Chuckles

If You Liked This...

2011-01-08T12:47:00.000Z

... you might want to check out the new thing I started. It's easier to write. I might even post regularly.

Yawn

2010-10-23T03:27:00.001+01:00

Chuckles finally rose to prominence yesterday as the subject of this letter to the Independent. Unfortunately, it wasn't printed. I have, however, acquired a copy and reproduce it here for your perusal.

Sir,

It was with great satisfaction that I received news this morning that the widely unread weblog Chuckles is to finish, and not before time. I mean, it was just getting worse and worse, wasn't it? And it was never terribly good to begin with. The posts were too long, the humour (if you can call it that) increasingly puerile, and the ridiculous stylistic conceit which the author insisted on - well, he was always going to paint himself into a corner with that, wasn't he?

But what went wrong? Anyone would've thought that our new government, Tory in all but name, would breathe fresh life into this bloated corpse of a blog. Maybe, but allow me to put forward my own theory.

Let's look at the blog's main thrust in its supposed 'heyday'. Started proper in the final, dying years of the Labour government, its apparent aim was to draw attention to the doublespeak and duplicities of a party that was supposed to be the 'good guy' in the old Westminster duopoly. Where bad things were done in the name of good, Chuckles was there to suggest less noble motives.

But then control was seized by a party which is not only quite self-evidently callous and dishonourable, perhaps even psychopathic, but which appears to revel in the fact. Well, then, what was there for Chuckles to do? Of course, there were a few weak, half-hearted posts saying things like: "ooh, cuts! Bad!" But who needed to be made aware of that? What, frankly, was the point?

So, after watching it limp heartbreakingly through its final few months, the author decided it was time to let go. And I doubt it was an easy decision to make, but I can assure him that it was the kindest thing to do.

I expect he wishes to thank you, you few who actually made the effort to read his drivel. And how very indulgent you all are. You must be saints.

For those of you seeking further punishment - perhaps you're trying to atone for some terrible doing in a former life: a drowned childhood pet, a drunken dalliance with a sibling - he continues to post, under the name of Gainsbourg, at the otherwise excellent spEak You're bRanes, and he's also recently embarked on what will doubtless prove to be another ill-starred attempt at a blog of his own: Scurferens.

Yours sincerely,

Buzz's Dad

Bye.

Chuckles Review Of 2009, Part 4b

2010-10-23T01:50:00.000+01:00

And then a bunch of other shit happened. The end.

One Eye Open. Coated In A Thick, Slimy Membrane

2010-09-23T23:26:00.001+01:00

Hello, cunt oik bastards.

A lot of people say to me, "George, millions are going to lose their jobs. Families, lives will be torn apart as a direct consequence of your actions. How do you sleep at night?"

And I laugh. I laugh in their faces, their poor, ugly faces, smeared in chicken grease, I laugh in them and I say, "you are very stupid."

Look, you sort of voted for us. Us, the Conservative Party, you voted for us. We bring misery to millions, that's what we do, we're the Conservative Party. What did you expect? I promised fairness. I didn't say to whom that fairness would apply. You assumed I meant the poor. My conscience, such as it is, remains clear.

But listen: it's not all bad. The pain will only be temporary, I assure you, in the wider view of things. Let's say, for example, that I were to cut off your legs. That would make you sad, wouldn't it? You would be sad boys and girls, sad, legless boys and girls, hahaha, kick them in their faces and run away, they'll never catch you!

But you mustn't be sad! Because other people will still have legs. And other people will continue to be born with legs. And in fact, the empty space where once your legs stood, now there is room for one more legged person, albeit a small one. And that is what economists call growth, and that is what we have set out to achieve.

It's time to face facts, and what better time for me to demonise whole swathes of society than when you're all clinging, desperate and cowardly, to the crumbling remains of the lives you once knew, prepared to cut loose anyone you believe will drag you down further? Let's face those facts, once and for all smash the manacles of political correctness with which the last government enslaved us, and grasp the glorious truth: the poor are useless. They are disgusting. They smell. They constantly expel wind from various orifices. They spend the vast majority of their lives on the toilet. They are mean, grasping and lazy, growing fat on the fruits of your labours. They sacrifice children.

A privatised nation! A corporatocracy! Our social inferiors, who once held us so ruthlessly to ransom, sat masturbating and hooting by the roadsides, beating each other to death with bloody thigh bones! Upturned cars! Derelict estates ruled by barking packs of feral children! Human meat! Miles and miles of burning wasteland, punctuated by gleaming pockets of wealth and commerce! High-end consumerism! Fine dining! Urban streets free of all but the highest achievers! This is your future! This is our vision! You will flourish or you will die!

Necessity is the mother of getting to do things the way we like.

Junt

2010-07-21T22:32:00.000+01:00

Jeremy Hunt, Secretary of State for Culture, Olympics, Media and Sport...

... done a massive shit in the doorway of the Tate Modern!
... poked a hole in the mouth of the woman in Lucien Freud's Girl With A White Dog and shagged it!
... done big trumps and burps into a loudhailer all the way through a performance of fucking Stockhausen's Licht cycle!
... dressed an Antony Gormley figure as a slag!
... stuck the pages of Ballard's Wind From Nowhere together with cum!
... set fire to a load of community arts centres with a burning cross!
... melted down Louise Bourgeois' Maman to make a giant bronze cock to punch a big hole in the British Library! Then he shagged the hole!
... got crabs then shagged all the birds at an 'urban' music event!
... shagged culture to impress his boss! But he didn't shag sport, because that, apparently, has been great, recession-busting value for money!

Haha! Of course, none of this happened. You see, Jeremy Hunt isn't actually a real person, but a cartoonish Tory stereotype.

Godse

2010-07-11T05:26:00.004+01:00

Schism!

You heard right. The Church of England is once again tearing itself apart over homosexuals and women. All in the space of a single week, gay (but - fear not! - celibate) cleric Jeffrey John's nomination for the bishopric of Southwark was leaked to the press, prompting a powerful lobby of conservatives to block his candidacy (having previously thwarted a similar promotion in 2003), whilst the thorny issue of female bishops had Church leaders sitting awkwardly with cushions in their laps at this weekend's General Synod.

We approached two prominent holy men from opposite ends of the divide, stripped them down, oiled them up, locked them in a cage and demanded they fight to the death. Unfortunately, they just talked instead, so we shot them. Not before we wrote down what they had to say, however.

Dr Rowan Williams
Archbishop of Canterbury
What do I think? Who knows? I appear to be an educated, progressive sort, saying things like, "no Anglican has any business reinforcing prejudice against LGBT people, questioning their human dignity and civil liberties or their place within the body of Christ," but then I do keep pandering to these spluttering conservatives, don't I? You know what I claim to stand for, but you don't have the faintest idea whether or not I actually do. Which is just how I like it. I have the respect of the liberal secularists, with none of the risks that that would usually entail. And as long as I'm Archbishop, no-one will ever know whose side I'm really on. Moral courage is all very well for the likes of Our Lord Jesus Christ, but then he didn't have anything to lose.

Dr Tom Wright
Bishop Of Durham
Many have said that the Church has no place in 21st century Britain. My fellow weaselly conservative bigots and I agree wholeheartedly. Which is why we are doing everything in our power to drag it back into the 19th century. Dr John's supposed celibacy really means very little as long as he insists on being open about his sexuality. If he'd only had the decency to remain, as they say, 'in the closet', then quite frankly, he could be buggering dead boys with a crucifix for all we care, and doing it with a mitre on his head. Openness or cock, that's the choice that every gay cleric must make as he enters the Church, and Dr John chose openness. He made his bed, and now he must lie in it, alone and frustrated. As for women, we can just about accept them as a half-hearted concession to modernity in order to confuse the liberals, but they have absolutely no place in the higher echelons of the Church. A woman is a tool, a thing for bishops to feign happy marriages with when they're not sneaking off for midnight walks in parks and public conveniences. She is unworthy of our respect. She cannot be trusted. She is dirty, the Fall of Man, the original sinner. I hate her. Why was she never there? Too busy fucking Uncle Archie to breastfeed, I suppose.

Letter From America

2010-07-08T23:43:00.005+01:00

Dear Prime Minister

Jesus, can you goddam British not just keep a lid on your fucking state secrets for a few decades? Listen, we know you guys have recently seized power and you want to make a new start, wipe the slate clean, sure, we understand that. But, y'know, hello? Like, Geneva Convention?

Seriously, we're furious at you guys. What the fuck are you thinking? What, so justice for a few limey terrorists who've been hung by their wrists from leather straps for a few hours each day is worth sacrificing the integrity of the United States of America? We've got a reputation to uphold. We're the leaders of the free world. We have values. What's everyone going to think when they see evidence that less conscientious regimes have been pulling out people's fingernails on our behalf? We can't use torture ourselves. We can't outsource torture without fear of exposure. How are we supposed to get information from these assholes? The legal way? Please!

Alright, so you're new to this. We'll give you the benefit of the doubt, assume you don't know how these things work. Allow us to explain.

Let's say, for the sake of argument, that Dick Cheney had punched a hooker to death. I mean, he didn't, but let's imagine for one moment that he did. Now, if that got out, it would cause a huge amount of embarrassment to the US, both its government and its people. Therefore, it would be better for all concerned if we were to deal with something like that internally, no? Which is well within our capability. We're the government, right? We're authority.

Now you might say, but Dick Cheney still walks among us as a free man. How can that be if he punched a hooker to death (which did not happen)? So we would say, OK, which is more important? Is it justice? Or is it, in fact, more important that the former Vice President of the United States isn't seen by the rest of the world to have punched a hooker to death (which, I cannot stress enough, he absolutely did not)? Therefore, we must do everything in our power to maintain the appearance of Dick Cheney not having punched a hooker to death (this really did not ever occur - please do not say that it did). And the best way to do that is to not prosecute Dick Cheney, even in secret. Otherwise, he's going to jail and everyone's going to start saying, "hey, tell you who I haven't seen for a while - Dick Cheney. What's up with that?"

Try to look at this with a rational, coldly indifferent, perhaps even sociopathic eye. Forget about things like ethics and morality for a second. Try not to let emotion cloud your judgment. Forget all the humanity bullshit and the whole... y'know... not wanting people to be tortured thing. No-one wants people to be tortured. You don't want cows to die horribly in concrete temples of death, do you? But from time to time - hey! - you want a burger. Well - hey! - we wanted evidence. And in the same way that you don't want to see your burger being stunned, skinned and hung from a metal hook, we don't want to see the source of our evidence having its genitals slashed at with a razorblade. Turning a blind eye while someone else does it is the only civilized way.

We hope now you understand our position. Please be more careful in future.

Yours sincerely,

Barack Obama

Dear President

We are very sorry about the recent failings in our legal system. The situation has, unfortunately, been ongoing since the dying days of the previous government (who, to their credit, did everything they could to obstruct the legal process), and is by now well beyond our control.

Nevertheless, we would like to assure you that the inquiry we announced the other day will be weak, powerless and flappy like a landed fish. Expect whitewash, or - worst case scenario - a few words of medium strength, years from now, when only Guardian readers will still be paying attention. Furthermore, our current interrogation guidelines are so full of holes that any idiot can get round them, which should buy us a few more months before we have to go, "oops! typo!" and rewrite them properly. So anyone you want doing in the meantime, send them through us.

Yours sincerely,

David Cameron

The Actual Female Eunuch

2010-07-04T00:30:00.004+01:00

Sexy TV star Christina Hendricks' Letter To Men has become an internet sensation since it first appeared in the April issue of Esquire. In it, she told men what every woman in existence wanted from them, in 840 words, helpfully illustrated with pictures of her eating melon in her underwear.

The initial draft was even more illuminating, however. Here it is...

We're obsessed with men. You are our world. At all times of every day, we're thinking about you. Everything we do is an effort to snag one of you, for cuddles, marriage, children, etc.

Once we've finally got one of you, that's it. We're gone. We surrender ourselves to you completely. You just have to walk into the room and we go weak at the knees. You'll have to sweep us up in your big, strong arms and revive us with smelling salts. Seriously, we're nothing without you.

We hang off your every word, mentally noting down every single thing you do and say. We crave your guidance. How do you want us to look? How should we behave? Are our breasts too small? We'll make them bigger for you. You like those big bowling-ball tits, right? Like that woman who died? Please, tell us. We're blank canvasses, just waiting for you to daub your sexy man paint all over us. We live to please. The only thing worse than being a slave to a Victorian patriarch is not being a slave to a Victorian patriarch. Subjugate us, you big, hairy brutes!

Please don't say anything bad about our friends, because we're incapable of forming and sticking to our own opinions about anything. If you were to say, "Sarah is a bitch," no matter how much I loved Sarah previously, you would throw me into confusion and doubt, because your thoughts and feelings automatically supersede my own. If you think Sarah's a bitch, then she must be. I have no idea why you think that, but if you said it, then it's true. Sarah's a bitch. I'll call her tomorrow and tell her she can't ever see me again. I'm sorry if her presence offended you.

We like: chocolate; puppies; rainbows; shoes; cushions; potpourri; anything frilly and/or pink; chocolate; diet soda; cuddles; chocolate; good bacteria; chocolate; you; chocolate; chocolate. All we ask is that you remember this short list and palm us off every now again with one or more items from it. Then you can pretty much treat us how you like. But if you don't, it's okay! Don't think we're, like, psychos or anything. We'd hate for you to think that.

Drink Scotch. It makes us so hot. Really, we're that superficial. Also, keep one eyebrow raised at all times. Walk around in your underwear carrying a baby. Beat up other men smaller than you. Maybe crush things between your bicep and forearm from time to time... house bricks, small woodland creatures, Fabergé eggs. And let out a little roar while you're doing it. You know, stuff that real men do. Use your imagination.

