Amir Khan

Is it just me or is everything Amir Khan says a lot funnier if you assume he's talking about fisting?

"Every punch is hard."

Yeah, yeah, I bet it is.

Spam Goes All Mystic Meg

I've started getting spam e-mails which are either crazy predictions of things that may happen, or are actually spam e-mails from the future!

Afghan bombing kills President Bush
Elton John dies in rocket ship
Yahoo search shuts down for good
Cute dogs massacred in Texas
Girl takes down five guys

That's some crazy future. Although the last one might be porn. Maybe. I don't know.

Passport Fail

I was in the Post Office the other day, posting something (as you do). There was a man trying to hand in a passport form in the hatch next to mine, but either the photo or his letters were too big, and his form was rejected because the computer wouldn't be able to scan the form properly. I sorted my letter and I was about to leave he entered this sort-of mini-breakdown.

"I've done this form five times now, and every time there's something wrong with it," he whined, possibly on the verge of tears, "I've got a full-time job and I just can't be doing with this."

He continued, but I left quickly in case he went over the edge and 'did a mental' on everyone there. Thing is, how the fuck does he hold down a full-time job if he can't even fill in a relatively straightforward form properly? It can't be that hard, can it?

Maybe the forms have to be filled in in Swahili these days, what with the way our country's going, PC and all that, eh? EH?

Normal Service Is Resumed

My posting's been pretty irregular for a while now, largely because I've been busy preparing for exams. But my exams have finished today, so hopefully I'll be able to post with something approaching regularity now.

There is one thing relating to my exams I'd like to bring up though. Remember this post, where I laid into an advert for Kelloggs Nutri-Grain bars? Well I actually bought a multipack, intending to eat a couple before each of my exams in lieu of a proper breakfast. Anyway, the morning of my first exam I ate two bars and then went in to my exam. As the morning progressed I started to feel slightly ill and it was obviously because of the Nutri-Grain bars. As opposed to curing my twatting 'cakey pangs', they gave me cakey nausea! Suffice to say I have not eaten any further Nutri-Grain bars, nor will I ever do again. Shame on you Kelloggs.

More Spam

I just got a spam e-mail promising me that:

Emotional volcano is just a blink away!

That actually sounds pretty unpleasant, to be honest. Think I'll give it a miss.

Spam Gets Nasty

I opened my inbox today to find a spam e-mail had gotten though the filter. "You're a moron", the subject line read.

Fuck me, I thought, I'm being insulted by a spam e-mail? This must be a dark day for humanity.

It's pretty distressing when even spam e-mail apparently hates you. What next, spam e-mails that make nasty comments about your mother? Spam e-mails that say they wish you were dead? Spam e-mails that do a Chris Morris and use your computer monitor to create an electromagnetic field that simulates a punch in the face? Is this the dark path we're going down?

I think it is. We're all fucked. Fucked.

Out-of-context Quoting FTW

"I'm touching a very large piece of wood on my desk at the moment."
Noel Edmonds

The dirty fuck.

Weekend In York

So as I was saying in a previous post, I spent the weekend in York. York is a bit like my hometown, in that it'd be a much nicer place if they rooted out the few good eggs and shunted the rest of its inhabitants off to some sort of concentration camp. A good proportion of the population are chavs. I went in the local Tesco Express thing - it was small and dirty and was apparently having a no-uniform day. This made me chuckle since one of the staff was wearing this horrible fake-leopard-skin kind of thing and another looked like he'd auditioned for Blazin' Squad (or whatever the modern equivalent of Blazin' Squad is - I don't know what such a thing would be like but you'd probably have to have murdered several old women to get in it, kids today and all that) but failed.

Out of the remaining non-chav population, a further good proportion were irritatingly old. I've got nothing against old people but too many of them and you end up being reminded of your own mortality all the time. Plus they all had a kind of smug look that I didn't like the look of. Maybe I'm just overly judgemental.

So yeah, have those two groups of people put to death and York'd be lovely. The architecture's quite nice. Oh, and there's a weird purple statue thing. Yeah.

York is home to the National Railway Museum, which I obviously went to otherwise I wouldn't be talking about it (there's no point blogging about tourist attractions you haven't been to - down that way madness lies. Can you imagine it? 'Went to York for the weekend. Didn't go to York Castle. Didn't go to the Viking Centre. Didn't go to York Dungeon. Didn't go on the Yorkshire Wheel. What if... what if I never get to visit these places before I die?... All the experiences I'll never have... [cue quiet sobbing into hands]'. Yeah, not pretty, is it?)

Anyway, one of the attractions at the National Railway Museum is part of a bullet train from Japan. You can see it in the picture. You're able to go inside the carriage and you can even sit down in the carriage chairs and watch this little slideshow thing on a screen. Thing is most people in there, and this included me, ended up sat there stuck in a kind of melancholic trance. It was as if everyone in the drab plasticy cabin had forgotten that the train wasn't actually real. All the people were sat there with a look of expectation, as if they were expecting it to set off any minute. But it never did. There seemed to be an element of tragedy about the whole thing really. It's not even as if people were going there to have a sit down, there was seating everywhere.

