**Intermission**

Oh dear, you will note I have not posted much of late. Work has been pretty busy and this has inevitably lead to me coming home pooped and wanting to do little more than sit slack jawed with my brain in the 'off' position, in front of some programme where they waste a huge steaming piles of food in an attempt to shame some fatty into losing weight.

Apologies.

In the meantime, as I have been SOB-ing now for about two years, why not check out some of my fabulous archives for a wide variety of witty-if-sub-par articles on things as diverse as

* Accidentally offensive junk mail

* My Alma Mater's hacked Wikipedia entry

* "I do not like Sarah Palin as her name is a combination of Pain and L which sounds like hell"

* A vitriolic rant against purveyors of pastel casual wear

* How to bury a hamster in a gardenless flat. A user's guide.

* Piss off the one you love with a teacoster

* It's safe to say you will never need to go to Colindale after reading this. (Unless you have an infection)

* The Great Pelican Conspiracy of 2008 part one and two

Enjoy bitches! I'll be back before you knows it! x

My First Dictionary

...is a brilliant little blog. It's greatness is it's simplicity, so rather than ramble on about it at length, here is a couple of extracts plus a link. www.myfirstdictionary.blogspot.com. DO IT


p.s the blogger who made this also has another blog called Musty Moments, which I have added to the ole HOT LINKZZZ and would recommend a gander at.

Baby fashion tips

Now I am not an expert on children, in fact, show me a child over the age of 9 months and ask me to guess it's age and even with leeway of a year either side I will probably still get the answer wrong. One thing I do know however, is that babies up to that point where they get all chubby and smiley (four months? six months?) all look like pissed off tiny pensioners.

Henceforth, if you have a baby, it might not be the best idea to dress it in tiny old lady clothes, for, as Kanye West would say, THATS SOME BENJAMIN BUTTONS SHIT RIGHT THERE.

Incidentally, do you remember that episode of the Simpsons where they take Maggie to daycare, and when they pick her up they are faced with a terrifying room full of staring babies, silent except for the noise of sucking dummys?

I went out to lunch with my friends and their two babies on Friday, and we chose to go to Giraffe, as it was a family friendly place (knoweldge gleaned from three years ago when I attempted to light a fag and was promptly kicked out. This was pre smoking ban so they were clearly nazis. 'Family orientated' nazis.). And how. Earlier in the day I had been plunged into Blursville, as the optician who a week previously given me a glorious exciting new world of details and colours via the introduction of contact lenses, cruelly took them away again as in my excitement I had worn them for far far too long and 'damaged a few cells'. So anyway, I enter Giraffe, and after stumbling slapstick style over about ten Buggaboos (prams, to those without children) parked by the doorway, I gazed around squintingly for my friends. All around me, like bobbing bouys in a sea of blur were these pink round wobbling blobs. Babies. Lots of 'em. Utterly terrifying. And noisy.

I would recommend a lunchtime trip to Giraffe for any girl feeling a bit broody. By 'eck, it will make you want to nip next door to Boots to stock up on propolactics sharpish!

Unfortunate photo juxtapositions part 2,334,553

I have to say I don't really get the furore over Susan Whatserface from Britain's Got Talent. So she is ugly but a good singer, and because she is ugly no one thought she would be a good singer so when it was revealed she was a good singer everyone was ZOMG!!!UGLEEZ CAN SING!1!!

And then everyone rejoiced and cried with happiness because this ugly woman who can sing has been rescued from her hideously obscure ugly little life in some hideously obscure ugly little Scottish village and is now FAMUS and SAVED and on OPRAH!1!!

Even my brother, who refuses to enter Topman, pay for magazines and walks out the room at the very mention of BGT or X Factor, admitted the other day that he had watched Susan on Youtube and 'It was, like, the most beautiful heart wrenching singing I have ever seen'. The pussyo.

Whilst it is nice that a woman is going to make a lot of money from her singing talent, the whole episode really just serves to highlight the widespread and ikky views of the general public - ugly people are useless and you can only find redemption and happiness through fame. Nice. Then again, I guess it also shows the power of a good ole showtune, and that is never a bad thing..

*gets off soapbox, digs out DVD of Rent*

THX 1138 to Hemen for this one...