When you perform basic tasks on our behalf, it makes us feel important, and we need you to make us feel important. We're so racked with self-doubt that we require constant validation from external sources, preferably external sources with penises. Unassailably self-assured external sources with penises. Because you are, aren't you? That's why you guys fight each other all the time and climb things.

Don't wear clothes that I don't like. No woman likes clothes that I don't like.

I don't like Facebook either. I especially don't like men being on Facebook, because I have no idea what you're doing on there. What if you're friends with other women? I would appreciate it if you could keep your relationships with other women to real life, where I can threaten them without having to figure out your login details.

This doesn't really have much to do with anything, but just as an aside, I've kind of got this thing about sneaking off and changing into sexy underwear after a date. I get really self-conscious about it. I might as well squat down and shit in front of you. I don't really know why I'm telling you all this. Just so you know, I guess. Oh God, I'm babbling, stop babbling, Christina, it's not attractive! Oh, I'm sorry. Please ignore me. You know how neurotic we can be! I haven't put you off, have I? You still think I'm pretty, right? Please tell me I'm pretty. And then... (Jesus, you're gonna think I'm nuts)... then will you please say "panties"? I love it when you say "panties". It's just this thing I've got, okay? Please just tell me I'm pretty and then say "panties".

So there you go, gents. The complexities of human relationships unravelled, finally, by Joan off Mad Men. Drink Scotch and say "panties". It really is as easy as that.

Fuckchops

2010-06-26T00:56:00.007+01:00

Bleeding heart disorder is on the rise!

Bleeding heart disorder (BHD) affects 1 in 10 public figures.

BHD is a disease of the soul. Its symptoms include psychopathy and a mild variation of narcolepsy. Sufferers have the outward appearance of giving a flying fuck, but do not actually, in themselves, give a flying fuck - and yet rarely have trouble sleeping at night.

Not much is known yet about what causes BHD, but it has been linked to: unsympathetic public image; endangerment of career; unpopular decision-making; unfortunate pronouncements to media, etc.

We have helped hundreds of public figures afflicted with BHD at the height of their careers to get their lives back. But we need your help. The only known cure for BHD is the sound of a tiny violin. However, when they start to go out of tune, the strings are virtually impossible to replace. Believe us, we've tried with all, like, tweezers and microscopes and shit, but it's rock hard, so we usually end up just chozzing them. For just £800, we can buy one tiny violin. Please give us it.

Here's what some of our current patients have to say:

G. Osborne, W. Minster
I'm an Oxford-educated Conservative Chancellor, which is a dangerous thing to be in times of economic hardship. Worse, my party has had to share power with another whose supporters tend towards the wearing of sandals and the reading of the Guardian. In my first budget, I had to perform a delicate balancing act: try not to upset the proles, and at the same time assert my authority over the vegans in our ranks. So when I announced an unpopular cut, or a shameless concession to my rich friends in the City, well, then I'd had no choice. I didn't want to do it, but the state of the country's finances and the previous government's insane levels of spending forced my hand. They had actually remortgaged the Houses of Parliament to buy iPads for illegal immigrant lesbian foxes, I shit you not! ;) Meanwhile, what little helpfulness or compassion had managed to seep through the cracks in my bare concrete wall of misery was me trying my very hardest indeed not to make the most regressive budget since the 1980s too painful for the paupers, all delivered with a nod and a wink to the Tory backbenchers. It was beautiful. Seriously, I was erect the whole fucking time.

N. Clegg, W. Minster
I had somehow managed to scam my way into something resembling a position of power by appearing to give a flying fuck. Of course, there was no more substance to my 'power' than there was to my giving of a flying fuck. In actual fact, I was there to soften up the country for the deeply unpopular and unnecessarily harsh treatment to which it would be subjected by the coalition government. A friendly face for the nasty party, so to speak, even if my face was virtually indistinguishable from theirs. "Just imagine how much worse it could have been!" I would say. "These good bits of the budget, they're there because I insisted on them. It's just a coincidence that almost all of them had already been announced by the outgoing Labour Chancellor in his final budget!" I hadn't had so much fun since I'd shagged all them birds.

V. Cable, W. Minster
As Treasury Spokesman for the Liberal Democrats, I often appeared principled and empathic, even human. This continued until just before the official formation of our coalition with the Tories, when I claimed to have been "heartbroken" by my negotiating team's failure to secure a deal with the Labour party. And people believed that shit. That made me piss a hot river of LOL down my right leg. I laughed even harder later on, after sitting behind the Chancellor of the Exchequer, nodding sagely as he announced his intention to butcher the poor for long pig to sell in Fortnum & Mason. I mean, as if I ever actually gave a fuck! I used to work for Shell, you daft cunts.

T. Hayward, Cowes
As Chief Executive of a massive oil company, any fuck-giving on my part was always bound to be pretty implausible. But I love a challenge, so I went for it anyway after some careless deep-sea drilling resulted in tens of millions of gallons of oil flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. I had a good old fucking wank when that happened. But the Americans have never shared our keen British sense of irony, and they consequently failed to see the inherent eroticism of the whole do. So I told Congress I was "distraught" and then went yachting.

B. Obama, Washington DC
I was President of the United States of America when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded. And when that oil came gushing out into the Gulf of Mexico, it was like, "fuckin' high five, Biden!" My approval ratings had been steadily falling for most of my Presidency, and flatlining for months. There was a lot of anti-incumbent sentiment making things difficult in the primaries. I was having a tough time. So that pipe blows and we have a much-needed distraction. Then what do you know! This pointy-faced, shit-for-brains British asshole comes along riling everybody up every single time he opens his mouth, and we have ourselves a scapegoat. Not only did I get a chance to finally impress the green lobby with a bunch of tough talk and no real action, I got to play the patriot card for all the old bastards still fighting the War of Independence in their stupid dusty heads. And we got to wring a shitload of money out of BP. It was perfect! We knew that me responding to the situation by dancing naked to More Than A Feeling wouldn't play well with the media, though, so when those cameras rolled, my heart bled. My heart bled for the environment. My heart bled for America. My dick dribbled in my pants. Fuck pelicans, man. Stupid, fat-beaked sons of bitches.

With your help, these people will one day be able to hold their hands up and openly admit to being the dessicated, mercenary bastards they so clearly are. Are you BHD positive? Prove it, fuckchops.

Do Have Nightmares

2010-06-17T23:20:00.007+01:00

Have you ever found an animal - a rabbit, say, or an escaped pet sugar glider - lying dead under a hedge, or in the corner of a field, and in an advanced state of decay, when it's little more than a writhing bag of maggots? Imagine that. Imagine the putrid odour, nature's sickly-sweet regenerative aroma, intermingled with the fumes of distant burning tyres. And nearby, a pool of reasonably fresh vomit from some other unfortunate who passed by perhaps two or three hours ago.

The smell is the first thing that hits you when you meet Piers Morgan. And it hits you hard.

I gag as he approaches, quickly drawing back the hand that I was in the process of extending towards him. I don't want to touch him. He seems unfazed. He must be used to being greeted in such a fashion.

I say hello, but get no reply. Instead he leans in towards me, closes his eyes and inhales deeply through his nostrils.

After several seconds of silence, his expression slowly oozes into a creepy half-smile. "Well! Someone's showered thoroughly today!" he says. "I'm disappointed. Let's feed."

The waitress holds her breath as she shows us to our table. A sticky, translucent fluid begins to seep from Morgan's skin. This, according to the naturalist Terry Nutkins, is a sign of arousal. He makes wet sounds as he moves.

He orders off the menu, then stares at me fixedly, breathing rather more heavily than I'd like him to.

"I believe you wish to talk. Then talk."

I ask him where he gets off, inflicting himself on the world. His face lights up with rage and his skin visibly turns leathery.

"Let me ask you," he hisses... "you!" The word has a strange, liquid quality in his mouth. There's a sort of sexual fury lurking within, bound and gagged. "Tell me, what do you know of Piers Morgan? What do you know of me? You know nothing about me!

"Did you know, for instance, that I'm invertebrate? That I can bend and contract at will? Spend hours, motionless in vents and cracks in the walls of:

changing room!
gym!
ladies' toilet, etc!

Did you know that I have inhaled the odour of our former Prime Minister's anus? Did you know he eats too much meat? Did you know that my body is covered in hundreds of long, thin tentacles that secrete a powerful anaesthetic? Or that Amanda (Holden, fellow Britain's Got Talent judge) will very soon give birth to my son? You didn't? Neither does she."

The waitress arrives with our food, then turns and leaves, weeping softly. Morgan sits admiring his order: two live and very frightened albino pygmy marmosets strapped to an ornate ivory stand. His smile fades. Unhooking the strap, he grips one of the marmosets in his fist, firmly but delicately, and brings it up to his disgusting face, breathing in its scent. Its fear.

The marmoset struggles, chirruping as Morgan brings it closer. Its eyes widen and the chirruping becomes more urgent, accompanied by some obscene slurping noises. It flails about wildly, almost screaming, then freezes, for the briefest moment, a study in terror, before losing its form completely in an instant, drooping like a deflated balloon over Morgan's fingers, an empty sack.

"Mmmm," sighs Morgan through bloody lips, "just how I like it: rare." He throws his head back, howling with laughter. The laughter becomes a bellow, a long, unbroken bellow. Tears are streaming down his face. He looks at me, still bawling, his face contorted, writhing, as if things are crawling under his skin. Then he stops suddenly, sinks into his seat, his head drooping. He sobs uncontrollably.

I ask him if he's okay. My voice seems to shock him back to reality. He screams at me: "would you like a marmoset! Would you like to try one for yourself, you cocker! It's delicious!"

I shake my head, unable to speak. He begins to sob again.

"I hate beauty," he says with his head in his hands. "Hate it. It's so greedy. If I was to say to a beautiful woman in the street, 'hey bitch, can I fuck a dirt up your pisshole?' she'd be horrified. Disgusted. But what right does she have to be? Does she want respect as well? And from me? (Let's not forget, I am famous.) The world does not work that way. Respect is for the ugly."

But Morgan's proposition doesn't stand up to scrutiny. After all, I'd be hard-pushed to name anyone who respects him even grudgingly, and he's utterly repellant. He takes umbrage at this.

"I am Piers Morgan!" he hisses. "Piers Morgan. Pi-Ers Mor-Gan. Do you get it? Pe Is Mor Gan. He Is More Than. See?"

More than what, exactly? He sits back slowly, freshly composed, bringing the tips of his fingers together, arching an eyebrow.

"Exactly," he says. "More than what. More than what, exactly. He, that is, I am, quite simply, more than. When the answer is 'everything', then the question is redundant."

I try to shut him up, but he is by now lost in the throes of self-satisfaction. The waitress seizes the opportunity to come and clear the table (my plate is more-or-less untouched, with a little bit of sick on it), but Morgan's reverie breaks.

"Ah, Chastity!" he says. She freezes, closes her eyes, hunches her shoulders, unconsciously leans away from him. One of his tentacles appears from under his shirt and caresses her face, leaving snot-trails on her skin. "Chastity, Chastity, Chastity..." I'm frozen to my seat, disgusted - with him, with myself. I feel complicit in his foul behaviour. A tear rolls down her cheek. My eye follows it to where it falls from her chin, past her name badge, which says: Sandra.

"I had the pleasure of Chastity's company last night, didn't I, Chastity?" She nods once. "Only you weren't very good, were you Chastity?" Shake. "Silly little girl. I hate you. Fuck off." He waves her away. "They need to be put in their place. Never let them view themselves in any way other than through the prism of self-loathing. That's my tip to you. You may thank me later."

I rise unsteadily to my feet without saying a word and, clutching my stomach, stagger out of the restaurant. I hear him slurping in the distance, far, far in the distance, through foggy oceans of anger and confusion. All the way home, one thought keeps returning: if Piers Morgan isn't technically human, then would killing him be technically murder?

He Sleeps Upside-Down

2010-06-02T22:56:00.009+01:00

It's the
Happygood Funtime Hour
with...
Spokesman for Binyamin Netanyahu
Mark Regev!!!

Imagine.

You are fast asleep, in the middle of the night, as an IDF commando sleeps, hanging from a helicopter over international waters.

Now imagine that your peace has been shattered by an attack from a flotilla of civilian boats. They sail underneath you and your commando friends, so that you are caught on the boats' decks like spiders from their threads in the palms of giant, steel, boat-shaped hands.

The civilians set about you with metal bars and wooden sticks. You and your friends have nothing with which to defend yourselves, nothing but non-lethal grenades. Non-lethal grenades and stun guns. And proper guns too. You have proper guns, ones that fire live rounds, live rounds that tear through flesh and bone. You have them. But apart from these - nothing!

You would be terrified, would you not? You would all fear for your lives, and would start using your superior weapons in sheer panic.

This is what our highly trained, combat-ready commandos were forced to do when they found themselves in such a situation during the early hours of Monday morning.

Fortunately, they managed to repel the attack. But it is only a matter of time before another marauding band of humanitarian workers attempts to smash through our peaceful - possibly even almost legal - blockade of Gaza in order to feed people. And not innocent people, oh no. People who live in a country with terrorists in it!

Israel desperately needs your help. If you can pledge just $5m a month, we'll have the means to fight this civilian menace.

Please call 0800-123-GODWIN now. Please.

Here is a picture of a wet puppy.

An Open Letter To Lorely Burt MP

2010-05-18T00:18:00.004+01:00

I was lonely, so I emailed this shit to Lorely Burt, Lib Dem MP for Solihull...