Speaking of tragedy, there was a little shop dedicated entirely to Thomas the Tank Engine merchandise. Dear me, they've really ruined Thomas the Tank Engine. All of the toys are plasticy and shit compared to the ones I used to have, and the originals books are horribly overpriced. Browsing the wares there was like writing the word 'childhood' in big letters on a piece of paper and then having to watch as a businessman in a suit wrenches the paper away from you and shits all over it, before rubbing the piece of shitty paper in your face. Well... actually it was nothing like that, but you get my point.

I guess the moral of the story is that capitalism is rubbish because the end result of it is a load of chavs (using their consumer power to buy the 'wrong' things), nasty old people (who, in the olden days, would have been dead by now), depressing mass produced trains, and the rape of everything we held dear in our childhoods. Boo capitalism! Boo! Let's all live in fields and beat each other up with sticks. That'll be a better world to live in, right? Right?! No? Oh, alright then, have it your way. Cunt.

[Untitled 2]

Unfortunate duplicate use of abbreviation:


Brit smashes world record
Brit to get new image

In other news, I went shopping today and released it's quite fun to pretend that you're stalking a complete stranger when, in fact, by coincidence you're walking in the same direction.

One Year Old!

This blog's one year old today! Whoopty doo. It's also the 50th post. Two milestones in one. Anyway, to celebrate I thought I'd do yet another shark-jumping 'blog about the blog' post. Here are my top 5 posts from the blog's first year:

5: Filthy - Sunday, 30 December 2007

I've had more hits thanks to this post than any other, thus it gets on 'the list'. People like middle-age tits apparently.

4: (Untitled) - Monday, 23 April 2007

Because sometimes a grainy scan and a short, bitchy, caption says more than a thousand words.

3: Coke FUCKING Zero - Friday, 2 November 2007

Why can't all good things come without downsides? Like adverts - but without a bunch of self-righteous whiny tossbags with a disturbing resemblance to a neo-Nazi movement.

2: The Death Cult of E-CARDS - Saturday, 24 March 2007

OMG!!! E-cards give you cancer!!! No, no they don't, fuck off Daily Mail.

1: Everyone Loves Stickers - Friday, 12 January 2007

People seemed to respond to VHS stickers. A bit like Lady Di, but with mass produced stickers. Thus this is No. 1.

A-Blog Year One - The Statistics

795 Visits
488 Absolute Unique Visitors
1,270 Page Views

And that's my self-indulgent tramp-fest over with. Hope you've enjoyed the blog and continue to do so.

New Year and Coast

Happy new year and all that. I was watching BBC1 when the 'event' occurred. Watching the fireworks at the London Eye on the telly is a bit of a tradition for me. This year they were spoiled slightly by continually changing camera angles (I just want to see the fireworks, not random plebs and men on boats inexplicably clad in outfits festooned with fairy lights) and the ramblings of Blue Peter dancing Welshman, Gethin Jones. Gethin made an effort at producing some kind of commentary but clearly had nothing to say, something that he admitted afterwards.

I was strangely irritated by Gethin's expressions of good will towards the nation. "Hope 2008 is a great year for you all," he may have said (I can't actually remember his exact words). I was just sat there thinking: "You don't care whether I live or die Gethin. You don't even know I exist. You insincere shit".

This relentless positivity that the TV people seem to think we want rammed down our throats is getting right on my fucking nerves. I was watching Coast on BBC2 yesterday and that managed to irritate me as well. I just got sick of the constant "wow, looking at this bit of coast has turned this into the best day of my life" and "this bit of coast is possibly the most beautiful bit of coast in the country". This latter phrase is so overused that apparently half the fucking coast of Great Britain is competing for the title of "prettiest bit of sand and rock and shit that happens to be next to the sea". Why can we not have an episode of Coast where the guy goes somewhere a bit mediocre and goes "hmm, well this is an average bit of coast. Not a great bit of coast at all. I've seen better bits of coast"? It might not make great telly but you could cut the bits about shit bits of coast down to a minute or so and have them interspersed throughout the show. Then it might, y'know give a bit of context to the lovely bits of coast. It might also give the presenters a chance to calm fucking down. Some of them get so wound up about lovely bits of coast that I worry they might explode.

I was going to do an 'awards' post at the end of last year with my best film and TV programme and shit like some other people have done. I forgot, but don't feel disappointed for I shall reveal my favourites now:

Best Film of 2007
Zodiac
(Comedy: Hot Fuzz)

Best TV Programme of 2007
Boy A
(Comedy: Peep Show/Mock the Week)

Best Book of 2007
Probably Harry Potter 7 by virtue of the fact that it was the only book I remember reading this last year that was actually released in 2007
(Humour: Confessions of a Chatroom Freak)

Best Video Game of 2007
Super Mario Galaxy - Wii

Some exchanges

In a shop:

MAN: Five pounds of top-up please.