This is the front cover for the DVD of George Lucas's debut film THX 1138, a science fiction about a underground dystopian world where drugged up drones lead lives devoid of emotion or feeling.

My friend Hemen works in HMV, a partially underground dystopian CD and DVD shop, where he helps drugged up drones find discs to stick on the goggleboxes so they have something to stare at whilst they eat their Chinese takeaway later.

THX 1138 is currently on sale for £2.99.

*Man wanders up to Hemen, holding aforementioned bargain of a DVD purchase*
"Oh right, what's this about then?"
*He flips the dvd over to skim the back, which aside from the blurb also displays a large film still of a drone getting violently beaten up by a group of police androids*
"Jade Goody?"
"Errrrm. No, not really. Not at all actually."
"Oh."
*Visibly disappointed, the man wanders off*

A Russian tale of caution, overheard on the Victoria Line this morning...

*Two Russian women get on the tube at Highbury and Islington. I can't actually see them as I am squashed up against some man with a giant rucksack he has refused to take off, but I can hear them clearly, not least because one is basically shouting in my ear*

"My friend, she keep snake. Big snake, Anaconda you know? They sqeeze, not poison but verrry big. She keep in her flat and one day notice that snake is being verrry friendly. It come sit with her on sofa, sleep with her at night and so. Now she think this is most unusual, she play with snake often, but it never so friendly."

"That is verrry odd for snake. Snakes not friendly often"

"Yes. So she go to vet and say. Vet goes 'oh no! You must not return home! Snake is not friendly, it is measuring you so's it can work out how it will eat you best. Get rid!"

"Noo!"

"Yes! Get rid! You see snake is like Dmitri. He being friend to you now, so he can make you trust, then he will come in night and kill you."

конец (end)

Spoon Rage

And now for a matter of massive significance that will make you question how you see the world and everything in it. The economy? The war in Iraq? No, I'm talking about the free spoons you get from Marks and Spencer's foodhall.

As a central London dwelling deskbitch I often get my lunch from what my dear Mum called 'Marks and Sparks', and this usually involves some spoonable item. We do have kitchens at work so I could plausibly pick up a spoon on my way back in, but this would involve at least a three minute detour, which takes away from precious gorgeing time, and frankly, I get the rage when someone obstructs my path down Carnaby Street to try and flog me a charity subscription or ask where Oxford Street is, let alone any greater hinderance to face/sandwich interface. God knows how people go to the gym or shop on their lunchbreaks...

Well anyway, this terrible unrepentant greed coupled with the fact that I love a freebee, even if it is a small, black and made of plastic, means I inevitably end up picking up a M&S spoon.

So what's the beef? WELL. For some reason, these little spoons have been designed so they are slim and disproportionately deep for such a narrow spoonhead. What this means is that unless one is blessed with Angelina Jolie type lips, (and let's face it, my mouth is more like a letterbox made of flesh) you can't get all the stuff off the food with one mouthful.
This results in having to turn the spoon over to lick it, which can look inappropriately sensual if eating chocolate mousse, and disproportionately retarded if eating pomegranite (as it requires more of a flipping motion).

Usually I have the latter, which comes as no great surprise to my workmates, used as they are to see me doing things like falling off my chair or lying on the floor with my arse in the air taking photographs of tiny bottles of shampoo for powerpoint presentations.
Today, I had the mousse, and honestly, I think I might have to steal spoons from Pret a Manger on the way back in future as I turned into some terrible Nigella Lawson/Winnie the Pooh hibrid, 50% sexy, 50% a bear of little brain, 100% wrong.

I saw this clever little item, which got me thinking about how much you can do with a single lump of plastic, if you have half a brain. This is a toothbrush which has a dented back, so once you have brushed you can flip it over and redirect the tap waterflow so it becomes an easily drinkable fountain. It's not earth shattering, but it's simple, it's clever and it works. That's two points up on the M&S spoon anyway..

Ask Propecia Anything

I've been emailing this to various people at work and stuff, and as it has been a while and I haven't quite worked up the energy to do a proper post, I'll just stick it here for the meantime.



Note: Watch with headphones on.