Lorely Burt, the MP for Solihull, has received around 800 emails since the [Conservative-Lib Dem] coalition deal was struck. Of these, around two-thirds have been negative, with some activists claiming they have been betrayed by the party. "I have been very busy, and am trying to reply to everyone. I have been sending emails back saying 'Look, this is grown-up politics here.'"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/may/15/liberal-democrats-grassroots-members

Mrs Burt

First things first, I should tell you that I'm not one of your constituents. But then, given the apparent contempt with which you regard them, I'm pretty happy about that.

Have you ever been a headteacher? You should be. You'd be good at it. Unfortunately - d'oh! - you've gone into politics. Different game, my friend. Different game entirely.

I'm sure you have your own take on your role as a Member of Parliament. Perhaps you see yourself as One Who Knows Best, looking down on your constituents as a parent looks upon an infant, variously indulging or refusing their selfish, perhaps unreasonable demands. In which case, it may surprise you to learn that they see you quite differently. Rather, they see you as One Of Them - a lowly member of the great unwashed (oh, I know!) plucked from a cold, bedraggled mass of human meat to represent them in parliament.

But however childish or infuriatingly negative it may be, this majority of the Lib Dem activists and disillusioned voters who have troubled to share with you their feelings, however silly and idealistic, it's probably unfair to dismiss it out of hand, however stupid it may seem to you, you so deeply embroiled in your frightening world of "grown-up politics", you at the vanguard of this thrilling adventure into the New Politics, you brave, thrusting hero, you!

Don't dismiss them, please. Because however filthy, ignorant and lazy they may seem to you, I feel qualified to tell you, as one of them, they're not.

They're not actually dumb automatons, shuffling blankly towards death, hooked up to a steady, numbing IV drip drip drip of terrible reality TV and pure chicken fat. No. Such people wouldn't be writing to you in the first place. In fact, I don't think they even vote.

Instead, the people responsible for those two negative thirds (that's two thirds) of your correspondence in the days following your party's decision to align itself with the Conservatives are quite the opposite. They are grown-ups. They're intelligent, passionate people who've taken it upon themselves, on a purely voluntary basis, at their own expense, to actively participate in our travesty of a democracy. You know, like we're supposed to, yet so few do.

Moreover, them being - or having been - Liberal Democrat supporters (usually a left-leaning and, well, liberal crowd, in case you didn't know), I think it's safe to assume that they don't feel best represented by this coalition government that you and the rest of your party have helped bring into being, dominated as it is by the Conservatives, a party that many of us have come to regard in our lifetimes as a party chiefly consisting and acting on behalf of greedy sociopaths. A party which consists primarily of rich white men, and exists primarily to protect the interests of rich white men.

Oh dear.

I fear I've slipped into that very same immature, idealistic rhetoric for which you so aristocratically chide the scumbags who elected you to office. But, you know, I have feelings. Ideals. I, too, helped elect a Liberal Democrat MP to office, only to see my precious vote used to put a man into No 10 that I was actively trying to keep out of No 10, and now I - like your correspondents - feel betrayed.

Maybe it's a luxury I enjoy as a mere voter, that I get to feel betrayed, a luxury you don't have. I don't really care. If that is the case, it's a luxury you chose to forgo. Don't blame me and others like me for clinging to it.

So by all means, you ascend to your elevated stage of human development, your impressive, grubby cloud of realpolitik. We'll stay down here, in the mud, with our ideals. And never the twain shall meet. You're lost to us now, possibly destined to be absorbed into the Tory ranks as so many have before you. Or not. Who knows? Who cares? It's a two-party system again. Well done.

But please remember this: the next time one of your constituents takes the time and effort to address you with their concerns, however naive: please, in future, refrain from responding in such a condescending manner. It really isn't becoming.

Take them seriously. It's your job.

Cheers!

Buzz

:(

2010-05-12T00:25:00.001+01:00

That's it now, my children. It's all over now. All over.

You don't need to worry your pretty little heads about anything anymore. Daddy's here.

Daddy walks among you.

Tomorrow it will be very dark. Don't be concerned, it will simply be because the sun hasn't risen. And that is nothing for you to worry about. It's all being taken care of.

You might notice there will be no birds in the sky. No wind. An eerie stillness will descend upon the earth. Do not panic, do not be afraid, do not act in any way. Everything will be unfolding as it should.

The air is full of portent.
Opposing forces are in alignment.
This is the time for change.
This is the time for Cameron.
Sleep well, my children.

Sleep soundly.

Forever.

English-Clegg Phrasebook

2010-05-09T23:21:00.006+01:00

In the restaurant...
A very good day to you, sir. Could I please have the duck salad to begin with, and then for main... the beef en croûte sounds delicious! I'll have that! And can we have a bottle of the white Zinfandel?

Hello. I'll have a starter, please, followed by a main course. And can I have a drink to go with that?

I'd like the apple and plum crumble, with an espresso and a large Cognac, please.

A dessert, please, and two drinks.

At home...
You do the cleaning and hoovering, love, I'll pick a few things up at random in the living room and pile them up on the coffee table.

I shall certainly contribute to the ongoing effort to keep our home clean and tidy.

I'd rather not tonight. To be perfectly honest, I can't stand to be around you anymore and every time you touch me it feels like spiders. And I'm having an affair with Siobhan!

I would like nothing more than to engage in acts of torrid carnality with the woman I love.

To the crowd of demonstrators outside the Liberal Democrat meeting...
The electoral reform that has been central to our party's ideology since its inception was never realistically going to happen, now, was it? So I'll just decide which alliance will last longer before collapsing in on itself and sell our support to the relevant party in return for a weak promise of a cross-party inquiry into proportional representation and a few flaccid compromises on some of our less controversial policies. But jolly good show! Don't give up! Keep doing our work for us and one day, perhaps, one fine day far, far into the future, long after you and your children, and your children's children, and their children and grandchildren have all died... perhaps then our descendants may be lucky enough to see a system in place whereby British citizens can elect people to represent them in parliament. Don't let anyone tell you it can't happen. It can.

The fact that you are here because you care so much about political reform is absolutely wonderful. Take it from me, reforming politics is one of the reasons I went into politics. I've campaigned for a better, more open, more transparent, new politics, every single day of this general election campaign. I genuinely believe it is in the national interest. I take your petition in the spirit in which I am sure you meant to deliver it - in a spirit of change, of real change, in the politics of this country. And in return, I would ask you to do what you are doing so well here today in Smith Square in every street and every community of our country, to continue your campaign for a different, better, new politics.

Chuckles Election 2010 Special!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

2010-05-06T00:19:00.006+01:00

You're weak, scared and confused. You lack purpose and direction. You need leadership. You're so pathetic you don't even have the faintest clue who to look to for that leadership, do you? Quite frankly, you make me sick. Nevertheless, I shall deign to aid you in your predicament with this comprehensive guide to the three main parties running in today's National Choosegovernment.

Labour
The incumbent party's past form includes: two notable wars - one illegal and one completely fucking unnecessary; an erosion of civil liberties and the criminalisation of greater swaths of the British public than has been managed by any other government, ever; tuition fees; a shitload of dodgy legislation rushed through in the last few precious seconds of what will very likely be their last parliament in government for quite some time.

As if New Labour never died, the party aims to continue Tony Blair's sinister quasi-privatisation of public services by turning police, schools and hospitals over to a system of 'federations' and trusts. That's 'chains' to you and me. Which means that if your local police force is underperforming, it could find itself assimilated, effectively made a franchise of a more successful force, even one several counties away, like Hertfordshire (if you live near Hertfordshire, imagine Durham). Number 10 refuses to confirm or deny the existence of future plans for unstoppable, merciless law-enforcement cyborgs.

If re-elected, Gordon Brown will make good on his insistence on replacing his obsolete, floating nuclear penis extension, Trident.

In a further echo of the New Labour project, Labour would continue in its commitment to making seemingly the whole of the country middle class. Because Britain just isn't bourgeois enough.

And their pledge for the compulsory Electoral Reform category is to introduce the alternative vote, which would alter the system just enough to satisfy a numb British voter without the unpleasant side-effect of significantly harming the party's advantage.

Vote Labour if you're a confused neoliberal living in a glassandsteel swankpad, blissfully unaware that your unapologetic capitalism completely devoured the last few remaining scraps of your youthful socialist tendencies long, long ago.

Conservative
They've been keeping quiet about it ever since they decided to position themselves as the progressive party of the people who'll reverse Brown's "tax on jobs" (that's his clever way of framing the 1% National Insurance increase), but Cameron's Tories are still hellbent on skullfucking society and any hopes of an economic recovery with a programme of severe public spending cuts.

Family is, of course, the magic word for the Conservatives, and rest assured that Cameron will continue his illustrious predecessors' war on people who've chosen not to have them, like an inverted China. Tax breaks for sprogpoppers and tough shit for everyone else. Although it's unclear exactly how this squares with their plan to scrap Contactpoint, the national database of children's social workers and GPs, many of whom were hitherto unlinked.

Arts and humanities would be edged out of education by an increased focus on cuddly, warm, traditional subjects like maths, science and history, and a policy of bribing maths and science graduates to become teachers by paying off their student loans. Which makes sense, because artists don't usually vote Conservative. Not before they're minted anyway.

As if to prove they haven't completely abandoned their intolerant roots, they'll be insisting on English language tests for foreign nationals coming to the UK to marry. Presumably they won't expect British-born citizens leaving the country to prove they can speak Spanish. As for Europe, Cameron promises a return to the good old days of isolationism, and shows form in this regard, having already pissed off the EU's major players by withdrawing from the centre-right European People's Party to join the European Conservatives and Reformists coalition with Poland's Law and Justice Party, a bunch of hard-right Eurosceptics with interesting views on homosexuality (bad) and Nazism (not bad).

Hunting! What modern, civilised society doesn't enjoy seeing wild animals being torn limb from limb by packs of slavering dogs? Cameron promises you a vote on a repeal of the ban.

The Conservatives also intend to replace Trident, although psychosexual therapy would be cheaper.

On electoral reform, Cameron would reduce the number of MPs, which would alter the system just enough to satisfy a numb British voter with the pleasant side-effect of significantly increasing the party's advantage.

Vote Conservative if you're a blinkered, nostalgic sociopath, a frustrated bigot, frightened and confused by a modern, multicultural world. Also if you're one of those dangerous idiots who doesn't think politics actually affects anything and just wants to see a different, more marshmallowy face on the news, purely for its own fucking sake. Or here's a better idea, if you're one of those people: don't vote. Don't vote at all. Go bowling or something. See a film. You've ruined democracy. You are the most persuasive argument yet for totalitarianism. Fuck off.

Liberal Democrat
They're the other ones you didn't know existed until three weeks ago, when you became their most ardent supporter. They stand primarily on a platform of not being the other two, along with a long-standing commitment to introducing proportional representation, a system which, by happy coincidence, would give the party a half-decent chance of actually being elected in their own right. It's difficult to find anything to be critical about in their manifesto, because it was written by people who presumed they'd never have to put any of it into practice.

The country's fallen in love with Nick Clegg, and it's not hard to see why. Here's a man with the skill and foresight to just happen to be Lib Dem leader at a time when the public are desperately unhappy with the status quo. Progressives especially love him, presumably choosing to overlook his suspiciously oft-stated desire to form a coalition government with the Conservatives at the expense of Labour. (For his part, Cameron's reception to Clegg's overtures grew increasingly hostile at two key points in the campaign: initially, when it looked like it might actually have to happen, and then more so when it no longer looked like it might actually have to happen.) Oh, and he looked directly at us during the television debates. We got a bit damp.

Vote Liberal Democrat if you're under 24, bored or a bit damp.

And They Smell Funny

2010-05-03T21:41:00.010+01:00

Immigration! It's the burning issue that everyone says no-one is talking about. The country is on the brink of having some foreign people in it, and the natives are understandably afraid.

In this special investigation, we cut right through to the beating heart of that fear, rip it out and hold it high triumphantly, roaring with primal ferocity, before eating it - rivers of blood running down our chiseled, bristly chin - then turn feral, charge unseen through the countryside, more ghost than blog, instantly turning into flappy, dry scraps of meat any living thing unfortunate enough to get in our way, sending supersonic waves of panic sweeping through the nation. Those immigrants don't seem so bad now, eh?

We talk to the people. Hush!

Granny Northernchops, 72
Bigot
I'm worried about immigration, yes. Just the other day, I heard this lad on the bus talking in foreign, well, he could've been saying anything, couldn't he? For all I knew he was being rude about me, or planning to do a terrorism or take drugs. When I were growing up, there were this foreign living in the next street - I think he was a ginger - and we used to throw rocks at his window and kill his pets. Course, nowadays you do something like that, you get called racist, don't you? It's all this political correctness. My Walter didn't fight the Nazis so foreigns could live and work in peace, without fear.

David Cameron, 43
Perfidious blancmange of privilege
You, the people of Britain, have been saying that we, the three main party leaders, have been ducking the issue on immigration. And I absolutely agree. You're right. We are ducking the issue, you're right to say it, and I thank you for saying it, but I also hate you for saying it. Because I didn't want anyone to know the truth. Like a softer, pinker, squidgier Nick Griffin, I've spent the last five years rebranding the Conservative Party, painting it a pretty new colour, sweeping our less cuddly policies under the carpet, hiding the old guard in the cellar until it was safe for them to come out. We're not the nasty party you thought we were. Look at us: we're nice. We simply stand for safe, warm, traditional values: family; Laura Ashley curtains; a delicious slice of Battenberg melting by the fire. What could possibly be wrong with that?

Quite frankly, the longer I could get away with not discussing things like immigration, the better. But here I am, forced to show my hand, compelled to rip open my chest, break apart this vaguely humanoid facade and reveal the slimy far-right tentacles within. And why not? Because that's where this battle's being fought now. So fuck it. Time to suck up to the core supporters.

