable conclusion, ending up with weight-loss/gain followed by happiness and cuddles. The fun aspect is in the 'versus' sections, where the featured supers swap eating habits. Keith stares despondantly at the two spoons of Shepherds Pie he has for his dinner, whilst Tiffany is dwarfed by a mound of chicken chow mein so tall it ought to have snow at its peak. My favourite moment was Keith openly salivating when he tells her, "scoop some on the prawn cracker...yeah...and have some sauce too...isn't that good? Ooh yes". He couldn't have been more obviously aroused if he had dropped his trousers, heaved up his stomach and masturbated onto the tablecloth.
"How long would it take you to eat all this?" tweets Tiffany,
"Er...a portion that size about five or six minutes" chortles Keith apologetically.

Concerned that the change of diet may not be enough to make Keith take himself in hand, Dr Sands takes him to watch a stomach-stapling operation. This seems to have the desired effect as, noticeabley upset by the drastic nature of the surgery, Keith resolves to make the life change. Not for himself, but for his six year-old daughter.
"My daughter is the light of my life" he says. At which point we cut to...no, not his daughter as you may think logical, we actually cut to earlier footage of Keith in a chip shop troweling deep-fried spud into his chops like he has a gun to his head. An unusual choice of edit, to be sure.

Now I love a freak show, but has my enthusiasm for pointing made these programme-makers lackadaisical? It seems impossible for modern documentaries to treat the subject of fat folk in a serious manner for longer than two minutes without reverting to stock footage of them waddling into a cafe and wheezily ordering two fried breakfasts as they tentatively lower themselves onto a double seat, or taking an hour to pick a pencil from the floor with their sausage fingers. An even lazier technique is the soundtrack. You could be forgiven for thinking that as soon as you reach 18 stone a small brass band appears on your doorstep and informs you that they will be following you, providing a soundtrack to your daily life until you lose weight. You feel obliged to invite them in and offer them a cup of tea, sighing as the tuba smugly parps your every footstep.

A bit like how Chris Martin follows you around incessantly warbling his wrist-cutting hit 'Yellow' if you suffer from depression and have private medical insurance.

Genocidal Tendencies

As with all sensible people, I am scared of spiders. Anyone that snorts ‘they are more scared of you than you are of them’, is quite frankly underestimating the level of fear that a human is capable of. We have created the technology to push ourselves beyond our planet’s atmosphere, shedding the chains of gravity and alighting on a lump of orbiting rock 238,857 miles from the nearest Tesco, are they honestly suggesting that our minds are incapable of competing? I’m not convinced.

The trouble with warm weather is that windows are flung open and forgotten about. You may as well advertise your property as an arachnid guest house. A few weeks ago I was sat on my sofa when a spider the size of a baby’s fist strutted in, posturing peacock-like.
“Alright” it said, nodding at my housemate and I.
“F***ing hell!” I yelped, my feet shattering the sound-barrier as they flew underneath me.
“What?” said my housemate.
Dribbling, I gesticulated at the cocky crawler.
“Oh don’t be a pussy” she said, popped a glass over it and slid a sheet of paper underneath. This is a popular method of catching a spider, placing a glass over it, sliding a piece of card beneath then taking it outside and disposing of it. That is, sliding a piece of card. Not paper. Card is rigid. Paper is not.

I smelled danger.

No sooner had she raised the glass that the paper buckled and the spider burst forth, shaking it’s fists and running directly…at…me.

“I’m coming for you!” it yelled, eyes burning with fires of hate fanned by self-loathing.

I knew I had to act, else I live out my days being steadily drained of life, trussed up in the rafters of our garage. I raised a Pythonesque foot high, and brought it down upon its charging form. I collapsed back on the sofa, and wept.

Ok I didn’t weep, but I did pant a bit. This experience was a book-token compared to the white-hot-poker-to-the-eye fright that yesterday morning brought me however, when, having stepped out of the shower I toweled myself off and pulled on my dressing-gown...

Something tickled my jawline, just below my ear.

I looked in the mirror.

A spider was sat on my shoulder stretching its arms and rubbing the sleep out of its eight-eyes.

