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.)