You might say that my policies - some vague talk about caps - don't go far enough. I agree. They don't. I was trying not to scare off the liberals. But rest assured, I intend to drive all but the highest levels of our economy so far into the ground, make life in Britain so intolerable that no-one in their right mind would come here. With my childish attitude towards Europe and my insistence on playing with the naughty boys, I plan to make us global pariahs. I shall alienate us so completely from the rest of the international community that our borders will simply fall into disuse. Britain will be a tiny dollop of shit floating in a cold sea of hatred. Obama, Merkel, Sarkozy, the most powerful people in the Western world... They think I'm a twat. And if, this week, you choose me to lead this country, they'll think you're all twats too.

Barry St. George, 37
Twat
I live in a tiny market town with a minority population of coloureds. I never thought much about it until I read in the Sun about immigrants. Then I realised, hang on, some of these people have jobs. And I know a few of them are on benefits too. Those jobs and benefits could be going to white people. Now we're all terrified for our lives. They dress differently and eat foreign muck. It's not right. The government should be standing up for indigenous Britons, even though homo sapiens isn't, by definition, indigenous to the British Isles and our ancestors came from all over Europe and, ultimately, Africa.

Nick Clegg, 43
Anointed
We had hoped we could appease you with the odd concession to your thinly veiled racism in our campaign material, nonsense about "years of incompetence, and failure to plan for the effects of unprecedented immigration," being tactful enough to keep quiet about the unprecedented emigration, which is climbing at a far higher rate, bringing net migration down with every passing year. Still, you pricks keep letting yourselves get whipped up by rightwingers with an interest in keeping you scared, don't you? So we all have to play naked, leather-bound fucking Hitlers, smearing jelly on our nipples whilst you sit in a circle, wanking and braying. Jesus...

Mark Youngconservative, 20
Confused liberal
At least a quarter of my friends are 2nd- or 3rd-generation immigrants. But I keep hearing that immigration is a bad thing, so I've decided I agree. It's alright, though - my friends do too. Apparently we're sick of people coming to this country and not working, taking our jobs that no-one wanted, stealing our women, refusing to integrate, diluting our national identity and enriching our culture.

That's why I'll be voting Conservative in this election. I haven't heard David Cameron say anything yet that jars with my shapeless, loosely liberal sensibilities, because I haven't been paying attention, and after Brown called that bigot a bigot I see no other option. No other option at all. Cameron's going to win, so there's no point in voting for anyone else. I'll be damned if I let a man with anything like his own personal ideology into Number 10. Much better a hollow populist so slick and shiny that his blank face dumbly reflects the base desires and prejudices of the majority, no matter how backward or wrong.

Gordon Brown, 59
Man disintegrating
Yes, I called that bigot a bigot. But let me make one thing perfectly clear: as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, my personal beliefs are utterly irrelevant. I am a salesman. Whilst in private I might voice my own opinions, in public I say what I believe is expected of me. I may not say it in the manner of someone you would invite out for a drink, which is, apparently, what you all want from your fucking politicians...

I'm sorry. I'll continue. What I say in the privacy of my car with my lapel mic on doesn't matter. What does matter is that this Labour government has attacked the perceived problem of immigration with an Orwellian zeal, aggressively pursuing and deporting even genuine asylum seekers on pure technicalities (not filling in forms on time, etc), condemning them to short lives filled with terror in dangerous, war-torn countries. Often countries that we made dangerous and war-torn in the first place. Make no mistake: Labour is the party that hates foreigners even more than you do.

Nick Griffin, 51
Walking Nazi foreskin
Contrary to popular opinion, I actually rather like immigrants. They've made racism respectable again.

Lairy

2010-04-22T21:48:00.005+01:00

Thought For The Day
with Ryanair boss Michael O'Leary

Some stupid cow I used to know - might've been my mum - once said to me: "Michael, don't you care about anyone but yourself?"

I said, "what would I do that for, for fuck's sake? Does anyone else care about me?"

She said, "I care about you, Michael!"

So I said, "well, that's your fucking stupidity, Mum/girlfriend/fuck-knows faceless parasite woman. Don't make me suffer for it. Even if I wasn't a fucking unlovable cartoon monster..."

Oh, hang on, look at this silly cunt being run over. Hahaha! That's the funniest fucking thing I've seen since that earthquake! Look, his girlfriend's moaning now... What's that, love? Call 999? Well, are you going to cover my expenses? My expenses, are you going to cover my expenses? Yeah, I know the call's free, but the fucking electricity isn't, is it? If I make that call, I'll be using up my fucking battery. Now are you going to reimburse me for the electricity? I didn't get to be fucking minted by paying for other people's fucking phone calls, now, did I? Well, now you're just being unreasonable. Look, there's no need now anyway, he's fucking dead.

Stupid fucking bitch, waste my time and money? Now, where was I? Ah yes, so I said, "I care about fucking me, love. I could afford to have my turds gold-plated before I flush them down the bog if I wanted. But I wouldn't, because I'm a rigid-fingered fucking miser. Either way, I didn't fucking get here by caring about people besides me."

So she says, "well, I'll be dead and buried one day, before you know it. Then you'll be sorry."

I said, "what, sorry I didn't have you fucking chopped up and canned and sold for cat food before they put you in the box? It's alright, love, I'll come and wank on your fucking grave, that'll cheer me up."

Eh, see this dog? I reckon it'd look better with its fucking eyes hanging out of their sockets, what d'you reckon? Hang on a sec.

That was a good laugh. Here! Woman! Was that your fucking dog down there? Yeah, I stomped it to death. Well, don't have a go at me, love, I'm just being fucking honest with you! Oh, for fuck's sake, look, here's six quid. Go and get yourself a fucking goldfish or something.

Jesus. Want something for nothing, these twats. Anyway, so I don't give a fuck about anyone else. What, you got stranded on fucking holiday and I won't pay your expenses? Fucking shouldn't have gone with Ryanair, then, should you? Fucking sue me. Oh, hang on, my phone's ringing. It's my lawyer.

Alright, Graham, how's it going? What's that? They've got a case? Fuck's sake.

I retract everything I've done and said in the last five minutes. Here, love, have your dog back. It's a bit stiff, but I managed to stuff its eyes back in. Don't mention it. I only did it because I had to. I'm still a massive prick.

Can I have that six quid back?

Chuckles Review Of 2009, Part 4a

2010-02-13T08:00:00.006Z

October

Something's happened, although we can't tell you what it is, or even why we can't tell you, but it doesn't really matter because you all know what it is anyway.

This is what the Guardian was reduced to in October after Carter-Ruck, the legal firm representing oil company Trafigura, firmly planted the term 'super-injunction' in the national vocabulary.

In 2006, Trafigura paid a local entrepreneur to dump what looked an awful lot like toxic waste in the Ivory Coast city of Abidjan. The company claimed the material was harmless "slops": grime and soap scum from the deck of their tanker. But as the Guardian revealed in 2009, the company's own internal emails were saying different, as were the numerous disfigurements, miscarriages and deaths that followed the dumping. The "slops" turned out, in fact, to be extremely poisonous residue from the purification of dirt-cheap crude oil.

The horse had already bolted by October, but Trafigura decided to brick the door up anyway. To stop the Guardian revealing the existence of an incriminating scientific report that had been commissioned by the company itself in 2006, Carter-Ruck slapped a gagging order on the paper, stopping it not only from reporting the existence of the report, but also from reporting that it had been forbidden to report the existence of the report.

Unfortunately for Trafigura, Carter-Ruck's influence didn't extend to the internet, which caught wind of the super-injunction and blew the whole thing wide open. The saga continues.

And what a busy month for the internet it was. When lovely Jan Moir wrote a piece in the lovely Daily Mail positing that Boyzone's Stephen Gately had died of gayness, a grassroots swell of electronic fury reared up and swallowed the article whole. Advertisers demanded to be disassociated from it, the piece was soon pulled from the Mail's website, and in the space of three days the internet had proved itself twice to be an actual, genuinely effective means of protest.*

When heemasexes weren't being attacked by thick rightwing columnists, they were causing rifts in God's dysfunctional family.

That crazy Pope - who you may remember claimed back in March that condoms actually exacerbate the spread of HIV (which, stupidly, I neglected to mention way back in Part 1) - was up to his tricks again, this time trying to poach Anglicans alienated by their church's insistence on ordaining gay priests. "Come, join us," I paraphrase his letter to them.

"Now, none of us is prejudiced. I'm not, and neither are you. That nice, helpful lad who works in Tesco is a dirty faggot arsecocker, and we still talk to him, don't we? We try very hard not to think about what he gets up to. And we don't always succeed, do we? Eee, hours we've spent lying awake at night, tossing and turning with his heaving great sweaty meatstick penetrating our thoughts. It's not easy. But we still find it in our hearts to give him the time of day, being very careful not to send out the wrong signals. And we think it's good that his type can now find gainful employment, where once he'd have had to resort to prostitution, petty theft and Benzedrine.

"But stacking shelves is one thing. Representing the Holy Spirit on earth quite another. Ye gods, just imagine him standing there before the congregation with that... thing between his legs! And when the menfolk kneel before him to take Communion... well, that'll just confuse the poor lad. I know you think the same. We see sense on this matter, you and I. Come on, you. Leave those dirty Proddies. Join the Catholics."

Other creepy bigots standing blinking in the full glare of the spotlight were Nick Griffin - who appeared on BBC Question Time - and Radovan Karadžić - the man behind the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, in which over 7,500 Muslims were killed, and very probably a wank fantasy for Griffin - who failed to appear at the start of his trial in The Hague, desperately trying every trick in the Big Book Of International Law to get himself off the hook. What a shining example of human nature at its finest! :)

But as one poor little mass-murderer was reduced to hiding in his cell, fruitlessly claiming immunity from prosecution and whining about conspiracies, aw diddums, another man with thousands of deaths on his conscience was announced as the winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

It's not often that winning the world's most prestigious award could feasibly be construed as a PR disaster, but for Barack Obama it was a moment akin to Christ's anointment by Mary, the Messiah brought down by his own vanity. Not that he noticed. No, he just strolled on up in front of a frowning world with his big, shit-eating grin, muttering something about being humbled while trying to conceal an erection that could punch holes in tarmac. It was like watching a middle-aged dad open an email entitled 'Hi! I'm a fit 20-year-old girl with massive tits and I've been after shagging you for ages!'.

And a bunch of other shit happened, but life is short and time too precious for you to waste reading about things that aren't even happening anymore. Look out of your window, look! The majesty of Creation. All of it waiting to be experienced. Why not go outside and point at a squirrel?

* At the time of writing, the Facebook page 'I hate it when you're with MC Hammer and he doesn't let you touch anything' has almost 373,000 fans. Sleep tight.

Intermission

2010-01-22T22:58:00.006Z

Jack Straw gave evidence yesterday to the Chilcott inquiry over his role in the run-up to the Iraq war. Writing exclusively for Chuckles, he attempts today to justify his actions to the British public, the people of Iraq, his conscience and his god.

Did I have doubts about Britain's involvement in the Iraq war? I absolutely did. Could I have stopped Britain from going to war in Iraq? I'm certain of it. Did I do everything within my power to rein in Tony's rampant ambitions? Sort of.

At the upper echelons of government, one is sometimes forced to make extremely difficult decisions, decisions which - it is true - may well carry considerable human costs. Our unenviable task is to balance this cost against the perceived benefits of a particular course of action for the greater good. Sometimes we have no better option than the lesser or least of two or more evils.

This is the position in which I found myself in the days leading up to the invasion. On the one hand: go to war, invade another country in an almost unequivocal contravention of international law, and for the remainder of our days bear some of the responsibility for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. On the other: jeopardise my Cabinet career.

It was not a decision I took lightly, but in the end I believe I made the right choice. Like Christ at the pinnacle of the temple, I reasoned that I could better serve my purpose by not jumping, rather stepping quietly and humbly aside as Tony's unstoppable human-meat grinder barrelled past.

I have lived with this decision for nearly seven years, and to say that I've come to terms with it would be to imply - falsely, I might add - that some crisis of conscience followed in its wake. I will say categorically that there was nothing to come to terms with. I sleep well enough. In my dreams I'm tortured by their faces, contorted into almost impossible expressions of uncomprehending terror, but the sleeping itself is otherwise satisfactory.

Should I reasonably be expected to live in torment for the consequences of my actions, perhaps descend slowly into madness until I am found, years from now, decomposing in an anonymous council flat, several months after my lonely death, the words 'I HEAR THEM' scrawled six feet high on the wall in my own excrement?

Without wishing to be callous, people die. Every day, all over the world, people die in circumstances of unimaginable horror. Even in this blessed land of ours, this land of peace and prosperity, you yourself may return home from work one evening, somehow not noticing - perhaps you have a cold - the strong smell of gas as you flick the light switch in the hall. As the leaking gas ignites, spinning shards of metal or glass, maybe even a broken piece of crockery, might fly straight for your neck, passing through unimpeded and decapitating you in less than a second. It may take several more seconds for you to die, your clouding eyes staring out from your severed head in bafflement at your own corpse.

It could be that your soft belly catches the full force of the blast at its source, your guts exploding from your back as your spine shatters into thousands of tiny off-white splinters, the rest of your body following suit almost immediately, splattering your whole against the kitchen wall.

Should Franz San Galli, inventor of the radiator, therefore be held to account for his part in the development of modern central heating - and consequently for yours and countless others' grisly deaths? A man stands in Tentelevskoe Cemetery, unzips his fly and exposes his penis, holding it gently between thumb and forefinger. Seconds later, a magnificent arc of golden urine bursts from its tip and splashes, a good metre away from his feet, on to the ground above San Galli's remains. Is this man acting reasonably?

