My anti knife crime poster

---

Version 2. Version 1 had the word ‘use’. Carry sounds better.

---

Spanglox Sally the call centre robot takes a call

Spanglox is always there to help you. That’s why we have a customer care line for all of our products.

Spanglox is constantly being sued for damages. That’s why you can’t have the number.

My profile page now has an audio clip that gives a brief glimpse into the hard work our call centre robots do to provide you with complete product information.

Below you will find any tenuous links to claptrap I already spouted and should have buried deep within my psyche alongside the memory of those terrifying days I spent wandering around Skegness that one time.

The ads they’d love to make – Spanglox dishwasher detergent

---

I tried to post this on my Posterous three bastard times. It doesn’t seem to understand that an outgoing Googlemail address is the same as an incoming Gmal address. Bah!

---

A troika of pictures that I’m lumbering you with

In the jetstream of data that is the internet we are constantly buffeted by forces that threaten to send our blogs plummeting downward into the sea of forgotten sites below. Today, my passengers, we are shaping our metaphorical airframe for a burst of speed and lift. it won’t help of course,…but I’ve got all these buttons and levers here and I’m damn well going to use them all. Even the one marked ‘DO NOT PRESS’.

All that has nothing to do with what you are going to see below, which is just stuff I scanned, our took photographs of. I just wanted to pull some levers I’ve never used before.

Tayto don’t seem to make these any more. I wonder why? Oh, wait…it might be because because they sound like they taste of sweaty workman’s scrotum. Their Flash games and stuff on their website ( http://www.tayto.com) are fun though if you have had a series of devastating head injuries or are blind drunk. Fortunately, both applied to me when I visited. Five fucking stars, Tayto.

I should bloody well think so. I won’t tell you which branch of Thorntons I saw this in. Zero stars, Thorntons.

The day when the inkling I had that my workmates in my old firm didn’t like me became a certainty. Not really. I actually had to move it outside while we cleaned up a chalk outline and some blood. We had a tontine-style pension plan, so it got a little bit competitive at times.

---

Hey, I could have given you a big block of text instead.

---

I’d be the worlds worst bingo caller

I’m not very good at brevity. I also have a problem with preventing the mental artist who paints the mental pictures inside my head from embellishing them endlessly until what should be just a funny internal visualisation of an event, a tiny vignette perhaps, becomes a bloody trompe-l’oeil  triptych behind my eyes.

I’ve long suspected that this might hamper any real-world activities or professions that I might otherwise enjoy and excel at. So I tried to practice brevity and simplicity in the comfort of my own home using a time-honoured method.

I tried my hand at being a home-brew bingo caller.

Not wishing to lessen the experience any I made a bingo machine from a hairdryer (on cool) blowing into the bottom of a Rainy Day Cricket box with a straw sticking out of the top of it. With a disk pen and a magnifying glass I marked polystyrene bean-bag balls with numbers in accordance with the Gaming Act of 1968.

I wore a waistcoat. A spangly one I found in the attic. I did not fasten it however, as I have somehow put on weight in the twenty years since I wore it last.

Then I had to fashion a long tube for the bottom of the Rainy Day Cricket box (from a vacuum cleaner hose that I still own despite throwing out the machine years ago. No, I don’t know why) so that  the polystyrene balls would stop bouncing off the ceiling. Then I had to make a stand for the whole assembly from bent wire coat-hangers and blu-tack so that the hairdryer wouldn’t burn out or the box fall over. I considered giving up, but armed with the knowledge that my task was both onerous and completely fucking pointless I knuckled down. Magnifying glass at the ready, and thumb over the end of the straw I began.

Four seconds later (or thereabouts) the whole fucking shebang fell to bits. The Rainy Day Cricket box was seemingly unhappy with its new, dual role and flew apart at the seams - spewing my tiny balls everywhere.

So I emptied out (by which I mean ate) the contents of a box of miniature Coco Pops from a Kellogs Variety pack and tried again. Success! Hammering a lump of blu-tack flat on the desk as a bingo board that I could embed the balls in, I began to test my calling skills.

“Two identical positive pregnancy test pens that your youngest daughter has held up in front of her; at which she is looking back and forth in growing horror and panic – like a spectator at a tennis match being played by zombie strippers…eleven.”

Not good. I tried again.

“Sheila and Melanie over there by the bar – who between them have enough liquid grease surging through their veins to fry a thousand sausages and still have enough left over to lubricate all the moving parts of a fleet of ocean liners…eighty-eight.”

Hmmm. Okay, one more try.

“The act of coitus that involves you and your husbands lying top-to-tail and stimulating each others genitals orally…but lets face it ladies…they’re not getting any younger, so at some point you know you’re going to have to stick an unspecified number of fingers up their bums and stimulate the prostates within that have enlarged over the years - to the point where they now resemble a goat’s kneecap…sixty-nine.”

It was at this point that the realisation dawned that I wasn’t cut out for this line of work.

---

Next time: I’d be the world’s worst flotation device.

---

Hater – the word the internets loves

From shrieking teens to respected bloggers, the word ‘hater’ is all over the internet. Not with a qualifier before it. Just sitting there on its own.

Hater.

“You are a hater!!!!!!1”

“Its haters like you that make the internet a horrible place”

etcetera.

Take a look – in the comments of satire sites, in raging wars between fanboys of opposing gaming technology, everywhere.

At least lover means something (many things) on its own – but ‘hater’ is a lousy word.

Definition? Hater: Someone who hates.

Fuck that.

I loathe the word. It is pointless. It attempts to dismiss the opinions of those with whom  its user disagrees – without the need for a cogent argument against whatever the ‘hater’  is saying. It’s on my list of internet numbfuckery alongside ‘OMG’ and ‘WTF’.