The Twitter Fallout

I admit I was getting a bit hooked on tweeting - well, any excuse for me to piffle more rubbish out into the tinternet and avoid my head imploding under the weight of a life that involves sorting out meetings, watching Masterchef and very little else...

What I never realised however, is that merrily microblogging away meant that you leave a very obvious googletrail of witter behind you. I was idly googling myself - an activity I do every so often in boredom and preparation for my inevitable life as a fantastically well known and admired sort - and I'm now popping up all over google like a battered plastic gonk from a whack-a-mole arcade game!

Although it is now easier to find out my identity than it is to buy an artisan bread in Muswell Hill, I am still going to attempt to keep some veil of anonymity and blank out my non biche identity.

As you will note, if you click and zoom in on the above picture, this twitter problem is two fold. Not only am I exposed for all to see, I am exposed with the phrase 'so painful I considered leaving it jammed up there'.
For those glorious souls who possess an inquisitive nature and click the link, they will readily see I am in fact writing about the incident when I got my entire fringe caught up in a hairbrush and panicked. For those who don't, I quite frankly just sound like a minger.

Japanese meme (NSFW if you work isn't keen on epilepsy inducing shots of male buttocks)

Oh poo, since I wrote the title, the best example of this bizarreness which included the flashing bumcheeks has been taken offline. Ho hum, such is life..

I found this brilliant article on Gawker today. In a nutshell, the collected works of gay pornstar Billy Herrington have become massive internet hits in Japan, ten odd years after their release. Being massive internet hits, they have been mashed up in various bizarre forms, and this being Japan these are very odd indeed, generally including rhythms beaten out on arsecheeks, baby's faces covering genitals and lots of grunting. Well, watch for yourself really...





Why have they become hits? Quite simply the English for 'You got me mad now', when growled by a beefcake in an echoey locker room sounds a lot like 'You are not distorted' in Japanese and 'Like embarrasing me, huh?' becomes 'You are sloppy recently' respectively. Oh, and it's like, two dudes wrestling and that is huhuhuhuh so gay.

Can someone with more accomplished (a.k.a any) video skills see what happens if we overlay Japanese tenticle porn with Something Kinda Ooh by Girls Aloud? Oh, but cover all the rude bits with photos of Matt Lucas' head? Then speed the whole thing up so it looks like people having a fit in a fishmongers to the sound of chipmunks singing? Internizze hizzle right there yo.

Westfield - Shopper, you are terminated

Boredom, curiosity and an ovewhelming urge to spend money lead to me visiting Westfield, the new juggernaut of a shopping centre in Shepherd's Bush today.

And absolutely huge it is indeed -and inside so white and curved that it is near impossible to get your bearings, find a start/end point or work out where any specific shop might be. I had to make do with wandering around in a daze like Will Smith in that bit of Men in Black where the doors open to reveal an extraterrestrial society getting about its daily business (but without the ensuing comedic high jinx).
Obviously there were no aliens, but nor were there that many earthlings at Westfield - I was there at 11am on a Saturday morning and there was probably a Monday evening 5.30pm amount of shoppers. This only added to the sense of surrealism as I pootled about, lamely trying to find Topshop but not wanting to queue at a cuboid touchscreen map, as they all seemed to be commandeered by the scant few other shoppers, eyes agog, trying to work out where the deuce Boots is (somewhere near the floating Nandos I think) or where in this dazzling ark of consumerism one might find a ginger beer (okay, just me on that one. The answer is 'nowhere' btw)

Maybe it was the emptiness, maybe it was because I was reading Revolutionary Road on the tube journey there, but I found the whole desperate 'this is the future!' great white massiveness of the place really oppressive - it's like Logan's Run before the running bit or The Island before the 'oh shit we're clones' bit.... something in the milk ain't clean, in other words. At one point I even found myself idly eyeing up the height of the glass rails, and wondering what they would do if I - okay, well, someone else - threw themselves off and landed splat on the white marble of the lower floor in protest. Believe me, it takes a lot for me to think such insubordinent things, I'm the biggest most superficial capitalista I know, but Westfield made me want to go and join an ashram in India, wear tie die gypsy skirts and brush my teeth with a stick.