I shall leave you to make up your own minds. To mine, my hands are clean. I know they are clean because I scrub them obsessively, every morning and every night, for hours on end.

Chuckles Review Of 2009, Part 3

2010-01-20T23:19:00.007Z

July
Truth is obscured in times of conflict by the fog of war. In China, where the smog of state-controlled media hangs heavy over everything like the ghost of a 13 tog duvet, the facts are even harder to discern.

Rarely has this been more evident than when a fight in a factory spilled over into days of ethnic violence in Ürümqi, in which between 150 and 200 people died (maybe more, according to some parties), with several others later sentenced to death. And the details remain reliably sketchy.

We know this much: on June 25, at least two Uyghur workers were killed in an 'incident' sparked by rumours of an assault on a young Han woman by Uyghur men at the factory in Shaoguan. Ten days later, hundreds of Uyghurs gathered in Ürümqi to protest against the government's handling of the incident, a protest which quickly turned violent, Uyghurs, Han and police all fighting in the streets. How the violence started and why is unclear. The Uyghurs blamed heavy-handed tactics by the police, Han bystanders told of unprovoked attacks by protesters, the government claimed that the riots were premeditated and engineered from the US by Rebiya Kadeer, exiled leader of the World Uyghur Congress.

The story was further obscured here in Britain when evidence of shadiness at the News Of The World, that bastion of quality journalism, sent the media into a cannibalistic frenzy. Newspapers like nothing better than an opportunity to launch into other newspapers, and after the Guardian discovered that the NOTW's notorious phone-hacking indiscretions from years previously had been much more wide-ranging than initially reported, it basically forgot to print any other news for about a fortnight.

Which must've pissed off some of the participants in Anthony Gormley's installation Pratform, for which Gormley did little more than invite some attention-seeking failures to stand on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square doing quirky, British things like nothing, or eating sandwiches.

Seeking attention for an actual, like, reason, a small group of workers occupied the Vestas wind turbine factory on the Isle Of Wight after the company announced plans to close the plant in favour of new ones in countries seemingly more committed to the production of renewable energy. Like, erm, the US and China (China, who - according to Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband - single-handedly wrecked any chances of securing a deal at the Copenhagen Summit later in the year, but we'll get to that). The plant still closed, of course.

And let's not forget Michael H Jackson's memorial extravaganza. Did it actually happen? Or was it, in infinitely more plausible fact, a mass hallucination experienced by the entire industrialised world? 2,000 years from now, scholars from the First Church of Michael the Anointed will still be poring through articles on Fox Wikipedia, trying to sort fact from fiction. Mark my words, kids. Mark my fucking words...

August
Britain, as everyone knows, is a grey socialist shithole (a grey socialist shithole with an ingrained obsession with material wealth, a vacuously aspirational citizenry and the 6th largest economy in the world), and the most potent symbol of this is the National Health Service, which aggressively limits patient choice, puts people to sleep when they become too expensive to treat, kicks puppies and betrayed Jesus to the Romans.

So it came as no surprise when America almost tore itself wide open last August over Barack Obama's fiendish plan to ape our drab quasi-Marxism by making healthcare available to all. As the pressure group Conservatives for Patients Rights pointed out, British physicist Stephen Hawking, who lives in Britain, would not be with us today if he had been British. Which he is. America's extremely vocal right was outraged, and understandably so. Universal healthcare is undeniably a bad thing. Just imagine if it was implemented: the hospitals would suddenly all be overrun by poor black people.

The stupid, the selfish and the misanthropic took to the streets with erections and revolting grins like weeping, septic wounds, and Fox News' Glenn Beck became a byword in the UK for either rightwing fanaticism or psychopathic cynicism, depending on your view. My money's on the second one.

Americans had another reason to hate Britain later in the month when Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Al-Megrahi was given an early release on health grounds. Fortunately for Gordon Brown, the decision had been taken by the Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill. Not so fortunately, the pesky media wouldn't stop asking about Brown's involvement in the decision. Brown mainly went, "um, ah, um." It later turned out that he'd given the release his blessing, and the UK-US 'special relationship' took a knock. Although it has to be said, since Obama became President, the dynamic of that 'special relationship' seems to have been mainly thus...

BROWN: I have had several lengthy telephone conversations with President Obama on this matter.

WHITE HOUSE PRESS OFFICE: President Obama has not discussed this matter directly with anyone outside the White House.

BROWN: I have had no conversations with President Obama on this matter.

In his dreams, Brown stands forlorn and trouserless in the rain outside a restaurant, while Obama and Angela Merkel sit in the window, laughing uproariously.

It was a good month for famous prisoners, actually, with the decrepit Ronnie Biggs released after Jack Straw finally accepted that he was no more a danger to society than he was to solids, while Bill Clinton got to step back out from Hilary's shadow to rescue two US journalists from jail in North Korea.

Things were not so good in Afghanistan, though. The Afghan government chose to resurrect the ghost of Taliban rule by giving men the legal right to tell their wives, "give up the coochie or starve, woman." Ten days later, the UN declared that the country's ongoing election may have been massively flawed. In between, the British military death toll hit the magic number of 200, while August was later declared by the UN to have been the deadliest month of 2009 for civilians. There are no official totals for civilian casualties since 2001, but even the most conservative estimates are approaching 50,000. Operation Enduring Freedom, ladies and gentlemen.

Puts the Oasis split into perspective. Me, I consoled myself with a John Hughes box-set.

September
Times change.

In the 1950s, a man could be chemically castrated just for being gay. Even if he was the father of modern computing. Even if he'd played a key role in winning the Second World War. No exceptions. Bumboys got neutered, that was the rule. And it would take 57 years, his suicide and a massive online petition before the British government would say, "actually, yeah, that wasn't really on, was it?" Such was the sad tale of Alan Turing.

In 2009, however, a man who'd made some films could be arrested for sexually assaulting a minor, but find his peers rushing to defend him.

Roman Polanski - coaxed out of hiding in France to collect a lifetime achievement award at the Zurich film festival - was unexpectedly apprehended by the Swiss authorities in September, apparently for some silly youthful indiscretion way, way back in 1976, when he was just 44. The festival organisers' "great consternation and shock" was echoed in Hollywood. Whoopi Goldberg mounted a defence on US talk show The View, in which she drew a helpful distinction between "rape-rape" and Polanski's version, which we'll call 'sodomising-a-drugged-13-year-old-girl-rape'. I'm still waiting to hear her verdict on Jonathan King.

There was more stark contrast in the UK economy, when a Guardian survey revealed that - shock! horror! - the death knell of capitalism had yet to sound in the upper echelons of the business world, where executives still managed to award themselves an average 10% pay rise in 2008. Two days later, the Office for National Statistics published the highest unemployment figures in 14 years.

Shock! in Guinea too, where Moussa Dadis Camara, head of the military junta which swept to power in 2008 on the back of a bloodless coup, with lovely words about democracy, transparency and development, had actually turned out not to be such a lovely head of a military junta after all. Following an announcement that Camara would be running in the 2010 presidential election, despite an earlier promise that his leadership was purely for the interim, the people decided they'd had enough. A 50,000-strong protest ended with at least 157 dead, 1,253 injured, and accusations of secret burials, rape and genital mutilation levelled at Camara's forces.

Didn't get a massive lot of column inches, that. Patrick Swayze did, though.

Part four coming soon.

Chuckles Review Of 2009, Part 2

2010-01-14T19:44:00.008Z

April
It's almost impossible to remember now what the world was like before April 2009. The looted shops; the abandoned cars; the despotic warlords that terrorise our neighbourhoods with makeshift weapons; the eerie silence; the decay and the foul miasma: all have become so commonplace that we barely notice them anymore, just step over the rotting corpses on our way to the bread lines each week, pass out from the exertion and finally cough ourselves to death.

Yes, April 2009 was when the nightmare began, as the initial reports of a deadly new virus started trickling out of Mexico.

But not even for swine flu does the news stop, oh no. April 2009 was a news-packed month, as news-packed as any other last year, if not news-packeder.

A North Korean rocket test tickled the West's trigger-fingers, Phil Spector went down for murder and former Met Commissioner Ian Blair misguidedly defended the officers who conducted the half-arsed investigation into the 1993 murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, saying he didn't "necessarily believe there was anything racist about the activities of the Metropolitan police". Apparently they'd have treated the murder of any poor person the same way.

At the G20 protests, Blair's former colleagues chose to unveil their latest crowd-control tactics, 'charging crowds of hippies chanting, "this is not a riot"', 'breaking arms' and 'killing innocent bystanders'.

An especially bad month for the law was topped off when the 7/7 trial ended with a bill of £100m and no convictions. But we didn't care about that, because we were too caught up in the Susan Boyle phenomenon. Fancy! A physically unattractive woman opens her mouth and doesn't honk like a wounded moose! What next? A gay man who can do sums?

May
Expensageddon!

I'll happily admit that didn't quite work just then. but the fact is that no words yet exist that could possibly do justice to the sheer hugeness of the MPs' expenses scandal, which kicked off proper in May.

And it was huge. So huge that tedious arseholes in pubs and offices up and down the country are still fucking bleating about it. Yes, duck island, well done.

Still, at least it persuaded then Commons Speaker Michael Martin - a man more persistently and visibly committed than anyone to keeping democracy closed and Parliament unaccountable - to finally do something vaguely honourable and allow his bent, bloated arse to be dragged kicking and screaming from his chair.

North Korea, meanwhile, was at it again with the nuclear detonations. Always with the nuclear detonations. The UN huffed and puffed a bit.

George Tiller, an American physician and bête noire to the anti-abortion movement, was shot dead at his local church.

And the 26-year civil war in Sri Lanka ended in defeat for the Tamil Tigers after their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran was killed. But at least it stopped the Sri Lankan military shelling civilian hospitals in 'no-fire' zones, eh?

Not a very funny month, all told. Sorry about that.

June
Before June 2009, you heard the word 'pandemic' and your head was filled with fantastic, terrifying images of closed airports, lifeless nations and possibly even brutal warfare as the machines seized their chance and vied to take over the planet. But when the World Health Organisation officially declared swine flu to be a verified Global Pandemic, it turned out not to be so terrifying after all. Less terrifying, as one GP pointed out, than malaria, whose daily death toll (approximately 3,000) is almost a third of the total claimed by swine flu since its discovery, yet somehow doesn't generate a lot of excitable news copy. But then, malaria doesn't really affect rich, white people.

Still, we had the beginnings of a new wave of fascism to grease up our dark, apocalyptic imaginings as the European elections saw the far right making significant gains all over the EU. Not least in the UK, where thousands of idiots decided that a bit of expense-fiddling amongst mainstream parties was reason enough to legitimise some neo-Nazis by electing two of its members to the European parliament.

Twats.

And again, for the benefit of anyone reading who might've been among them:

Twats.

And just in case that didn't quite sink in:

Fucking goat-kissing, mother's-dick-sucking, baby-felching wanker twats.

Only days later, Iran too was gripped by election madness, when President Ahmadinejad secured a surprisingly definitive victory, winning by a much wider margin than had been suggested in some of the more reliable opinion polls. Within an hour the streets of Tehran had become a battleground. Ahmadinejad is still President. The status quo is hard as nails.

June was also a bumper month for celebrity deaths, with David Carradine and Farrah Fawcett both making their final payments on the farm. But we were all utterly 'stunned' by the 'shock' departure of Michael H Jackson, whose 'sudden' death magically, and with extreme prejudice, erased a whole world's memories like them flash things do in Men In Black, almost two decades of hostility disappearing in a puff of smoke, preserving forever in amber the Jackson we used to know and worship, in all his lovably eccentric, pre-allegations glory.

And I can't leave you without giving a mention to the former NME writer Steven Wells, whose death actually did come as something of a shock, even given his long battle with Hodgkin's lymphoma. Who would've believed death could be hard enough to take him on?

Part three follows when I can be arsed...

Chuckles Review Of 2009, Part 1

2010-01-10T18:03:00.003Z

"You, boy! What day is this?" "Why, today is the 10th of January!" Was there ever a better time to begin a four-part review of news events from the previous year? I sure as shit can't think of one. Here it is, babies...

January
George W Bush's impetuous toddler finger was finally and forever wrestled away from the big red button. It was the day the world had been waiting for since pretty much the day on which he first took office.

So what did we do to mark the occasion? How did we greet him when he stepped out of the White House, caked in the blood of several hundred thousand civilians and soldiers, having contributed to a global recession the like of which few now living had ever seen, the man who let New Orleans sink, a man for whom human life is just so much meat, meat in Asda Smart Price packaging that just says 'Meat' on the front (on the back: 'Contains 5% meat')? Did we cheer? Did we celebrate? Did we strip naked and burn effigies of him in the street, howling like wolves and rutting madly as we did?

No.

We thanked him for the laughter.

And while Bush went off into the night, garlanded with affectionate titters, his legacy kept on pounding holes into both people and earth like a daft, fleshy jackhammer. His friends in Israel had sent the IDF into Gaza over Christmas, where for most of the first month of 2009 they happily continued shooting and shelling everything in sight, man, woman, child, hospital and school.

Meanwhile, his glorious recession almost claimed a nation-sized trophy when Iceland's government cut itself to ribbons on the shards of what was left of its banking system. A new government was quickly formed, a pound of flesh torn from the financial industry and a terrifyingly primal revolution - which would almost certainly have involved rocks, heads on sticks and public masturbation - was narrowly averted. Is it wrong to have been just a little bit disappointed?

All of this seemed trivial, however, after Joaquin Phoenix rapped badly in a funny beard and fell over.

