What this blog isn't

It's not a Leeds-based exploration of the joys and challenges of shaping the mortar between house-bricks so that the rain runs off without undue damage.
Nor is it about looking at, achieving, or maintaining erections of the male variety. That's what the rest of the internet is for.
It's also not about drawing peoples' attention to the beauty of the Aurora Borealis by indicating it with an extended forefinger
It probably isn't SFW[Safe For Work] either (especially if you work in a church) thanks to the liberal sprinkling of profanities, heresies and blasphemies.

Friday, August 31, 2007

Future archaelogists. The bastards...

I sometimes worry about future archaeologists finding our landfill sites, and them standing there in their pristine fusion-powered eco-friendly future.

Just standing there. Judging us.

The bastards.

I hope it’s not too far removed from now, just long enough for the bin bags to still be intact. We might fool them into thinking a landfill was the nest of some monstrous creature that stalked the lands, eating god knows what and shitting out huge shiny black pellets - the remains of their hapless prey. Whatever it was.

Envisage these archaeologists there, unshaven and groggy, and finally at work – having been dragged out of their bed in a cheap and cheesy floating motel – their polygamic future marriages at breaking point due to the stress of this project. These mystery creatures that roamed around in the early 21st century, (mostly in the north, funny that), and they didn’t even have the decency to leave a skeleton behind when they died.

The bastards.

Project head, Froop, turns to his assistant Goyp3 and barely notices that he’s picking the shreds of one of Ma Sappho’s self-inflating, self-destructing artificial sex mutants (non-kosher, may contain traces of nuts) from his pyjamas, having slept among the bin bags. He says he’s trying to get a feel for the creature, trying to know it.

His wives have kicked him out as well.

Froop says, “What did it eat? What did it eat? Our millions of binbag simulations every single minute in our fantastic future computer - you know, the one in my hip - all average out at the same basic prey. It's skeleton was mostly composed of two-litre Tango bottles, AOL CDs and rock-solid man-sized tissues. It’s blood was probably alcopop, as was the creature’s, and the only actual faeces we could find was wrapped in these bulging white parcels with cute pictures on them.”

He is beside himself with frustration and fear. “What is it we’re dealing with here? What if there is an enclave of them somewhere underground, or one waiting to be thawed out of the last iceberg at the North Pole Ice Museum? What will we do?”

His assistant tries to calm Froop, mainly because Goyp3 has only just replaced his clone-brother Goyp2 after the boss pushed him out of the window of some cheesy floating motel. “Relax, chief. We would probably hear it taking a shit from the next continent. Even if I was a massive beast, I wouldn’t want to pass some of those. They’re frequently pointy and nearly always dry on the outside. This one’s got an armchair in it, man!”

Well I suppose they’ll have it better than their descendants will. If we wait a thousand years there’ll be a good head of flammable gases building up under there, and the minute they stick their futuristic equivalent of a spade into the ground, the entire top half of the country will probably explode.

Hang on, though. I’m prepared to give our predecessors credit where credit’s due. What if the Victorians or the Romans hoped the same thing would happen to us all those years ago?

The bastards.

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Learn from the past. Go on, there's loads of it!

Despite my frankly idyllic lifestyle, I find myself perturbed that I may be missing out on some of the more prosaic yet welcome aspects of a normal life. Specifically relationships. I see my friends all pairing off as they get older - engaged, married, murder-suicide. That kind of thing.

Withers is always here of course; and most of the time he is in good spirits and therefore good company, barring the occasional apoplectic raving about his dwarven hermaphrodite daughter and her unseemly love of wearing monocles in entirely the wrong orifices. But helpmeet, companion and oft-time card table that he is, he's still no substitute for the love of a good woman.

So to comfort myself in moments of solitude and loneliness I have taken to reading a lot of history books. Very liberating and reassuring; mainly because their lives were so unfortunate that we don't even have a suitable yardstick to measure how badly they had it any more.

The fear of growing old alone in the twenty-first century diminishes because you know that in the past you weren’t very likely to grow old at all. If you didn’t die of an horrific condition (usually dubbed something like 'Dead Man’s Mandeath') when you were a child or a teenager, then when you did meet someone, you didn’t have to worry if they were going to have an affair, or if your marriage would be happy and lasting - because you’d both be riddled with the same Dead Man’s Mandeath you escaped dying of a couple of years back.

Also, learning from the past makes a decision like which mobile phone, car or even toaster to choose very, very easy...

BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL WITCHCRAFT, DEVILTRY AND SORCERY!

There I am at the showroom, and the salesman asks, “What are you looking for in a car then, sir?”

-Well…I’m looking for one that won’t assume its true form on the M1 when I’m taking the kids to Alton Towers.

-Have you got one that won’t imperil my mortal soul with sweet entreaties and false miracles?

-How many manifestations to a gallon do you get?

-Can I get it in red?

See? Easy! Now it's off to eat boiled pork from a plate in the form of a weevil-infested flat-cake before the King's tax collectors take all I have to pay for his crusade in the Holy Land.

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

US loses 190,000 guns in Iraq. Blames dog and runs out of the house, slamming the door

I have to give our wayward colony credit here - technically they themselves did not fuck up this time. No, instead AK-47's issued to Iraqi police and army personnel have gone missing.

It's not like losing a textbook at school - no deadline to find it otherwise your parents would be asked to buy another, and in the meantime here's the tatty one with the odd-smelling sticky mass plastered across the front cover. These are guns. Death-sticks with only one use. They're fuck-all good for opening tins or changing the channel on the television set or easing the misery of contact dermatitis. You'd think they'd be more careful, what with them being good at war and that.

-Where's the guns we gave you guys yesterday?

-Sir, our dog ate it.
-Sir, it's in my mate's bag and he hasn't come in today.
-I thought we were doing hand-to-hand today sir.
-Sir, my mam washed it and it wasn't dry in time.

-Never mind, men - we've got millions of the god-damn things lying around. Just get another one and get ready for inspection.