“Morning” it said.

Now I have considered how to accurately represent the noise I made, however I have found myself at a loss. It wasn’t really high-pitched enough to qualify as a squeal or a scream, but it wasn’t deep enough to be a yell or a shout. It was essentially the noise you make if your jaw drops, your vocal folds tense and all the air in your body rushes out within half a second. Basically, “UH!” laced with more surprise than if Richard Dawkins found himself at the pearly gates.

My arms flailed and I swiped my towel at my shoulder with one hand whilst trying to shed the dressing gown with the other. With an audible ‘ptt’ the spider fell to the floor tiles and I stood pressed against the wall waiting for it to make its move. But it didn’t, it just sat there. Plotting. Time was clearly of the essence, so I opened the door and padded pathetically into the living room where a recently roused housemate was perched.

“What’s going on?” she said before cocking her head slightly to one side as a school nurse may do when asking ‘do you want me to call your mummy?’, and added “was it a spider?”

Nodding I pointed into the bathroom and in she went, a yawning Beowulf heading to the hills to do battle with a scuttling Grendel. I remain in her debt.

To exist in a world riddled with eight-legged peril is tricky. In the past I have purchased a battery-powered spider catcher, a sort of tubular vacuum cleaner, the idea of which being that you point the tube at the offending creature, press a button and an integrated fan sucks it off the wall and into a tube. You can then dispose of it outside, ‘humanely’. The trouble is, the fan was so feeble all it would succeed in doing is messing up the spider’s hair, which just pisses it off so it runs at you like a psychopath. This didn’t quite match the high-hope I had of it flying from the wall and landing headfirst on a honed steel fan, dicing it to marmite like a gremlin in a liquidizer. I have since bought one with a sliding trapdoor which has proved slightly more successful, although invariably a spindly leg gets caught by the mechanism and the horror contained within starts pushing the door open like a Jehovah’s Witness.

More afraid of me than I am of them?

"Doubtful" I yell, as an army of arachnids chase me over the horizon like the Pied Piper on a bad day, "very doubtful".

Smear today, gone tomorrow

Reading an interview with the fragrant Sugababes on The Guardian website, my interest was raised when they spoke about performing at Jade Goody's wedding:

"She had a wish list of things she wanted, and she asked us to perform," [Keisha...the black one]Buchanan says. "I'll never forget, we were performing, and she whispered to me, 'Can I come up there with you?' And she did, and so did [Goody's twattish husband] Jack... It made me go and get a smear test afterwards".

Now I'm no doctor, but even I know you can't catch cancer by standing next to a sufferer. Besides, surely there were kits on the reception tables?

Dusty Births

I was very excited to see a trailer on the tellybox last night for a programme about old Mums. Very old Mums. Mums that are in fact so old that they look like someone has discovered a way to allow babies to suckle on corpses.

The trailer first drops the bombshell that across the globe, "women as old as seventy are giving birth..." and then raises the question upon which I suspect the documentary hinges: can you be too old to be a Mum?

I'm no expert of course, but I would suggest that if the baby is being delivered on an episode of 'Time Team', then yes you might just be.

"I'll be your dog"

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: pets are great. Dogs are especially great since they actually care about you. Old ladies may sit and chuckle to themselves about the bond they have between themselves and 10 year-old Tiddles, but they are sadly deluded. In their dusty mind Tiddles is a warm, affectionate, loving companion who is never happiest than when she is cuddling up to her blue-rinsed owner. The knowledge that, to Tiddles, the tittering heap of knitwear is little more than a slow moving cat-food dispenser, is knowledge that waits at the entrance of her mind but has yet to be allowed in. It’s probably wearing trainers, so entry is anything but likely.

Dogs on the other had, are brilliant. We’ve all seen homeless people on the streets of London or Brighton, wearing grubby rags, clearly surviving on bin-scraps, and with a dog sat nobly beside them. It is fair to say that this is a dog that has a pretty shit life compared to, say, Lassie. Does it care? No. There he sits next to his snoring cider soaked partner, blinking apologetically for the rapidly expanding puddle of piss that passers by are huffily vaulting. “I’m sorry about my friend, he’s had a run of bad luck. He’ll be back on his feet soon enough though, just you wait” he says through watery eyes formed of rich loyal chocolate. A cat would have given him a golden shower, scratched his eyes out and sold them for catnip.