February
One of the big political sagas of 2008 limped to a numb and unfulfilling climax in Zimbabwe when Morgan Tsvangirai was kind of sworn in as some sort of Prime Minister, but apparently without taking any actual power or anything from President Robert Mugabe. The revolution will be nullified.

Another brutal tyrant laughing in the face of justice is Chris Brown, who, despite a vicious assault on his then girlfriend Rihanna in February, also still seems to be enjoying something resembling a career.

And yet another another massive fail for justice came as Binyam Mohamed was finally released from Guantanamo Bay and flown back to the UK, whereupon he regaled us with tales of lies and humiliation at Guantanamo, and razor blades and penises in Morocco, where mysterious British figures emerged from the shadows with leading questions and false hopes.

In order to allay any fears that the UK may have colluded in torture overseas, the British government still refuses to make public official documents relating to the case, claiming that to do so would harm national security by damaging relations with the US, another democratic country which absolutely does not no way not us no sir engage in torture, and would almost certainly not be implicated in any of the official documents relating to Binyam Mohamed's alleged 'torture' in Morocco, in which the British government is confident the courts will not be able to find them guilty of complicity if it can just hold on to the fucking documents until everyone gets bored and goes away. At the time of writing, the UK Foreign Office is appealing against, ooh, the 327th High Court ruling in favour of publication. Nothing to see here.

March
The tip of the expenses iceberg hove into view this month when soon-to-be-former Home Secretary Jacqui Smith was forced to apologise after inadvertently claiming for her husband's masturbatory aids. This is what happens when you don't keep your hands above the duvet, kids.

But with the full horror of the expenses scandal as yet unveiled, the government allowed itself a moment of brief self-satisfaction as British troops began pulling out of Iraq. This would prove to be a double-edged sword, of course. On the one hand, Blair's last few stubborn pubes were finally going down the plughole and one of the darker periods of modern British history was coming to a close. On the other, the British public was now free to focus its attentions on Afghanistan, a calamitous fuck-up in a giant's rockery where soldiers are still dropping like flies, whipping up whole new waves of anti-war sentiment. And this time the protests are coming from NORMAL PEOPLE. Not students, anarchists and ageing hippies, but NORMAL PEOPLE WHO READ TABLOIDS, WATCH X FACTOR AND REPRESENT THE MAJORITY.

Speaking of tabloids, a woman who for years had lived on the covers of British gossip rags, died on the covers of British gossip rags. Always First For Celebrity News, OK! magazine published its Jade Goody 'Official Tribute Issue' ('In Loving Memory... 1981 - 2009') two days before Jade Goody's actual death. So moving.

Part two - featuring the exciting months of April, May AND June - will follow in a couple of days or something.

Nova Express

2009-12-29T02:38:00.008Z

The earth is slowly burning, death lying across its surface like a shroud. Corpses litter parched deserts where once lush, verdant pastures teemed with life. Waters in one part of the world bubble and shrink, while in another they rear up and swallow the land.

Ed Miliband (79) sits outside his Siberian retirement villa, wrinkled and sweaty in the thick, muggy air. Between heavy breaths he speaks. Speaks thus:

Naivety, immaturity, stupidity. These are the basic elements of idealism, and they were in plentiful supply on the perimeter of the Copenhagen summit back in 2009. Forge a meaningful, lasting agreement on tackling climate change, they said. Respect the Kyoto treaty, they demanded. Of our delegates from the developed world they begged, accept responsibility for the state of the earth in 2009, don't make developing nations pay for our mistakes. It was our fault, they said, our doing.

Well, no-one was disputing that, were they? Of course we were liable. But did that mean that we should have accepted liability? Hahabsolutely not! What sort of world were these idiots living in! A world in which people took responsibility for their own actions and dealt with the consequences? Jesus fuck haha!

Oh, Christ... Mustn't laugh... Makes me so terribly dizzy in this heat...

Sorry, I'll be with you in a moment...

Right, where was I? Ah, yes. Responsibility. You see, it's all very well to hold one's hands up and say, yes, we admit it, it was all our fault, we'll sort it out, don't you worry. But that would have been terribly damaging to national interests, would it not? Have you any idea what the bill was going to be for what was proposed at Copenhagen? Why take on that sort of workload and expense when you can simply not?

Seemed simple enough to us, anyway. But then the whiny little sods started saying, no, that's not the point. The point is fairness. Well, I mean fairness! Fucking fairness! Do you want to talk about fairness? How fair would it've been for the likes of us, the British, to be running around now, cleaning everything up while China and India do what they want and reap the bloody benefits?

You're too young to remember, of course, but in our day, believe it or not, we were relatively important. Less so than we had been, but much, much more than we are now. The British Prime Minister, you may be surprised to learn, had access to almost all of the major world leaders. Not merely the President of the Republic of Scotland. Even the Germans listened to us. I mean, they thought we were idiots, but they listened. But we knew then that Britain was going to become a minor economy. We didn't want anyone else to know that, though, so we just played silly buggers for the duration of the summit and then blamed the poorer countries when the whole thing fell apart.

And that's politics. All this 'fairness' and 'justice' and 'not wiping out a quarter of all life on this planet' is all very nice, but in a world like ours, ultimately meaningless. The brutal truth is that everyone's looking out for themselves and to hell with all the other buggers, and so that's the game we all have to play: friend or foe, don't wait to find out, just silently hack your fellow man to death with a machete, fuck his corpse and eat what's left. Then weep, weep for all that's been lost.

Could things be done differently? Well, perhaps. But that would take effort, wouldn't it? Effort and compromise. Co-operation. Skilled diplomacy. Fuck that!

Shillcot

2009-12-13T23:14:00.008Z

In anticipation of his appearance at the Chilcot inquiry in the new year, former Prime Minister Tony Blair has bravely chosen to drop his biggest bombshell now, in an interview with a lightweight, former daytime TV presenter; an interview which was broadcast this morning, when everyone was still in bed, news of which interview broke yesterday - Saturday - a day on which no-one pays attention.

We heard Blair talking afterwards, off the record, to Ms Britton. Here's what he said...

Yeah, alright, I didn't give a fuck. So what? What you gonna do about it? Yeah, I knew no-one wanted the war, and yeah, I knew there probably weren't any WMDs, or any legally justifiable reasons to invade Iraq. But you know what? Fuck it. I was Prime Minister, I was calling the shots.

What, you don't think that's democratic? Think that's despotic, do you? Well, boo-fucking-hoo. If you don't like it, get your own fucking country, love. Three times you fickle twats elected me to make these sorts of fucking decisions. So I made them. I sent the UK into Iraq because I wanted to. Hundreds of thousands of people are now dead, because I felt like making them dead. Do you know what it's like to live with that kind of knowledge? Makes me fucking hard, love. You ever seen a powerful man weeping, naked and erect? Play your cards right, maybe you will later. It'll change you.

I wanted him out. Saddam. I wanted Saddam out. And I didn't give a fuck about what happened to Iraq afterwards. Why would I give a fuck about a load of foreigners? I didn't do it for them. I did it for me. I wanted him out. I wanted to go down in history as the Prime Minister who got rid of Saddam. I wanted the fucking hat-trick, love. I fucking sorted out Northern Ireland, fucking done a crack at Yugoslavia, now I wanted Iraq. So fucking historians will look at me, way off in the future, they'll look at me and they'll go: "that was Blair, the man who brought peace to the world." Give it about a thousand, I reckon they'll be saying I was the Second Coming or something. I know how these things work. No-one wanted anything to do with fucking Jesus when he was around, did they? Have you ever felt the light of our Lord Jesus Christ inside you, love? Would you like to?

They hate me too. Doesn't matter... I hate them... unambitious little piggy fuckers, snuffling around in their own filth. What've they done with their lives, eh? Have you ever changed the face of the world, love? Have you ever had that power? Have you ever had the face of the world in one hand and just... pounded it with the other BAM! BAM! BAM! till bits of it have fallen off or turned to mush? Have you ever felt that power, love? Coursing through your veins? Making your muscles throb? Straining against the fabric of your pants?

I'm like some fucking Nietzschean Superman, love. Beyond good and evil. I do things for my own reasons... because I can... start wars because I can... because great men are made on fucking conflict, love... great men... great, strong men... big muscles...

(Short silence)

I like to kill things, you know... small animals... birds... the world goes silent then... the chattering stops... head feels light... see stars... feel like I'm not here... feel free...

(Longer silence, sobbing)

TONY FUCKING BLAIR!!!

Manndela

2009-11-08T00:46:00.002Z

Champions of human rights all over the world were celebrating earlier this week as mercenary Simon Mann was released from prison in Equatorial Guinea.

In 2004, we looked on aghast as Mann was both arrested and jailed in Zimbabwe, en route to heroically overthrow President Teodoro Obiang's government for money and power. After spending three years in a Zimbabwean prison, Mann was secretly extradited to Equatorial Guinea to face trial, during which he courageously praised Obiang's brutal totalitarian regime.

Having languished for the last two years in Malabo's notorious Black Beach prison, Mann - who reportedly made millions in the 1990s from shipping arms to Sierra Leone, allegedly in violation of a UN embargo - was finally granted a pardon by Obiang on Monday, November 2, and released the following day. Although he missed out on the £15m that he would have been paid for nobly mounting a successful coup d'état in the extremely oil-rich country, his story is expected to net him almost as much. Mann's politically convenient release has been hailed a victory for human rights in a country with little regard for such things.

Prior to his arrest in 2004, Simon Mann killed people for money.

Big Jobs

2009-11-01T19:26:00.001Z

GOVERNMENT DRUGS ADVISER

Job No: WM/17171

Wage
Negotiable

Hours
60+ HOURS PER WEEK, 7 DAYS

Location
WESTMINSTER

Duration
Fixed-term, until spring 2010

Date posted
31 October 2009

Pension details
No details held

Description
The UK Home Office urgently seeks a drugs adviser. The title is essentially symbolic: the post-holder will be required to do no more than look important and clever whilst reading out pre-approved Home Office statements. The successful candidate will ideally have a load of letters after his or her name in order to present a veneer of credibility. However, actual expertise is not essential. In fact, the less you know, the less trouble you're likely to be.

The ideal candidate will shut the fuck up and behave, doing and saying nothing unless directly instructed otherwise.

Den Haag

2009-10-30T20:42:00.002Z

I haven't told you this before, but I was arrested last year on a number of charges, including (but not limited to):

Receiving stolen drugs!

Loving the streets!

Slagging the law!

Organ-sharing!

Public hello!

Illegal lubrication!

Pigeon-getting!

Hard nudity!

Wanky-wanky!

Them and roughly 134 other offences. I was looking at about 25 years for that lot. Pretty scary, I can tell you!

However, through a series of complicated legal manoeuvres, which I can't be arsed to discuss in detail, I managed to get myself tried as a war criminal at the UN's Yugoslav tribunal in The Hague.

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia may look a bit forbidding to the untrained eye, but actually, if you don't abscond or cark it before your case goes to trial, it'll probably only give you a tossy four-month sentence, or even let you go free altogether. And if, like Biljana Plavsic, you plea-bargain on charges relating to your pivotal role in the most heinous act of genocide in Europe since World War 2, chances are most of the other charges will be dropped and you'll serve no more than six of an eleven-year sentence. Six years! For genocide! And police protection when you get out!

What criminal wouldn't want to be tried by these motherfuckers? They strike fear into the hearts of precisely no-one. As I write, Radovan Karadžić is being sick on a picture of Judge O-Gon Kwon, which he will present to the judge himself on Tuesday morning, telling him: "this will represent me in court! Now I go back to playing Farmville! Tell me when I have been acquitted! Haha!"

Anyhow, long story short, not only was I found not guilty on all counts, but the tribunal actually pleaded guilty to crimes of its own against me, paid me a £1.8m fine and sentenced itself to life imprisonment.

Result!

Let Them Not Weep

2009-10-28T07:57:00.005Z

As Gordon Brown limps through the final few months of his premiership, he tells us what he has learnt during the past two years

On achievement
Imagine, being on the cusp of greatness. For most of your life you have wanted it, thirsted after it, toiled for it. You have betrayed friends for it; you would even have killed for it if necessary. And finally, you find yourself just before its beginning, struggling to conceal your impatience as you wait to assume the mantle that you have coveted for so long. Every fibre of your being compels you to snatch at it, greedily. But with superhuman effort you fight these urges, determined not to let anything destroy your hopes at this crucial moment.

And then it comes into view, though warped and clouded through the filter of your tears, brought hesitantly towards you in your predecessor's loving hands: your life's ambition, your glory. Trembling, you take it.

Now imagine that it's covered in shit and sick, that for the next two years the entire country is going to hit you repeatedly in the balls with it, and that forever after you will be remembered as Shitty Sickman.

And worse, when finally the time comes for you to pass on the baton, you shall see how miraculously clean it suddenly appears, sparkling and gleaming in the scrubbed and shaven hands of your successor.

On loyalty
Is there someone, or a number of people, in your life that you can trust? That you know you can rely upon, when you need support, or when you feel the need to confide in someone? Someone, or a number of people, that you know will never betray that trust?

Then I am afraid that you are an idiot. There is no loyalty in the cruel glare of brutal nature. These people want you dead. You are in their way. Your very existence denies them access to vital resources, mates and such. You are an obstacle to these people, and they to you.

Be prepared to fight, or else go away and hide, in solitude, for the rest of your life. They will be looking for you. And when they find you, you will want a quick death.

On luck
Luck has been a central character in the story of my premiership, and not a very helpful one. At least, not to me.