That said, I wasn't completely impervious to the many, many shops, and I'd be buggered if I went all that way and didn't get anything, so I got this:

Fitting in quite well with the whole 'pointlessly futuristic' flex of this post, it is Mood Swing lipgloss: Our supernatural formulation starts off crystal clear and blossoms into countless shades of pink, depending on your emotional state - Oh goodo, that sounds plausible. Maybe Too Faced have discovered a formulation that will successfully do away with a hundred odd years of psychoanalysis, and who would have thought it would be strawberry scented too?

So what is my 'emotional state'? (apart from 'woman who has just discovered she has taken a photo of herself that includes a slight bogey up the nose')

Hmm according to them I am having 'dirty thoughts'.

Little do they know this is far from the truth, as I am in fact wondering if I have time to do my hand-washing before I go out this evening and if it is weird to have felafels for both lunch and dinner.

So yes, Westfield... it's definitely worth a look, but more so you can work out your exit strategies for when the thought police come knocking, or to have some life-changing revelation about the shallowness of your existence. Not if you want a ginger beer, that's for sure.

p.s If anyone wants to hire me as a hand model, do drop me an email...

p.p.s Let's update that emotional status to 'woman who is now questioning her photography skills after taking a second pic with the most embarrassing item in her living room in the background.' Look yeah, I won it on a grabber in Southend, and it's not exactly easy to dispose of a giant teddybear without feeling a bit cruel and wasteful.

What we have learnt from 'He's Just Not That Into You'

*If you force someone to marry you, they will have an affair and hide their smoking from you, but if you don't force someone to marry you, you will split up, get back together after a few months of ritual humiliation on your part and living on a boat on his part, and he will compromise all his values and marry you anyway.

*Baltimore is nothing like the Wire. There are still corners, but they are clean and empty. Front steps are street kid free and lead to frosted glass doors, not crack dens. Everyone has exposed brickwork and distressed leather furniture and every house overlooks the Domino Sugar factory. It's also a yuppie's dream, as it appears you can afford a massive warehouse loft to yourself simply by managing a bar, or doing some vague office job where you actually spend all day squealing and jumping up and down or running out at a moment's notice to catch your hubby cheating.

*Jennifer Aniston has a head like a sweet potato**.

*If you a sexually liberated feisty young woman who knows what she wants (read: slut) you will end up sad and alone (even if you are Scarlett Johanssen) but if you are a kooky fuckup with no social skills who acts like a twelve year old, you will meet the man of your dreams because 'at least you try'

*If you are Jennifer Connolly you must be asking yourself why on earth you are in this film.

*If you are gay, you will flock around Drew Barrymore like squawking seagulls ready at any moment to drop a dead fish of sassy relationship advice into her lap. You will also be well schooled in rolling your eyes, clicking your fingers and generally binding the different storylines together in various tenuous ways. You will dress like the last ten years never happened (see right)

*The best place to tell your wife you cheated on her is the flooring aisle of Homebase. This section was also good ammunition for the argument I had with my brother that you really can't tell the difference between laminate and real wood flooring.

*The mirror in your house is not for checking your hair, it is for Seeing Into Your Soul. Every so often you will look in it with a faraway gaze, then either sigh wistfully or smash it into lots of pieces. If the latter, you will then get a new mirror, symbolically put it on the wall of your new batchelorette pad and repeat.

*Scarlett Johnanssen truly has a fantastic figure. Dodgy hair extensions not so much.

*You will leave the cinema uneasy at a film that on one hand shows some quite obvious truths about relationships (if he doesn't call... if she doesn't sleep with you... if he doesn't want to marry you etc etc) but on the other hand ties up all the ends nicely and 'happily ever after' under the weak justification that these women are 'the exceptions to the rule'. Unless you are the slut. (see above)

*Wood Green is the BEST place to see any film of even slight comedic merit. Honestly, the cinema was half full but it was still like sitting in a Ricki Lake audience when some fat woman just stripped down to her red polyester neglegee- the whooping! The laughing! The genuine gasps of shock at coming-a-mile-off revelations! I swear I even heard a 'go girl!' at one point. There was also one man with a really distinctive loud laugh, which is just great, because you end up laughing at their laugh rather than the lame pratfall that happened onscreen.