No surprise then that a Bristol Family are so keen for their runaway dog to come home, they’ve been peeing in the street. Not through distress-induced leakage, but through legitimate luring techniques. Techniques learned from a website I might add, so there is no doubting their validity. “It’s quite a normal way of doing it” said the Mum. Of course it is, you lose your dog you spray the drive with your first leak of the day. It’s obvious. “You just put a little bit in a bottle and then top it up with water” she goes on, confusing the contents of her bladder with the contents of a Kia-Ora bottle.

“You only have to do it once.”

Ok, maybe it’s not so bad.

“We've left two trails.”

Oh. Maths not as good as her research skills then.

Phil them up

It is a mixed blessing to be an actress on Eastenders, as it is only a matter of time before you have to snog Phil Mitchell. Like retarded moths their characters flap towards his glowing maw, an uninviting pothole in a ridiculous red light-bulb head that looks like it belongs hanging upside down in a prostitute's window rather than perched atop his lumbering thumbs-in-pockets body, squeezing air through its non-lips so he whispers like a sex pest. There it could hang, cheerlessly gurning down at her customers as they grimly thrust away their self-respect.

They are too far down this bumpy track to stop now, they have made their 'he's irresistable to every no-tail that drifts into the Vic' bed and now they must lie in it. But why did they even buy the sheets? Is it so that we ugly blokes can watch him munching through the faces of various underwear-clad FHM fodder and think "cor, if he can get a girl like that there is hope for me yet"? This is otherwise known as the Ron Jeremy theory. More convincing is the fact that he came into the show with his bruv, Grant Mitchell (played by Ross Kemp, Karl Pilkington's well built twin) and Phil was the more attractive romantic interest for the Albert Square ladies. But this was simply because he was the less psychotic of the two. Is that really how women choose their partners, on a least-worst basis?

'Was' is actually the key word here. You see, whilst Grant was plain old fashioned 'squadie can't handle being home from the war' mental, Phil had a lovely drink problem written for him. Every now and again the plot-lines will dry up and the writers will dust off the 'Phil falls off the wagon' story. That's the good thing about addiction, it's always there for you in times of trouble.

I love a soap alcoholic, partly because it invariably opens up the inner-ham in the relevant actor and we can enjoy their attempts to channel Oliver Reed's 'Wild One' appearance on Aspel and Co for a few minutes - special mention must go to The Bill's Jim Carver for providing a particularly delightful example of this. It is also partly because of the predictability of it all. No sooner has the wagon lightened its load but out comes the Smirnoff bottle full of tap-water or the Bells full of apple juice (depending upon budget). There will also be some ill-advised romantic entanglements. Which brings us back to Phil. During his most recent wagon-departure Mr Mitchell willingly stumbled down the dusty track of Queen Crow Shirley Carter.

Ouch.

Now sober he is currently laying siege to the sugar walls of lovely Dawn Swann. If ever one were required, you would struggle to find a better arguement for sobriety.

Sadly the actress who plays Ms Swann is due to be written out of the programme later this year. Presumably through having vomited herself inside out.

There's Something in the Water

I am currently on holiday. Well, actually I'm not any more. By now I will have returned home and uttered the phrase "very nice thanks" seventeen or eighteen times. But that's a future now. 'Now' is elastic like that. My current now involves me camping in Wiltshire, sat in my tent with a can of warm lager perched precariously on a beach towel in case of spillage.



See? Truth be told, it's not been much of a holiday for that towel, when it isn't braced for saturation it forms the basis of my pillow. I pity its return to the other towels.
"Alright Tattystripes, how was Wiltshire?"
"Which part, the mopping up of beer or the being squashed beneath a fat bloke's sweaty cranium for eight hours?"
It doesn't sound so bad now I look at it. Do you notice the can's white backdrop? That's the flyscreen. It's far too hot to zip the tent's main door shut. This is the first time I've slept in such a way and I've noticed that it provides both the benefit of allowing air to circulate about my nocturnal perspirations, but also imbues the camping with a (admittedly, small) sense of bold adventure. After all, there is mere netting between my slumbering heap of self and the horrors of the outside world. It's either 'bold adventure' or 'naked vulnerability', I forget which.