Luck is a fickle mistress, and one of strange tastes. For instance, let us say - purely hypothetically - that two men stand before her, competing for her affections. One of them plunged his country headlong into a war that is deeply unpopular and costly - both financially, and in terms of life. And let us say, for example, that he becomes almost as unpopular as that war, and leaves his position to the other man, who takes it, bathed in the warm glow of goodwill. Luck smiles on that second man.

But then before they have even done it or anything, she kicks him in the knackers, for no reason whatsoever, and impales his hand on her stiletto heel. Suddenly the first man is fucking goldenballs again, traipsing around, saving the world, swanning into Parliament when he feels like it, met with hushed awe, like a returning hero. And luck is right back in his pants.

And the second man can only hope that luck somehow secures for the first the impressive but essentially powerless role of President of the EU, where he will be revered, garlanded, perhaps even deified, but effectively neutered.

Again, this is all hypothetical.

On hope
Hope is a terrible thing: a curse, a harbinger of disaster, a demonic baby clinging to your neck, sinking its fangs periodically into the well of your clavicle until you give it what it wants. Hope has cast a long, dark shadow over my entire adult life.

I particularly look forward to the day after this election, because that will be the day when I can finally give up hoping.

Brother, My Cup Is Empty

2009-09-13T20:28:00.009+01:00

Sometimes, in life, we have cause to stop, look around and take stock. Where are we? How did we get here? Is this where we want to be? I've been doing a lot of that this past year or so, stepping back, taking in the carnage that surrounds me. Is this where I want to be?

I suppose it's not where I want to stay, but I have no doubt that I am where I'm suppose to be, now, at this point in my life. It's another step on the path that I've chosen to walk down, and however bleak my existence - however harrowing the screams that cut through the midnight air from the depths of the forest behind the Ukrainian farmhouse that's been my home for the last 18 months - I remain philosophical about my situation.

Still, I sometimes wonder if I wasn't, perhaps, fully ready yet for this particular chapter of my life. If so, I blame nobody but myself: I chose this new career as surely as it chose me, and I'm determined to see it through. After Big Brother I suddenly found myself, for the first time in over a decade, without a steady source of income. Snuff seemed like a logical progression.

It still feels strange to recall the life that I led, and the person that I was in the early days of Big Brother, more than a decade ago. I was chosen to present the show for my qualities as a mid-ranking Duchess of late-night television: I was cheeky, irreverent, one of the girls; but I was also warm, sisterly and ultimately unthreatening. And this was the role I played on Big Brother for many years. I was the kindly figure that greeted housemates on their ejection from the house, picking over their experiences unflinchingly but non-judgmentally. I was almost de-briefing the contestants, helping them to make sense of their experiences in the preceding weeks, gently acclimatising them to life post-Big Brother, like a lubricant, easing their passage back into the world - a world they recognised, apparently the same as they left it, but by now oddly unfamiliar, a world that now recognised them too, a world that now hated them, hated them because our producers wanted it to.

But time marched on, the format got tired and we all - all of us, you included - became a little jaded. None of us believed in anything anymore, did we? Britain by the end of the noughties was a place where just about everything was permissible, particularly if it was in the name of entertainment. We were all sleepwalking, humping husks, eating, fucking and crawling over each other's corpses, desperate for gratification that could never again be achieved.

Which is why I started to treat the housemates a little less like humans than I had before. I'd always been slightly apart from the excesses of the Big Brother format; obviously associated with it, but not directly involved in the torment of the housemates. I was the one you could trust. You were safe with me. Not so much by series 10. I was one of the bastards by that point, dragging the housemates over hot coals when they came out, mercilessly ripping the shit out of them on Big Brother's Big Mouth. I was, by now, very much the personification of the malevolence at the heart of the show.

I didn't mean for it to happen. I'd been tainted, infected by the evil of the brand - unavoidably, after so many years in its presence. And so when I was approached after series 11 by Tantalus Films, the world's leading producers of extreme reality entertainment, I naturally jumped at the chance without a moment's reflection.

I used to dream of one day returning to civilised society, of turning my back on this world of horror, and reconnecting with my humanity. But I realise now that's impossible.

One morning last week, as my victim's almost unnatural howls of agony bounced off the walls of the killing floor, blood splattering my overalls, his gurgling disbelief, death rattle, pathetic final spasms failing to effect any greater assault on my senses than would the sight of an old man eating ham sandwiches on a park bench, I finally understood my place in the world. My dirty cleaver fell to the floor in a shiny pool of crimson, my head drooped, eyes closed, shoulders sagged. I dropped to my knees and for a little while I moaned quietly, wordlessly, a brief act of mourning for things passed.

And that was when I came to terms with my fate. Like it or not, this is where I belong now. There is no going back. I am lost.

Extract from McCall on McCall, published 2012 by HarperCollins

Unpleasantly Thick

2009-09-04T23:05:00.006+01:00

Advertisement
Hey, you!

Are you a white, educated, middle-class liberal? Are you a scrupulous observer of modern ethics? Do you pride yourself on your extensive catalogue of progressive social anxieties?

Doesn't it get wearing? Aren't you tired of tip-toeing around, trying not to offend anyone? Don't you wish you too could indulge your natural distrust of anyone different to you, without remorse or fear of recrimination?

Then Islamophobia is for you!

Testimonial
I've always enjoyed talking shit about people who didn't necessarily deserve it, making myself seem too cool and clever to subscribe to liberal dogma, without actually breaking any specific rules. But until recently I had to direct my poison at individuals. With Islamophobia, I can be openly racist on prime time television. Hey! I'm not being racist - I'm being antitheist!
C. Hitchens, Washington DC

Finally! A new prejudice for a new generation. Imagine: holding forth in the office, appearing on the radio, writing columns for left-leaning broadsheets, spitting filthy brown gobs of hatred at an entire race... and no inconvenient pangs of liberal guilt!

Testimonial
As a high-ranking member of a well-known government, I've had to watch what I say at all times. Then I discovered Islamophobia. When I humiliated a Muslim woman of my own constituency, I was not reprimanded, but instead credited with sparking a national debate! Even with the blood of hundreds of thousands of Muslim civilians on my hands, I still get to keep my job! I would recommend Islamophobia to anyone! Except bastard Muslims, that is!
J. Straw, Minster Lovell

It's been proven: Islam is bad. It isn't compatible with western values. It's evil and must be stopped. Look...

Kill all women and gays and Christians and Jews and and any other type of infidel which hasn't been invented yet. Drive cars loaded with explosives into their shopping centres and hotels.
The Koran, p.36

It would be wrong not to hate Islam and all its practitioners.

With Islamophobia, you can be:

Bigoted!

Intolerant!

Prejudiced!

Racist!

An utter fucking cunt!

All this and still retain the respect of your disgusting hypocrite peers!

Testimonial
Racial intolerance is generally frowned upon in modern literary circles. But thanks to Islamophobia, I can ignorantly associate 1.5bn ordinary people with the actions of a handful of rabid extremists, rather like a muttering, shaven-headed fellow sitting alone in the corner of a downmarket hostelry... and continue to be taken seriously!
M. Amis, London

That's Islamophobia - the bigotry you can enjoy without ruining your liberal credibility!

Psoriasis

2009-08-31T18:23:00.005+01:00

Yes. It's true. The worst thing that anyone could possibly imagine has indeed come to pass. Oasis are no more. The news has sent echoes - no! - screaming jetbursts of white-hot pain bolting through the world's broadband pipes at twice of the speed of demons. And as ever, you've been writing to us in your thousands: for comfort; for a friendly ear; for leadership. You are lost and frightened, longing for direction and purpose. And we will give it to you. But you're not ready yet. You haven't suffered enough. You're too strong. You may resist.

In the meantime, we've gathered together a selection of your emails about the split. Have some tissues ready, because it's moving stuff. Not to mention highly erotic.

So crack open a beer, scratch your arse and prepare to feel the pain of your fellow fans. Let's remember together the happiness that Oasis brought us. Let's remember the laughter and the tears. Let's get a bit emotional in football tops and then act all surprised in two weeks when they get back together. (NOTE TO SELF: edit according to status of band in two weeks)

I can't believe it! I'm knocked sideways! Jolted violent till my joints seized up, mate! Fucking blinded by the light of this 15 megaton nuclear explosion of revelation! Ninja news! Whoosh! Schlock! Decapitation fact, son! Oasis broken up! Totally unexpected! Fuck...
alaindebotton@gmail.com

I remember when Sutho (former NME editor Steve Sutherland) first tipped me off about this new band from Manchester: Oasis. He said, "Alan - they're wank. You'll love 'em!" We had this thing going, me and Steve, we had a thing for dredging up the most uninspiring, mediocre shit we could find and foisting it upon the record-buying public: me releasing it, him writing about it, towers of concrete hyperbole, talking it up like it was going to change your fucking life - Teenage Fanclub's Jangle Revolution! 18 Wheeler Will Destroy John Major! Ride Fucks The Economy! - see if the dull-eyed bovine fuckheads would buy it. And of course, they did! We thought it was hilarious. Did get a bit out of hand later on, though, didn't it? That's why we had to kill the original Liam.
Alan McGee (Creation Records founder)

Everything changed the first time I saw Oasis live in 1994. I remember watching them stand there like waxworks, eyes fixed firmly on their instruments, Liam with his hands behind his back, plodding through their stodge with workmanlike efficiency. And I remember thinking, this is the most exciting live band in Britain today. Why, they're going to rip the music scene wide open like a huge, quivering cock of wrong. And now it's over... And still no-one gives that much of a shit outside Western Europe.
Big Jim, 53, Rochdale

Oasis' lumpen, mid-tempo pub rock gave my life meaning. Noel's vague lyrical platitudes taught me how to be a better person. In a world without their self-absorbed, macho hedonism, there's simply nothing left to believe in.
Yorp

When Noel Gallagher wished AIDS upon Blur's Damon Albarn and Alex James, we were naturally outraged. But now we can see the funny side. Great lads, great days, great music. They'll be missed.
Phil Farley, Terence Higgins Trust

Excuse us while we have a little cry.

Schmalvin

2009-08-23T17:17:00.000+01:00

Calvin Harris: A Day In The Life

Calvin Harris is having a lovely dream about eating some pancakes but then ding-a-ling-aling! it's time to wake up because it's about ten in the morning and he has to go to the studio today and make some songs that they'll play on the radio and listen to on their MP3 players, so he gets out of bed and goes to the toilet for a wee and then he washes his hands and then he goes downstairs and asks his mum to make him some breakfast and he says, I fancy pancakes today Mum, but I don't know why, so his mum says, you sit down Calvin and I'll make you some lovely pancakes, and she does and then puts them on a plate and then puts the plate on the table and Calvin puts some maple syrup on them and puts lots of sugar on and then he eats them with a fork and they're well nice, then he finishes his pancakes and puts the plate in the sink and his mum tells him he'd better hurry because he has to go to the studio and make some music and not to worry because she'll do the washing up, so he goes upstairs and goes into the bathroom and brushes his teeth and then he goes in the shower but then he gets out of the shower because he's forgotten to get undressed first, so he has a shower and then gets out of the shower and then he goes to his room and he puts on some socks and then some underpants with Bananaman on them and then he puts on his trousers and a t-shirt and some trainers and then he leaves the house and says, bye Mum I'm going bye! and starts walking to the studio and on the way he decides he wants some rhubarb and custard sweets so he goes into the shop and walks up to the counter and looks at the shop assistant and he says, hellooooooo! and he looks at the shop assistant and the shop assistant looks back at him so he carries on looking at the shop assistant smiling and the shop assistant keeps looking back and he wonders why the shop assistant doesn't just give him his sweets but he doesn't worry about it too much so he keeps looking at the shop assistant and the shop assistant keeps looking back and then he forgets what he came in for, so he goes back out of the shop and walks off down the street until he gets back home and he goes in and says, hi Mum I'm home! but she doesn't answer because she must be out or something, so he goes to the kitchen and makes a nice fried breakfast with some eggs and some beans and some mushrooms and some nice sausages and some bacon and some tomato ketchup and a lovely cup of tea, and he eats all of the breakfast he eats it all up and then he goes upstairs to the bathroom and he has a quick poo and then he washes his hands and then brushes his teeth and then he gets changed into his jammies and gets into bed, but then his phone rings and it's the producer and he says, come on Calvin we're supposed to be making some music today for them to play on the radio and their MP3 players and Calvin goes, oh no! it was a such an eventful day today I forgot to go the studio and the producer laughs and Calvin laughs and the producer laughs and Calvin laughs and the producer says, come on Calvin I'll send a car to pick you up, so the car comes to pick Calvin up and Calvin gets in the car and the car sets off to the studio and the driver says, hello Calvin how are you today? and Calvin says, hello Mr Driver I'm a bit sad today actually, and the driver says, oh dear! what's wrong Calvin? and Calvin says, well you know when you like look in the mirror and you look really hard at yourself like really trying to see into your soul and you don't like what you see because you realise that the life you've chosen for yourself is utterly meaningless and it's sucking you dry draining you of all substance and you're like looking at your eyes and you're trying to look through them and you can't see anything there it's just like looking into a void and you can almost feel yourself being sucked into it like you might lose your balance and fall in and get lost forever completely disorientated in the foggy swirl of your own vacuousness and you'll never escape and can you just drive the car into this wall please or off this bridge? and the driver says, no I've never felt like that Calvin have you? and Calvin says, I can't remember now. What was I talking about? And the driver says, I've forgotten hey! we're at the studio now Calvin! and Calvin says, hooooraaaaaaay! and Calvin goes in the studio and makes some lovely songs and they will play them on the radio and their MP3 players.