Update: Rather good article in the Guardian about this twatfest of a film and why romcoms in general are vile

**I know, I know it's all anti-woman to say so, but she is getting to the age where you can't get away with superlong romcom facial closeups when you are projected sixty foot high onto a screen. It's harsh, but it's just not that nice to look at. See Sarah Jessica Parker in SATC. That said, it's not everyone, the rest of the SATC 'girls' and Drew Barrymore did not offend the eyeballs so. Maybe 'a face for television' is the kindest way to say it.

How to Hypnotise a Woman (NSFW if you can bare to watch it all the way through)

I defy you to find one woman this could possibly, ever, ever, work on, those having undergone frontal lobotomies or aged under eight excluded. That said, Brenda's sheer gullability and the toys on her bed suggest that actually both these things might be the case...

Honestly, it's more like an episode of The Red Shoe Diaries than a self help video and was clearly made for men by men who clearly haven't spent much time in the company of those who are not men.

Note to self: If any therapist ever utters the word 'horny' run for the fucking hills!

A heartwarming image for a cold Wednesday evening

Here is P Diddy treading in a poo.

This is why you are fat.

A great, self explanatory website, with the best use of a full stop I have seen in a while.

On one hand, you will never want to consume bacon (in all it's many, many forms, from taco shell to mayonnaise flavouring) ever again, on the other it makes you question The Truth.
We're told that even minor things like M&S sandwiches and tiramisu are superbad for us, and yet people actually eat the things on this site and don't explode into Mr Creosotesque fireballs of lard, or simply drop dead of a coronary angina within a day.

Yeah, they are fatties though.

Nothing is new...or sexy

I expect by now you've seen Morrissey's new 'gasp omg contravorsial' CD sleeve (Dlisted and Ich Luge Bullets have shrieked about it at length) It's here anyway in all it's pallid fleshy glory:

Ha, let us blight the memory of your favourite songs as they will now forever be associated with some hairless pale blokes from the pub stand around nonchalently listening to Morrisey play 'pat a cake' on his head.

Well anyway, vaguely offputting it is. New, contravorsial or different it aint. Get ready for a second scar on your retinas...

Yup, Cosmopolitan, glossy mag for slags (or for those stuck at train stations when WH Smiths has run out of Marie Claire) has had celebrity male centerfolds for years, including this incredibly...honest? one of Radio 1 or 5 or whatever DJ Colin Murray* from a couple of years ago.

One can only assume (or rather would like to assume as it is tres amusent) that Moz is a Cosmo Girl

*I don't get it. If you were of a slightly mouse-like persuasion, why would you agree to have your DJ partner (with her incredible invisible legs and torso) hold a CD over your bits in a delicate pinching fashion one would usually use when trying to pick up a teeny tiny jellybean off a desk? No amount of 'it's THIS big' hand gestures from you is going to offset that.

Don't say I don't do nothing for yous..

Bored with bad phone photos of creepy dolls? Tired of amusing websites and wondering what Hatchet Face out of Cry Baby looks like now?

Why not click the cornify button, handily located above PeeWee's head to the right of the screen?

Joy!

Scary dolls of Wood Green - an occasional series

Aah the Letchy Unsavoury Loves Arse limited edition vinyl doll... a faithful rendition of the sort of gay alcoholic tramp that occasionally frequents Soho Square - hawaiian shirt? Check. Face distorted and battered through years of alcohol abuse? Check. Fist clenched ready to off any young twinks who spurn his advances? Check. Cock hanging out of star spangled pantaloons...

The Anne Geddes Collection* - bean filled representations that prove once and for all that bestiality is wrong. What better way to educate your child of this irrefutable fact than to buy them a stillborn human-animal hybrid in a box?

The ratbaby is admittedly quite appropriate for Wood Green, situated in the borough of Haringey, best known for A Life of Grime and the Baby P scandal....


*I love that being a 'collection' it means that somewhere, someone has got a whole shelf of dead animalbabies lovingly displayed. It must look like aftermath of some hideous genetic experiment or possibly a nuclear explosion in the nursery of Fuckedupland.