For a lot of people their main camping experience is as a (relatively) economical way of attending festivals, primarily because it gives you a base at which to leave both your clean clothes and any foolish intention towards clean living that may have stowed away in your rucsac. Of course, the festival cliche that sends many running to the hills is the distressing state that one may find the toilet facilities. A benefit of regulated campsites (such as the one upon which I currently find myself) is that bathroom terrors are rare. They are cleaned/fumigated/cleansed by fire every day so they can be used with some degree of justified optimism, unlike festival loos whose doors must be opened with trepidation, the knowledge that unpleasantness may lurk within that is so unspeakable as to force you to question the humanity and self respect of the previous resident. And make you poo behind a hedge instead.

Being a biologically functioning human who lacks a desire for floating teeth, I visted the campsite facilities earlier today (by 'today', I refer you back the previous discussion of 'now') and felt my heart sink as I followed a fellow camper through the door. "Balls" thought I, with the knowledge that there are only two urinals, "I'll have to use a cubicle". You see, urinals are complicated numerically. A single is fine, as are three or more, but two is horrible when they are both occupied. There's a feeling of teamwork that hangs between you which I'm not particularly comfortable with. It's like you've become Brothers in Piss. A manly nod is exchanged as if to say 'we're here to do the same job, together we can get this done [zzzip]', an acknowledgment which I would rather not be involved in. Therefore, to avoid sharing another man's hosedown, I dart into a cubicle. Locking the door, I raise the seat. I am confronted by something that resembles the decomposing thigh of a black bodybuilder. I shut the lid immediately, retching quietly to myself and wondering why there was no blood. Surely noone could birth something like that without splitting themselves in two? Disgusted, quizzical, and still needing a wee, I decamp to the next cubicle and shut the door.

I almost open it again to check whether I actually moved.

It is exactly the same, like someone has clumsily parked a brown camper van at a jaunty angle at the base of the u-bend, the owner having snorkelled off to phone the AA. Escaping again I find that within each of the five cubicles lurks a monstrous water-logged torpedo, each more intimidating than the last. This was ridiculous. Had a family of lumberjacks brought their work on holiday with them? I felt like a lion tamer realising he's out of his depth, realising that a whip and a chair won't come close to defending against the advancing horde of drooling beasts, eyes blazing with vindictive hunger and teeth glistening in perilous moonlight. Eventually, with a sense of grim resignation hanging on my shoulders like a drab overcoat you are obliged to wear because it cost your auntie a week's pension, I return to the first cubicle, lair of the smallest bowel-evacuee, taking care to fill the bowl with a large quanity of toilet tissue. If I had to share a room with it, at least I didn't have to look at it. I pulled the lever allowing the cistern to empty and vacated the cubicle to wash my hands. I'm certain that, as I left, I could hear a gurgly voice growl after me.

"I'm still here you fucker."

Satan no longer has all the best tunes

After a long and painful battle with a particularly nasty bum-cancer, blonde 70's sexpot Farrah Fawcett has died. Shortly afterwards Michael Jackson (other Kings of Pop are available) popped himself into a coma and was pronounced dead of not breathing two hours later. Earlier this month David Carradine was found hanging neatly in his closet, so the rule of celebrities dying in threes can sit back in its chair with a smug look plastered on its fat face as it reaches over to the honey roasted cashews on the side table.

As is to be expected, this is very sad news. Death is like that. Though if Jackson (other Pops are available) was hoping to drum up excitement for his 50-date 'This Is It' O2 residency, I can't help but feel that dying was a rather poor marketing decision. I feel for his fans. Especially as they wailed great troughs of tears when they saw him perform, so as news of his death is beamed across the globe we are sure to see entire continents disappear beneath tsunamis of boo. I'm also concerned about congestion in London as 170,000 Jacko (other Popos are available) fans queue outside the O2 Arena seeking a refund. But then, as I don't live in London, my concern is about as short-lived as MJ (other KoPs are available)'s coma, which at two hours was really more of a nap. But let's not get dwell upon semantics.

