A week and a half ago I gave up drinking. My reward has been three days of ludicrously high fevers, stomach cramps, and pains just about everywhere else. Thanks body. It’s probably all of the grapefruit and sodas I’ve been forced to drink in pubs.
Thankfully recent developments in non-penicillin antibiotics have provided me with a disturbingly rapid cure. You never remember how bad being ill feels until you’re ill again. Even now I can’t remember anything beyond lying in bed and moaning, yet at the time I know I just wanted to curl up and die.
Where was I going with this ? I don’t know. Sorry.

Excuse the titles of these blogs but after watching a hilarious sharkjumper of a Quincy episode today (“Next Stop, Nowhere”) I’ve decided to use Quincy episode titles for a while.
God I really should get some sleep and stop spouting this drivel.

Since the nauseating backslapping festival that was Blair’s last appearance in parliament, there has been a relentless parade of documentaries on TV about him and his legacy. It’s quite tedious but I’ve been watching them all to help me remember what a messianic loony he was; time is a great healer and I don’t want that wound scabbing for a while. It’s been working too.
Tonight BBC2 aired the first part of a TV adaptation of Ali Campbell’s diaries and it really did shock me. I’d expected it to be a load of self-pitying crap covered in a coating of sugary lies but it wasn’t. It was certainly self-pitying and I suspect much of it was creatively embellished (especially the emetic descriptions of Princess Diana), but I was genuinely surprised by how blatant he was concerning Blair’s ruthless, single-minded, desire for power. He openly severed all links with Labour’s socialist core so he could get power. And Labour lapped it up, most of them anyway. The few dissenters such as Scargill looked as bemused and shocked by what was going on as I feel now looking back on it.
A quote I don’t remember hearing at the time summed it up nicely.

“Power without principle is barren, but principle without power is futile. This is a party of government and I will lead it as party of government.”

Blair said it, and Labour applauded! They should have had him sectioned! It sounds like a quote from Mussolini! Soon after that, he got elected. By people like me! Why ? Why did we do it ? I can honestly only think of one reason, and that is because we hated the tories so much we would have done anything to get them out. Deep down we still believed that because Blair was flying the Labour flag (ok, rose) it would still, somehow be ok. I’m so ashamed but at least, in my defence, by the time of the second term I’d realised he was insane, Labour was dead, and didn’t even consider voting for him. What was everyone else thinking though ?
That quote alone should have been enough to scare everyone away. The logical conclusion of that statement is that power is all that matters; even if it involves putting puppies in blenders. What is the point of another party standing against the incumbents if they have no differing principles ?
Ironically (or maybe not), ITV2 showed one of my favourite films, Election, straight afterwards. It’s a film about morals, ethics, corruption and the blind pursuit of power. Hmm.

Have you ever seen a fast food flyer as scary and unappetising as this one (click the picture to see it) ? It looks like the sort of place that would give you a family bucket for use after the meal. You can just imagine the arguments they were having about which of the many varied deep-fat-based delicacies would best represent their establishment

“Pizza is all very well but it doesn’t accurately reflect our full range of culinary expertise! I think we should put the kebabs on the front as well.”
“But what about the burgers ? People like burgers!”
“And the chips!”
“And the fried chicken – don’t forget the fried chicken!”
“And the ice cream for the ladies, don’t forget the ladies”
“Sod it, lets put everything on”

Kebabs, burgers, pizza, chips, fried chicken, fizzy crap drinks, garlic bread, ice cream and oodles of mayo, all bundled together in an huge, emetic, pile. It would have been so much simpler to go outside their “restaurant” at 4am on a Sunday and take a photo of the pavement. I honestly think this flyer could be the cure for obesity in this country – just force all obese people to sit and stare at this for ten hours and they’ll start craving green salads in no time.
If you’ve seen a worse one, send it over to me.

Update!
As if to illustrate the point about The Wankers Edge, here is a Slashdot story about a twat who is disappointed to find that his brand new $500 iPhone doesn’t work with 64-bit Windows!

QED

I wonder if it’s this guy ?

A while ago I blogged about so-called early adopters, how mind-meltingly dim they are and how grateful I am for their dedication to lowering the price and helping fix faults in new technologies.