Rampantly Popularist Interlude

Look, look there is a tube map. Lovely. This is an unashamed attempt by me to get more people to this site, even if it's only because they are google imaging 'tube map' or some such.

Oh yeah, and you can now follow me on twitter, should you be wondering whether I have actually died or fallen off the earth this time, or if work is just a little bit busy and I can't think of anything funny to write.

I bang the worst dudes

Well, not me. *cough* *shuffle*

This is a rather amusing-if-possibly fake website where women can upload pictures of their awful lays and basically explain to the world why it was a matter of the earth needing to swallow them up rather than moving, as such.

On one hand, it's a funny read. On the other you kind of think that if this was a website about women, then everyone would be up in arms. Poor men, no one stands up for them.

www.sorrymom.tumblr.com

"What fresh hell is this?"

...were apparently John Waters' words while making Cry Baby, which was beset by disaster after disaster, from torrential rain to one of the main actors, pornstar Traci Lords, being caught up in a massive scandal when it was revealed she had been underage for basically all her porn career.

Being fidgetty of nature I can't watch a film without simeoultaneously googling it, and one thing I was curious about was what Kim 'Hatchet Face' McGuire looked like without all her makeup. And then whether she was dead or not, as one of the only pictures of her on the net is from www.findadeath.com. (She aint, the guy who runs the site got a fan pic of her and anecdotally linked it into a different actor's obituary, unfortunately with the tag 'www.findadeath.com' stamped right across it, so has inadvertantly sparked off an urban myth that she has died. Well, I assume it is an urban myth, there is no other evidence of her death online)


As Hatchet Face in Cry Baby

With Johnny Depp back in t'day at some sort of premiere I would imagine

Screenshot from 'It Came From Baltimore' the bonus documentary on the DVD which could have saved me a lot of googling.

Other interesting point of note is that when Traci was facing arrest, to make her feel better, the cast and crew all admitted what they had been arrested for in the past. ("Grand Theft Auto!" "White Slavery!" and "Kidnapping! But not really I swear!" were apparently among them, which doesn't seem that comforting to be honest) The young and slightly naive Amy Locane, feeling left out because she hadn't ever been put in the clink, turns to Patti Hearst, (in a cameo role as Traci Lord's mother) and asks 'but you haven't ever been arrested, have you?'

Pretty much sums up East London...

'If you're not from Hackney stop begging and go back to your own ends. We have no use for you'

'Yes you do, you could mug us or something'

History NOW

Happy Inaugeration bitches...

Can I get a reeeewiiind?

I've just redone my old post on Paris is Burning.

I think you should read.

Noble Hound

just because...

Quit yo snarking..

I saw this video on a website, where is was (quite rightly) being merrily derided for being one of the shittest music videos ever. Honestly, watch it through, it's bloody terrible.. BUT I have not been able to get the song out my head all week.




Edit: If you watch this video on Youtube it has funny comments that pop up, but it doesn't seem to work when you embed it.

It's quite an interesting story really, Jan Terri worked as a limousine driver to fund recording her music (hence the rather ubiquitous use of the limo in the video) and made a load of terrible cheapo videos to promote them, which she would give out to the snarky media types she chauffered around. These little videos, which featured the Cabbage Patch-esque Terri wandering around bleak cityscapes like a little be-leathered baked potato, were dubbed from VHS to VHS (remember life before DVDs and Youtube?) and passed around media agencies until Ms Terri was something of a cult hit in such circles.

Then one day Marilyn Manson saw them, met Terri, and was so impressed by her sincerity that he hired her to play at his party and even open a show for him. Well, that's what Wikipedia says, I'd like to think that he was genuinely impressed and he wasn't just laughing at her some more, but in any case, she got another album and a greater cult following out of it, so I guess everybody sort of won.

Anyway I genuinely really like it, it's a good little new wave pop song, okay so not exactly in tune and bloody rough around the edges, but a catchy little song indeed.

I also think Jan deserves props for her sheer perseverence and chuzpah to keep doing what she loved, and not letting her looks, her lack of dollar or, let's face it, her slight trouble holding a note, hold her back.