Squeeking on the BBC website, Jermaine Jackson has asked for the media to respect the family's privacy during this difficult time. This shouldn't be difficult for the media, especially since Michael Jackson (other Kings of Pop are available) spent so much time out of the limelight anyway, and it's not as if the public has ever consumed Jackson-based conjecture like builders at a burger van. Jermaine always seems like quite a pleasant sort of chap to me, despite his painted on hair and the ethereal quality that comes with being part of the Jackson family. When he appeared in Celebrity Big Brother a few years ago he managed to avoid the whole 'Shilpa Popodom' idiocy by hiding behind dinner-plate sized Ray-Bans, and we all respected him for it. He was the voice of reason in a house riddled with imbicilic woodworm.

"And Allah be with you Michael".

I'm sorry?

You see as well as wafting through life like a celestial being, Jermaine Jackson has religion. Specifically he is a Muslim (according to Wikipedia, since 1989). Fortunately Michael (other Kings are available) also cuddled up to Islam, otherwise this Allah bloke could be making himself very unpopular with the recently de-lifed, turning up at funerals like an annoying neighbour, only to be turned away because "Ben never knew anyone called Alan".

Windy

I saw this picture on the Guardian website, in a story entitled 'A Celebration of Old Age'.

Notice how noone wants to sit next to the lady on the left.

That's Lady Trumpington.

My Marmoset, to get things done...

Aren't pets lovely. I mean seriously, aren't they. Look at their little faces, doesn't it make you all excited and gooey and make you want to dress them up in frocks and take them to restuarants pretending that they are your babies? No? That's because you are not mental. Unlike the subjects in Channel 4's recent sniggerfest 'My Monkey Baby'.

This is the latest from Channel 4's unending supply of documentaries that serve no purpose other than to provide us with a conveyor belt of freaks and misfits at which to point and laugh at like a Robert Ripley produced 'Generation Game' final. Make no mistake, I love these programmes and I am always excited when new ones are advertised. The trouble is, they are often a bit of a let-down, most notably in 'Tourettes Camp' where I was hoping for an hour of 'John's Not Mad' style tourettes-based hilarity, but actually got a fairly sensitive documentary about a group of children coming to terms with their problem. If it hadn't been for a lovely scene of all the kids walking up the driveway to Tourettes Camp, twitching and cursing as they went, I would have felt cheated.

So anyway, 'My Monkey Baby' is the story of various...wait for it...Americans...who, for a variety of reasons (most of which fall under a Darwinian umbrella) do not have children. They haven't let this get them down though as they have invested in the next best thing. Monkeys. Which they then treat as their offspring (the clue was in the title really), by dressing them in nappies and dresses and teaching them typical human behaviours such as drinking from cups, using the internet, going to restaurants and poking their tongue into their dad's mouth. Often the only non-human aspect of the relationship in fact (from the owner/parent perspective) is that they name the monkeys things like 'Butters' and 'Silly Willy'. Silly Willy? Seriously, if you're going to anthropomorphise your pets, call them Susan or Dave, not Silly Willy. Surely they cover that on day one of 'Being a Mad Pet Owner'?

Butters was actually quite a sorry case, the last we saw of him was his wide-eyed, terrified face having the features licked from its visage by a pitbull and a bull-mastiff. He had been in his new home for five minutes and he was already staring at the camera, pleading to be taken away from these bizarre people. "Ah his brother and sister are saying hello" gurgle the proud parents, not realising that they are actually trying to decide which pedigree chum best accompanies monkey.

It can't be denied how human the monkeys appear. At one point another 'mum' looks off camera and says "Maggie, get off the phone" and you find yourself being mildly surprised that when the camera pans around we don't see monkey Maggie slam the receiver down and slope off to her room like a sulky teenager complaining about how unfair she finds it all (instead Maggie hops from the telephone and disappears to have a poo in her cage), so it's easy to see how the parents can become a little deluded by the relationship. Having said that, I do feel that the lady who, upon being asked 'what do you think will happen when you get older?' replies matter-of-factly "well, Jesse will have to look after me" was being slightly optimistic.