A colleague and I were discussing this the other day and came up with an expression to describe the area of technological developments in which they reside. We already have “The Cutting Edge” and “The Bleeding Edge”, but this is where the developers and engineers live; people who are actually working on the technology. Just behind them is the zone where new technologies are made available to the public on day zero, for vast amounts of money, together with badly thought out designs, bugs and flimsy cases that take several revisions to fix: this is The Wanker’s Edge.

The Wankers Edge is where you’ll find products like:

• The first releases of Windows Vista/XP/98/95/3/2.x
• Blu-Ray/HD-DVD drives
• The first version of the iPhone/iPod
• All HTC mobile phones (yes I do own one)
• DAB radio
• MacOS 10.0/10.1

It’s also the area where all of the ‘extreme’ twats hang out with their gigawatt solid-gold car stereos, sub-woofers that need munitions-licences before they can be operated in public, and overclocked PCs that need industrial refrigeration units.

SpyBlog is rightly questioning the purpose of the MI5 Terrorist Threat Level. How are we supposed to react exactly ? According to every trite government statement the answer is for us all to be “extra vigilant” but of course that advice is as hollow and meaningless as the government ministers that spout it.
Also, and I may be wrong about this, the increase in threat levels seem to follow explosions and bomb discoveries rather than precede them – wouldn’t that be more helpful ? As it stands, anyone with access to the news could have the job of setting the threat level. If a bomb gets discovered raise it. If nothing happens after a few weeks, drop it again. It’s almost as if the security services have as little idea about the actual threat as the public.
In the 70s and 80s, especially in London, the terrorist threat was almost exactly the same as now, with the possible exception of deliberate suicide bombers. Bomb scares regularly helped mask the crapness of London Transport and occasionally something would blow up. The idea of being scared about it is utterly ridiculous to me and always will be. It’s like worrying about being hit by a meteorite.
Regardless we will all be forced to endure many more government spokespeople banging on about “defiance”, “vigilance” and “serious threats” for the next million weeks.

Meanwhile in my personal life many significant, and in some cases tragic, events have coincided that have forced me to start making some serious life decisions. I don’t want to blog about them yet…sorry I mentioned it really.

Today was the first day this week that I went into the office. All of my colleagues, bar one, decided that this would be the perfect day for them to work at home. Hmm. Oh well – suited me. Not only did I get a shit load done, have a superb lunch but I also got into the Salmon Dance q.v. the new Chemical Brothers album (w/ Fatlip). Michele agrees on the high ODR (Objective Defness Rating) – let me know what you think.

Incidentally, RockBox gets better and better. Not only can you listen to fresh (i.e. definitely not wack) sounds on the way to work, but you can play tetris at the same time and then miss your stop.

P.S.
Nice one Alex 🙂

10 years ago today Michele and I got married. This is quite a shocking realisation but really quite a pleasant one.
No diamonds, cars, holidays in the Caribbean for us though; we went to London Zoo and then to a really rather good Korean restaurant in Soho.

London Zoo gets better every time I visit it. Not just because I notice more stuff there either, but because it actually gets better. As a couple of born-again bird nuts it was perfect! Parrots galore, birds of prey, owls, vultures, penguins, flamingos, pelicans and…herons. In fact the herons weren’t invited but came anyway. Loads of them. We’re used to seeing starlings and sparrows in abundance but really, the Herons were everywhere. Now, Michele and I love herons, especially their stealthy hunting techniques but today we were reminded about the real nature of nature. Around the pelican area is a little moat, in which was a mother duck with her beautiful new born babies, another bunch of uninvited interlopers. Like a bunch of tragic losers we ran up to the edge in order to coo over the little fluffsters. A member of the occupying force of herons was also in the enclosure and our excitement seemed to induce a similar feeling within him, and he came over to have a look. He came, he saw, he deftly plucked up a perfectly formed baby duck in his considerable bill and sat back to enjoy his meal. All observers were shocked and we exchanged amazed glances while Michele went to sit down and try not to be sick.
Mrs duck was obviously not happy and gave the heron a serious set of pecks and attacks but, being a heron, he wasn’t too bothered. No, all he was worried about was trying to stop his lunch escaping. Despite her best efforts, Mrs duck failed to redeem her baby and reluctantly went back to the moat where her surviving children were all huddled together in a fluffy, frightened, ball.
Me and the other rubberneckers were trying, pathetically, to persuade the Heron to drop his pathetic, beautiful, wiggling catch. But he didn’t, maybe he didn’t speak English. He ate it. Whole.
Michele was on the bench, head in hands, feeling faint.
This wasn’t part of the Zoo experience but to me it was very valuable. Loving birds is all very well, but you need to harden if you’re going to remain sane. Nature is violent and as full of tragedy as it is joy.
Later on we watched an astounding display of birds-of-prey and applauded enthusiastically, despite the fact the birds were being encouraged to perform their amazing feats with the promise of mouse-nuggets (as yet unavailable at KFC…officially). What a couple of hypocrites eh ?