SHOP GUY: That'll be five pounds please.

No shit.

On the Wall of the Facebook group "Jeremy Clarkson should be Prime Minister":

Alex Camponi:
Jez is the man. He can have my sister - and she's fit too

Greg Coward:
u just called ur sister fit?

I fear for humanity.

Demonic Castle

I got an e-mail today from an online import CD store about a random Japanese clothing label. The press release bit made me chuckle though:

Deorart is a gothic and gothic/punk fashion brand known for its appearances in popular visual kei magazines. Conceived for the concert club, Deorart clothing presents alternating dark and light facets for an edgy, stylish look.

Imagine a demonic castle where each room is draped in either skeletons or angels--this location lurks in the hearts of their designers and serves as the source for their designs. Just look at Deorart's angel-wing logo for proof.

Demonic castle? There isn't really anything I can add to that.

Random Shite

I just got sent an e-mail from HMV with the subject line: "Go all the way with Jonny". What? I... I don't even know who Jonny is. Why the fuck would I want to go "all the way" with him? That's... that's just wrong. Ugh.

Anyway, I was just watching a bit of that Leave Us Kids Alone on BBC3, and one of the parents said of their teenagers: "He's like a one-man idiot". Um... what? How... how does that work? Are idiots normally Siamese twins or split-personality sufferers or something? I... I don't understand.

Oh, also today, I went into a lecture to find that someone had left an big empty bottle of vodka stuff on the floor:

That must have been a fun lecture for somebody.

Oh, and some news hot off the press - tonight a man wandered into our front yard and cut the wire off the discarded freezer lying there. He then wandered off with his prize. Bizarre.

(Untitled)

Here's a scan of an article from my local paper:

No. No it is not.

The Spy Who Loved Mutilated People

The other day, for some odd reason, I remembered the talk we’d been given before work experience back when I was in secondary school. The talk pretty much went along the lines of:

“Well, I have a friend who lost his hand because he didn’t listen to the supervisor when he was doing his work experience and had it minced by the meat grinder,”

...and:

“I have a friend who had his face reduced to a bloody pulp because he didn’t wear his mask while he was doing his work experience and had it flayed by the box-making machine.”

Her message didn’t really get through to me because I was sitting there thinking: “Where the fuck did you get all these friends, you bizarre woman?”

I mean seriously, is that what she spends all her spare time doing, going into pubs scouting out all the mutilated people she can get her hands on? Does she see a guy in the street with a stump instead of a hand and go: “Ooh! A mutilated guy, I think I’ll go and befriend him!” Then, when she finds out he had it amputated because of some kind of horrible malignant hand-tumour and not because of a work-experience accident, she stops returning his calls and it all ends up with him outside her house shouting: “Why won’t you talk to me anymore?” and her leaning out of a first-floor window screaming: “You weren’t injured during work experience! I don’t need you! Get away from my house you fucking cripple!”

Perhaps she spends her evenings on YouTube looking for CCTV footage of horrible workplace accidents to satisfy her insatiable mutilation-based desires. Then again, perhaps she only gets off on it if it happens to teenage boys. The fucking peado.

These people make me sick.

Everyone Loves Stickers

I wasn't going to do a blog entry today but I had an empty hour. Ho hum.

There's some programme on the TV right now, where a random woman's bitching about carrots. "Call these carrots?" she says, among other similar comments. What do you think you're presenting woman, the Carrot Factor? Because you aren't and you should really shut the fuck up.

Anyhoo, back to business. I found this set of stickers that came with a VHS cassette and they made me laugh. Here's a scan:

The dad's my favourite. Who the fuck looks like that? I fear for the children because their dad's obviously a total paedophile. And if you look at the woman you can see the secret plea for help from a woman who has to spend every evening in her husband's secret sex torture dungeon. She even looks as if she's wearing some kind of odd school uniform fancy dress outfit.
"Do I have to wear this again Jeremy?"
"Yes! And I told you, call me Adolf."
"Daddy, why is Mummy wearing a school uniform?"
"WHAT ARE YOU TWO DOING IN HERE? I TOLD YOU TO GET IN THE CUPBOARD!"
I mean look at the pretty blonde children, sitting there like a Nazi's wet dream. Bet they have blue eyes. Or the neo-fascist dad makes them wear coloured contacts. Perhaps they have to bleach their hair. Y'know sometimes I wonder if I should get a life, but then I realised that over analysing the stickers from a video tape is much more fun than living. Stop looking at me like that.

My greatest achievement today was completing the free activities that came with my Scooby-Doo advent calendar. Look!

I made Scooby's face out of the doors from the days during Hollyoaks and then I made the Mystery Machine while I was watching Project Catwalk with my Mum. Aren't I clever?

Meanwhile I did fuck all work on my very important and soon-to-have-to-be-handed-in essay. Shows where my priorities lie.