Life

It's pretty rare that I read an article that makes me go 'yeeah!' in a inspired fist pump of agreement usually only employed by sports fans and winners of minor rounds of reality shows. This one by Sam Leith in the Guardian today, and his thoughts on working in an open plan office made me do just that. The affection, the bitching, the community...

.. the sad fact that 'you have nothing to lose except your life'

*sigh*

This is my real desk btw. But a while ago, I have added to the gonks since then.

Tom Cruise is a twat part 1,2339492048757

‘I grew up wanting to kill Hitler,’ Cruise says of his suitability for the part. (in Valkyere)

‘As a kid I would run around with a pretend gun playing games, acting out the war films we watched on TV. It was like, “Who is going to be the Nazi?” And it was never me. I always wanted to be the one who was going to get them.

Oh rightio, that would make me a shoo-in for George Bush Snr in the upcoming dramatisation of the Gulf War, which as a child I would occasionally attempt to re-enact with my brother.*

And oddly enough, as I was the older bossy one, I was always 'the Americans' while he was left being Saddam Hussein and lying dead on the floor in about five minutes. It's a bit of a stretch to say that 'I grew up wanting to kill Saddam Hussein', though. (The Chuckle Brothers on the other hand...)

I wonder what happened to the kids Tom used to play with who were all 'ooh! Ooh! Can I be the Nazis? Pleeeease?'?*Have I mentioned this already in this blog? I have the sinking feeling I might have done... Father in foreign news? Advance knowledge of world affairs but obviously not so much that I knew about the UN coalition? Well anyway, there you go, it's a nice little story anyhoo...

All that is wrong in the world today...

Intern plan to ease graduate woes

Students who are unable to secure jobs after leaving university may be offered paid internships for three months.

Well, not that bit, that bit is a good idea... the justification however:

Mr Denham told the paper: "At the end, they will be more employable, and some of them will get jobs. Employers won't want to let good people go.

"These are the children of the baby-boomers. They will be a very big group. What do we do with them? We can't just leave people to fend for themselves."

Err what? You would think we were a bunch of little fluffy baby chicks, not grown up people who are perfectly capable of work and independent thinking and stuff and ting like that.

The problem is that a load of us are lazy fucks who expect things to be handed to us on a plate and have never worked before university because our parents gave us free money, so have a non existence Curriculum Vitae, and yet believe we should walk straight into jobs editing Vogue or some other such shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit and freak out at the prospect of earning peanuts or working hard doing menial boring tasks on the road to getting there.

Get back to making the tea, bitches. If you're good, you'll get there one day.

Looks like a case for Detective Barnaby!

In the midst of a humanitarian crisis in the Gaza and an ecenomic recession in the UK, the Guardian comes over all Midsomer Murders.

Oh, and this is quite funny too but I nicked it off YepYep.

The Rock-afire Explosion - My New Favourite Band

..well, that and the creepiest thing I have seen all year. This might seem a rather glib thing to say on January 2nd, but I happen to be watching a tv show which compiles all the most popular Youtube clips of 2008. So actually I've already seen a pelican eat a pigeon and a dog having a wank. So there.

Aaanyway, from what I can gleam from Youtube and Wikipedia, the Rock-afire Explosion were an animatronic robot band (oh but of course!) that they had installed in lots of Shobiz Pizza Places across the US of A. I feel this demostrates both how seriously Americans take their pizza consumption experience, and how much damn space there is, that they could have a full sized robot band in every joint. And both these things make me jealous.



But yeah, now someone has funked up childhood nightmares, got robots to sing rude songs and put it on Youtube and of course the result is fabulous! There is quite a good Shakira one too you should check out as it includes cheeky inter-puppet banter.

Some places in America still have grimy fluff and latex covered robots to jerk around while you eat and haunt your dreams while you sleep, although with a new rubbish and more basic lineup. This is apparently because of process known as 'concept unification' which is a typically bullshit marketing phrase if ever I heard one, but thankfully one that has a hideous mid 90's video to go with it, which basically seeks to justify why a giant jerky Italian Chef isn't a weird choice of robot to put the kids at ease as they descend into obesity.



You might notice how I now am just linking things, rather than do my usual 'see it HERE'. Think of it as a supremely minor resolution for 2009. Aim small kids, avoid disappointment