The best (by which I mean most mental) parents are the couple who take their baby to a local restaurant, sit down and are perusing the menu when the restaurant manager appears and tells them, unsurprisingly, that monkeys aren't allowed to dine in their establishment. This outrages the couple, who secure their zoo exhibit back into its pram and storm out. "We'll not be coming back!" shouts the mum, having learned nothing from Rosa Parks.
Later the mum finds pills missing from her handbag. Worried that her baby may have eaten them she phones an Animal Psychic. I should point out that this is not an animal that is skilled at tarot, but a lady that can read animals' minds.

Over the phone.

"Can you ask him if he swallowed the pink thyroid pill?" says the mum, rather too specifically, and then holds the phone next to to her monkey, who tries to eat it. A few moments later she brings the phone back and the psychic tells her the good news.
"He said 'no I did not take that pill mommy, I would never do that'".
"Thank God" says mum, oblivious to the ridiculousness of it all.

At the end of the hour you are left with the overwhelming feeling that these parents, utterly insane though they are, still have tremendous hearts, but they are hearts bursting with delusion, and like so many doddery old lady cat owners before them, they live in blissful ignorance to the knowledge that if they fell off their perch, their furry darlings would not organise a flower-filled funeral, but would instead eat their bonkers faces.

I suppose it serves them right for standing on a fish in the first place.

Live Longer

Not that my life is as empty as an Ethiopian's colon, but have you seen the new Calgon advert? No? I have.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about, Calgon is the water-softener tablet thing that you put in your washing machine/dish-washer so that it doesn't get limescale.

It is not the most exciting of products.

In fact it is dull as dishwater (do you see what I did there? No? You see, there's an expression 'dull as dishwater' that is applied when something is very dull indeed, because dishwater itself is often grey and quite colourless. The word 'dull' can apply to both something that lacks intensity of colour, and also to anything that arouses little interest. Something tedious. What I've done is apply this expression to a product that is both boring in itself, and is also relevant to dishwater. Do you see? No really, do you? Excellent. Moving on...) and must therefore have proved quite a challenge to the advertising agency tasked with selling it. Now, what sells? Sex obviously, but it's tricky to make a connection between limescale and lovelysweatypantingorgasms, so they opted for the other thing that sells: FEAR.

Fear sells brilliantly, all you have to do is shout "this might happen and our product is the only, repeat ONLY way you can prevent it" enough times at the viewer and you're selling your company for billions and retiring to a supermodel's loins before you can say 'Barry Scott'. It's not just product of course, adverts warning against STDs do this very well too (though I still believe that viruses would be cut by half if they simply showed somone picking up a 21 year-old underwear model in a nightclub, taking her home and discovering she has a penis so huge it has a Sky-dish bolted to the shaft). Calgon however, may have over-egged the pudding.

No sooner has the advert Mum's washing machine broken down than a repair man has appeared in her kitchen, pointing her with an icy bespectacled glare whilst cradling a heating element in his hands like a driver guiltlessly presenting a cat he's just hit to the child owner as he solemnly intones that it was really the child's fault for owning the cat in the first place. The advert Mum, horror of horrors, has been using a cheap water softener. Do you remember the commercial in Tim Burton's 'Batman' where the Joker points to a gagged fellow and says that he's not happy because "he's been using brand X" and the words 'OH NO!' flash repeatedly on the screen? It's like a doom-laden version of that.

"Cheap water softener is only HALF as effective!" shouts the engineer, somehow resisting the urge to shake the woman like a furious masturbator. "Half protection is like no protection!" he rages, the Mum flinching at the spit mist settling on her eyballs. "It's like him [frantically pointing at a boy cyclist, inexplicably pedaling around the kitchen] going out with half a helmet!".

