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?