So, for those who can’t stop using it, I’d like to consign you to ‘L’ over and over.

L       over

L     over

L    over

L   over

L  over

L over

Lover.

---

There. I feel much better now.

---

Nostalgiorgasm: The Sup of the Gods – Half and Half

I was sixteen years old. It was the summer of 1985. Kate Bush was still do-able, even though she kept running up hills away from us. Prince and Michael Jackson fought the chart-fight among the scattered gaudy shreds of New Romanticism. I still had lots of hair on my noggin and lamentably fine ‘tash bristles that would make a Baleen whale’s teeth look like mammoth tusks.

I was in a Working Men’s Club. It’s gone now, but back then it was still a hub of excitement, activity, ridiculous dance moves from the middle-aged and SERIOUS DRINKING. It was a family do – and like at all family do’s I just tried to keep my head down. I’d found a corner to wait for my then girlfriend and sat with my pint, quietly sipping it as I watched my kin – close and distant- celebrating a wedding in the traditional noisy way. I wasn’t alone for long.

Parting the revellers on a bee-line for my quiet table was a wizened apparition clutching two pint glasses close to his chest. Two pints of the darkest liquid I had ever seen that wasn’t Guinness. He reverentially set the twin pints down on beermats on the table and squeezed in next to me. A deep, grumble grew in his chest as his gap-toothed maw worked slowly on an invisible blockage. Eventually the grumbles became words, and he spoke to me.

“Son….son…son…sunna…sunna, man…sunna.” he said, insistently trying to get my attention.

“I fear thee ancient man in here.” I mumbled back at him. (Yes, I was just as much of a pretentious fuck then. I was just cuter with it.)

“Wha’?” he replied, his confusion turning his entire face into a knot of pallid flesh.

“Never mind, mate.” I responded, hoping to get this encounter over with. “What can I do for you?”

“Whatcha drinkin’?” he asked, nodding down at my pint a few more times than was necessary for me to understand the gesture. I think his head was loose or something.

“Trophy.” I replied quickly. Trophy Bitter was my tipple then and I loved it as much as someone who has never tried more exotic things loves their egg and chips.

“Try this man.” he wheezed. As he held the untouched dark pint up for me I noticed that he was already half way through the other, even though he’d only just started supping a minute or two ago.

Slightly afraid of this octogenarian shambling creature I complied…and had my young mind blown in a way that drugs would struggle to better years later. A rich, delicious, nutty, oaky, hoppy flavour flooded over my taste buds. You know they say milk is a food? Well so was this. Not thick, or over-heavy – just satisfying and somehow filling and warming at the same time.

“My God! What is this stuff?” I gasped, the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end. I licked the brew from my nanofilament tash hairs. They too were standing on end. If I’d taken the time to look at my pubes, I suspect that they – for an instant – would be poker straight. It was THAT good.

“It’s half and half.” he chuckled back, before succumbing to paroxysms of pleurisy-style coughing that would put an Elizabethan consumptive to shame. When he had recovered, he swigged down the rest of his pint and took the glass from me again. Still laughing, he took a deep draught. “Half Exhibition and half McEwans Best Scotch, sunna…and there’s nowt else like it.”

He was right. I’d tried Scotch on its own and liked it, but this was another thing altogether. This was fucking NECTAR. Somehow the Scotch had been transformed by the mix with Newcastle Exhibition Ale into a binary propellant that shot my senses into orbit. The shambler told me that it was a bit of an old man’s drink these days, but you could still ask for it in pubs and clubs and only the most clueless barman wouldn’t understand your desire.

“Trouble with it is,” he went on amiably “it either preserves yer forever or kills yer before yer fifty. There’s the wife now. I’m off to the bar. See yer later sunna.”

As he moved off into the crowd I shouted after him.

“I’m sorry, but I can’t remember who you are.” I explained sheepishly to this elderly gadgee who had opened my eyes to this amazing brew.

“I’m yer Uncle Bob’s first wife’s brother, Davey.” he informed me, not unkindly.

“But that would make you about…” I halted, unsure of my maths (and family tree too – I didn’t even know he had a first wife).

“Aye, sunna. I’m forty-six. See yer later.”

I sat there stunned. Just then my beautiful blonde beloved walked in and, after greeting my family, came over to me. Smooch greetings ensued and when we were done she asked me if I wanted anything from the bar seeing as she needed the loo.

“Yeah.” I said without hesitation. “Get me a pint of half and half. The barman’ll know what you mean.”

As she wandered back to me with the drinks, the Kershaws man came in the door behind her with his basket of cockles, mussels and assorted snacks.

My joy was complete and overwhelming.

---

They don’t make Exhibition any more….and yes, I wiped away a little tear when I finished this post

---

Reflections on the weaponisation of children

Pester power through your telly

Toys and games and foam bath jelly

Their idols shill for soft drink firms

Buy their crap on easy terms

 

The charities don’t think it funny

that doe-eyed kids beg for our money

Sad songs sung in monochrome

Battered, in a broken home

 

Adopt a puppy, horse or kitten

Look! They’re cute! Your kids are smitten

Open your wallet, sullen dad

The pets are actors, you’ve been had

 

“My dad smokes. I wish he’d stop”

“Mum buys gin from down the shop”

“The internet’s a dangerous place”

“Come on in and book my Face.”

 

Units. Cancer. Paedo fear

Legislate’s the way – it’s clear

CCTV in our schools

Comply! You must. These are the rules

 

Government. Charities. Companies. Stop using our fucking children against us. When they no longer listen to us, they will turn on you.

---

I’m reading Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man again. That’s what being cut out of the web 2.0 feedback loop will be like for some people: not being an Esper any more. Mind you, being completely immersed in it would be like demolition. Wiped of personality and uniqueness, but all your skills are left intact.

---