Well...no it isn't actually. Besides, aren't they rather overstating the dangers of limescale? to take them at their word the slow build up of chalky deposits is a disaster of biblical proportions (only not fictional). Nations have fallen to it. Countries' topography radically altered by the sudden appearance of vast mountainous peaks of calcium. Continents absorbed as if consumed by a very hungry caterpillar. Planets burst like over-ripe pimples. Galaxies folded in on themselves like exotic origami. Universes perished like fruit at a Weightwatchers buffet, and realities voted out of existence by deities outraged by a lack of limescale prevention.

On the other hand, the plumber did seem to know what he was talking about.

Madonna with the Big Babies

"So" you say, "Madonna or Angelina?"

Well, assuming you're talking about a baby flinging contest (and you almost certainly are) then it would be pretty close but my money would rest on Angelina's bonce, since she has more ammunition. This news has clearly worried Madonna so she's decided to start stockpiling for the final clash of the succubi.

Until recently their stocks were as follows:

Angelina - 6
Madonna - 3

But now Madge (not to be confused with the tomb-voiced ex-wife of ex-Neighbour Harold Bishop) has finally been allowed to adopt little Mercy. Phew. This won't improve her odds of toddler-splat victory by much, but as Tesco is so keen to remind us, every little helps.

The main aspect of this news that I find a little disturbing is the line "Madonna spotted Mercy at an orphanage three years ago, but waited...[etc]".

She waited.

Lurking in the shadows.

Biding her time, before driving her wagon into town whistling 'Kiddie Widdie Winkies' and sniffing the air unnervingly…

I suppose one should feel sorry for them. If only there were orphans/unwanted children available for adoption back home then these ladies wouldn't have to trot across the globe in order to increase their urchin armada. Mind you if they existed anywhere else they probably wouldn't resemble a Thorntons Comic Relief special edition, and who would want that?

To Truly Spite Your Face

A little while ago I mentioned the man who escaped from prison through the sacrifice of his foreskin. Now I look at that sentence it does seem as if he and his foreskin were escaping independantly. They might have been in the process of climbing the fence when suddenly twenty guards spilled out of the building waving dogs whilst batons growled at their feet. The foreskin may have looked at his comrade and his comrade may have looked at him.
"It looks like this is the end for us, old boy" says the prisoner.
"It certainly seems that way" says the foreskin, the words leaking from his mouth like droplets of unshaked urine. It is at this point that his creased face changes, as if he has been confused all his life and is only now experiencing clarity.
"Tell Frances I love her"
"Fanny? But how will I...no wait!"
But he is too late, Foreskin has already flopped to the ground and is scurrying towards the advancing guards and their baying hounds. The prisoner raises a shaky hand to his temple and offers a misty-eyed salute to his friend, before heaving himself over the fence to short-lived freedom.

This sacrifice, whilst bold, is swiftly forgotten in the light of a 25 year old Egyptian man who, when his family wouldn't let him marry his beloved, opted to cut off his own penis. Presumably by way of protest.

This is bizarre for many reasons, most of which involve the words 'he cut off own his penis'. There is also the slight issue of him choosing to protest in this manner. You see he has been trying to persuade his father to let him marry a girl from a lower social class for two years, but his father remained resolute. It was time for action, so out came the knife, off came the winkie, and 'hello' said the understandably perplexed hospital. For his sake I really do hope that the protest was as unsuccessful as the hospital's attempts to reattach his little flesh-fez. Imagine the disappointment if he relented.
"Aziz, what are you doing?"
"I'm...cutting...off...my...penis"
"Why?"
"I'm...really...upset"
"Because you can't marry Fukayna?"
"Yes"
"Well if she means that much to you, feel free"
"What?"
"Marry her. I mean, I thought she was after your money but if you're willy to risk it then, well, go for it"
"What was that?"
"If you're willing to risk it"
"It sounded more like...actually, never mind. Can you call an ambulance? I'm feeling unusual".

He is currently resting in hospital with a jar next to him containing what appears to be a depressed frankfurter. I honestly hope his protest didn't work. That would be an awkward phone call.
"Hey honey, I've got good news and I've got bad news. The good news is that you can come off the pill..."