After the Zoo, we went, via a pint in the John Snow and a visit to a record shop in Soho, to Ran.

Ran is the first Korean restaurant I’ve ever been to and it knocked me over. Ever since my first visit I’ve wanted to return and to take Michele. The return visit was just as good. Each table has an in-built gas barbecue on which we cooked beautifully marinated beef and scallops. We also had ribbon beef sashimi, which is raw beef with pears and a raw egg on top…ok we may get tapeworms and food poisoning but by cack it was worth it.

In all it was a wonderful day. But the sad thing is that I know we can only do it now because we have money. How the fuck people are supposed to visit the zoo with a family when it costs 16 quid a go is a mystery to me. It always reminds me of Keep the aspidistra flying where he becomes so annoyed with money’s influence on any experience in life that he gives up everything.
As Max Miller said,

“Whether you’re rich or whether you’re poor,
it’s good to be rich.”

A beautiful example of why I hate lawyers and the law in general can be found in this supposedly humourous exchange between two twats. Now, this has been posted all over the Internet, because it features a lawyer making lame legal threats that turn in to threats of physical violence. All very amusing I’m sure you’ll agree. Especially as we witness the protagonist slicing through the threats with his huge purple-veined sword of superior legal knowledge and massive stature…not to mention his mad martial arts skills…ffs.

In reality, this story is nothing more than a public cock-flexing competition between two morons. We are supposed to read this, sneering and laughing at this pathetic lawyer’s impotence and applauding the righteousness exuded by our hero. But hold on, making impotent legal threats and being an obnoxious bastard is what being a lawyer is all about! That’s what they do. That’s why we should kill them all.
But I contest that worse than lawyers are those that encourage them and egg them on, like our hero TJIC.
Stop it you gormless cretin! And while we’re on about it, what sort of fuckwit calls himself an anarcho-capitalist ? That’s a contradiction in terms! If that wasn’t damning enough, he also claims to be a catholic. And armed. On the same page. How very righteous.

What more fitting tribute to the great (in the sense of grossly fat) man Bernard Manning could there be than an obituary in the Daily Mail penned by that equally odious glutton Michael Winner.

It seems we (me and the rest of the loony left) are wrong about what’s funny and what isn’t! No wonder we all hate him, Manning and Jim Davidson; it’s simply because we don’t understand humour and common sense!

Winner explains by using a simple example:

“When Lenny Henry, one of our wonderful black comics, started out, he had a terrific line in his act.”

he slobbered.

“He’d say: ‘If you don’t laugh, I’ll come and live next door to you.’ Funny, funny, funny. Later, I seem to remember Lenny apologising for that. Silly, silly, silly.”

You see, that’s funny! Jokes about black people moving next door to you! That’s what makes people with common sense, for example readers of the Mail, laugh isn’t it? And all the time they’re laughing, Lenny is being appreciated.

Meanwhile, all we joyless, ignorant, unrealistic, lunatics on the left have to keep us happy is humourless PC sourness.

One of the funniest things I’ve read recently, which means it must be an example of this PC rubbish, was in my favourite magazine: Viz. They had a competition to give away a pound coin to the first thousand readers who wrote in and admitted to wanking into Michael Winner’s food, whilst working as restaurant staff. The highlight was someone who didn’t have time to wank into his soup and was astounded when it was returned to the kitchen because it “tasted funny”.

See, not funny at all.

Muwhahahahahahahahahahahahaha!