Guided By Voices

2009-08-23T01:41:00.006+01:00

As you may know, David Cameron - visionary Conservative leader and British Führer (2010-2019) - has, over the past year, been consorting with an eclectic, international set of rightwing politicians, writers and intellectuals. I broke into his house and found this memo:

Conservative policy direction for government?

Gentlemen and ladies,

You may be aware that I have been purring seductively around the heels of a number of dangerous extremists for some time now, and have taken from these consultations a great deal of inspiration re: future direction for our party, post-election. Please review my notes. Comments welcome.

Youth and Community
The 'Broken Britain' meme has now well and truly saturated the public consciousness. With the help of sympathetic elements in the press, we have so successfully reframed the average teenager as an embryonic psychopath that even some liberals have bought it. When your father passes an 18-year-old boy in the street, he fully expects the boy to produce a large bladed implement from his waistband, drive it into the soft flesh at one side of the belly and drag it all the way across, then stand watching as the intestines flop, as if in slow-motion, from the obscene gaping wound, stand barely smiling - so jaded that mere existence is torture, so numbed by ennui that even this depraved orgy of violence, this adventure to the godless far reaches of human experience, is a deadening routine - look into your father's frightened, uncomprehending eyes, then walk away bored before daddy even hits the ground. The city crumbles. Anguished screams echo between deserted tower blocks. Therefore, I expect voters will welcome a compulsory 2-year tour of Afghanistan for all children between the ages of 14 and 19. Posting tertiary citizens (to be defined in further communications) to front lines - ostensibly in support services - should provide a useful buffer for active personnel. (Re: education, we may, under the pretence of a post-election emergency budget, be presented with the opportunity to do away with state-funded education altogether. I'll go into more detail at a later date.)

Economy
It was generally assumed, at the start of the economic crisis, that we would see a shift in the public mindset towards more socialist Utopian ideals. The opposite, however, has proved to be the case. As one immediately becomes considerably more attracted to one's wife when she threatens to leave, so now - more than ever - the voters crave capitalism. Spending continues to rise. After a decade of prosperity, shiny things, house porn and cokestripper orgies, they have no desire to embrace a simpler, less extravagant existence. No-one has a problem with capitalism who believes they stand to benefit from it. Two-pronged attack: 'a Conservative government will make you richer'; while for the truly hopeless (state-educated, social housing), keep trotting out the trickle-down bollocks. As the economy worsens and public spending recedes, they'll take to the streets: brutal guerrilla warfare: gardening implements; makeshift firearms; cars upending; cannibalism; necromancy; wearing each other's faces, etc. 2 or 3 years of this should help spoon away some of the scum. I believe this is what is known as social Darwinism.

Immigration
Our ultimate goal, obviously, is zero immigration by 2015. Liberal orthodoxy still exerts a stranglehold on British society, however, so this must be a gradual process. A terrorist attack may be useful (consult MI5 and Met re: feasibility, etc... possible ethical issues: IMPERATIVE NO MORE THAN 200 DEAD). Deal with remainder as with Muslims (see below).

Muslims
Softly-softly - even, dare I say it, conciliatory? - approach initially, introducing a non-compulsory programme of integration courses, possible 'amnesty' for fundamentalists and would-be radicals. As time progresses, participation may become compulsory for all practising Muslims, with imprisonment for non-participation or failure. Scope may, over time, be widened further to include non-practising Muslims. Voters should be sufficiently desensitized by 2018 for us to introduce summary incarceration and ultimately deportation for all. Any resulting fuss should be manageable (police: shoot to kill?).

The Jew
My consultations have left me absolutely in no doubt that the Jew poses as grave a threat as ever to British interests. Besides being inherently untrustworthy, self-serving and unhygienic, the Jew has, more specifically, brought the global economy to its knees and betrayed our Lord,

(Several pages missing)

state media, summarily executing dissenters among former representatives of the free press. By 2019, Final Solution should pass more or less unopposed.

Stephen Hawking, 1942 - 2009

2009-08-12T22:42:00.002+01:00

Just received this important communication from Conservatives for Patients Rights. Please circulate:

The FACTS About The English Health Service

London's English Health Service was founded in 1948 by Joseph Stalin.

You might be thinking, 'now, hey! Free health care, that doesn't sound so bad, right?' Perhaps not - in theory. But the reality is very different. Health care costs money, and the more people there are to treat, the less money there is to go round. Which is why the English Health Service refuses to treat sick people, only performs surgery on the under-30s, and drowns disabled babies at birth. If it had its way, Stevie Wonder, Christopher Reeve and former President George W Bush would not be alive today. In a nutshell, the English Health Service wants its patients to die!

To further cut costs, the English Health Service recalls London's citizens on retirement. Having been informed by letter that he has reached the end of his useful life, the retired Londoner goes to his nearest English Health Service centre on the specified date, where he is put to sleep and melted down to produce the gristly slop on which London's citizens are fed in huge, gray, socialist canteens.

English Health Service surgeons kill far more people than they save. Think about it: what incentive is there to do a good job when they're only getting paid the same amount as the cleaner, whose job it is to remove, by hand, their stools from the buckets that Londoners - who lack modern drainage facilities - are forced to use for toilets? London surgeons perform their operations in dirty, ill-lit, blood-spattered basements, often while drinking warm beer and smoking. One patient who, in 2007, went into theater for a routine appendectomy, woke up the following day to find his lower intestine dangling outside of his body, the surgeon having neglected to pack it away before the cavity was stitched up and cauterized. Meanwhile, 26-year-old Ben Morgan of London had so little confidence in the English Health Service that he attempted surgery on himself after suffering a brain aneurysm. As a consequence, his entire vocabulary was dramatically reduced to just one word: 'glans'.

Socialists argue that universal health care systems such as the English Health Service are fairer as they make treatment more accessible to people on low incomes. But should these people be able to afford health care? Surely, if God had meant for the poor to live beyond 50, He would have given them money? The poor exist to fix our cars, clean our homes and provide us with guilty sexual gratification. Allowed to flourish, unchecked, they will very quickly become a drain on any society. They're also loud, unsightly and ill-mannered.

The English Health Service hates freedom.

Mansour Update

2009-07-07T22:42:00.004+01:00

(See... 1... 2... 3... 4... 5)

There's been a wicked response on the petition. 1,200 beautiful, shining signatures. Love to all y'all.

A decision's going to be made in the next 48 hours, so it all counts between now and then. If you've signed the petition, please pass the link on to everyone you know. In fact, go for everyone you've ever met. Aim high. That's the key.

And fire off an email to Phil Woolas and Alan Johnson, asking them politely but firmly to reconsider their position. Maybe put human lives before political expedience. Radical. The address is privateoffice.external@homeoffice.gsi.gov.uk

Mansour Petition

2009-07-05T13:00:00.004+01:00

(See... 1... 2... 3... 4)

There's a petition online to stop the Mansour family's deportation to Egypt, where they risk religious persecution. And here it is.

I can't help but notice that this blog has actually had some readers in the last 24 hours, so some of you are clearly getting involved and putting the word out. Good on yers, whoever you are.

And the campaign's Facebook group seems to be getting bigger by the hour. If you're on Facebook, the for Christ's sake, join it.

Back Once Again With The Ill Behaviour

2009-07-04T19:50:00.007+01:00

(See... 1... 2... 3)

I'm pleased to be telling y'all that flight BA155 to Cairo left the runway one family of seven lighter than planned earlier this evening. I've been told that Hany Mansour - on the advice of the Boaz Trust, and against his placid nature - created such a shitstorm that he, his wife and their five children weren't allowed onboard.

The campaign has put the family in touch with the barrister who'll be helping them mount an appeal.

The campaign's built up a massive head of steam over the last 36 hours, and this result is testament to the soul and sheer force of will among their community in south Manchester and their two young daughters' school, Our Lady's RC Primary. Not to mention the resourcefulness and ingenuity of many of its members. Give it up for them. Without their - and your - efforts, the Mansours would probably be on their way to a truncated life of misery and fear right now.

So the family has won itself more time, but the fight isn't over until they're granted leave to remain in the UK. They still need your help.

If you're on Facebook, join the campaign's group for news. If not, follow me on Twitter, or check back here, where you can read my updates over there on the right.

Stay involved.

More Help Wanted

2009-07-04T10:27:00.012+01:00

(See previous posts... 1... 2)

The Mansours are scheduled, courtesy of the Home Office, to leave the UK at 17.55 this evening on flight BA155 from Heathrow to Cairo, where - as Coptic Christians - they risk religious persecution. As well the Home Office knows. Father of the family, Hany, came to the UK bearing the literal scars of his experience in Egypt.

They'd been arrested on Wednesday morning and were last night refused an appeal, despite not having received adequate legal rep. The family includes 5 young children.

The campaign to intervene in their repatriation had been asking people to email their MP Tony Lloyd (who's an active supporter of anti-deportation causes), which you can still do (see either of my last two posts). But there's another way you can help.

The campaign's currently trying to persuade British Airways not to allow the Mansours on their flight, and it needs as much help as it can get.

You can get in touch with British Airways by telephone (+44 208 738 5100), fax (+44 20 8759 4314) or email. Ask them - no, tell them - not to accept the Mansours on flight BA155 from Heathrow to Cairo at 17.55 this evening.

You might also like the mention that the Mansours' human rights are currently in breach, and that by allowing them on this flight, British Airways will be complicit.

MORE: A campaign member has found a name and more numbers for British Airways - call +44 8444 930 787 or +44 7789 611 614 and ask to speak to Ewan.

Help Wanted (Update)

2009-07-03T19:00:00.002+01:00

The Mansour family (see previous post) have been refused an appeal.

The family came to Britain to escape religious persecution in Egypt, a country which the Home Office itself recognises as a dangerous place for non-Muslims, particularly Christians, such as the Mansours.

The family was arrested last night and is currently being held in an immigration centre awaiting a flight to Egypt tomorrow evening. They hadn't been offered legal representation.

The staff at Our Lady's RC Primary in Whalley Range, which was attended by the family's young children Karin and Nardin before their arrest, are still doing what they can, as can you. The decision may well have been made for now, but you can still make a noise.

If you haven't done so already, please just take one minute to copy and paste the text below and email it to the Mansours' MP Tony Lloyd at contact@tonylloydmp.co.uk

The more support this family gets, the better, deadlines or no.

Also, if you're on Facebook, join the group.

-------

Dear Mr Lloyd,

I am writing with regards to the possible deportation of the Mansour family from Moss Side. The children Karin and Nardin Mansour attend Our Lady's RC Primary school in Whalley Range. I would like to say what a terrible loss it would be to the school community and the community of Moss Side if the family were to leave.

It is extremely worrying to think that the family may be deported back to a country where their safety is at jeopardy. There are fundamentalist religious groups that are a threat to this family due to their religious beliefs.

Please do all you can to prevent this from happening.

Thank you

Help Wanted

2009-07-03T15:28:00.006+01:00

Hello all.

I'm afraid I have to drop the front again and ask for your help.

I got a call earlier today from a friend of mine who teaches at Our Lady's RC Primary in Whalley Range, Manchester. She needs urgent help in petitioning Tony Lloyd MP to intervene in the possible deportation of the Mansour family, two of whose daughters attend the school.

The Mansours came to Britain to escape religious persecution in their home country. Their lives may well be in danger if they're repatriated.

The school was only informed of the Mansours' situation this morning, and has apparently been given until 5pm today to petition on behalf of the family. They need as much support as possible in the next hour and a bit.

I don't care whether or not you're from Manchester. If you see this in time and have a mind to help, then please, please, please, please, please copy and paste the letter that my friend's drafted (below) into an email to contact@tonylloydmp.co.uk

In fact, even if you're reading this after 5, just keep them coming regardless.

And be a love and pass this on to as many people as you can think of. The public services union Unison has got involved, and I'm told that Tony Lloyd is an enthusiastic supporter of anti-deportation campaigns, so there's a real chance of making a difference here.

Thanks in advance. I'll let you know what happens.

-------

Dear Mr Lloyd,

I am writing with regards to the possible deportation of the Mansour family from Moss Side. The children Karin and Nardin Mansour attend Our Lady's RC Primary school in Whalley Range. I would like to say what a terrible loss it would be to the school community and the community of Moss Side if the family were to leave.

It is extremely worrying to think that the family may be deported back to a country where their safety is at jeopardy. There are fundamentalist religious groups that are a threat to this family due to their religious beliefs.

Please do all you can to prevent this from happening.

Thank you

Not About Jackson

2009-06-27T04:31:00.001+01:00

As the Iraq inquiry prepares to convene just as soon as someone decides what it's actually doing, we talk to the key players...

Brown
I've come to view Iraq in much the same way as I imagine an artist might regard an experimental work that is perhaps not technically successful, and has failed to capture public and critical imaginations, but whose intent is apparent. It is a brave thing to do. And if we were to the measure the worth of an endeavour not by its outcomes, but by its intentions, then it was very clearly right for us to embark upon operations in Iraq.

The point is that we were duty-bound to try. We weren't, admittedly, sure that Iraq possessed WMDs. We were, I confess further, actually quite sure that it didn't. But it might have done. One might even say that - as with Schrödinger's cat - Iraq, before the incursion, both had and didn't have WMDs, and would have continued to remain in this state until we resolved the matter by observation; by opening up the chamber, as it were.

Reasoning thus, we made the perfectly valid assessment that Iraq posed a grave threat to the wider world. Our observation ensured the non-existence of WMDs. I therefore stand by the Iraq project without reservation.

Miliband
My biggest regret about Iraq would have to be the Despair Bomb. It was very much an experimental weapon - one we weren't fully ready to deploy in a live situation, certainly used rashly; a weapon that unleashed, besides unimaginable destruction, a whole raft of troubling questions, many of which we'd failed to consider until after the fact... Questions such as: what happens to an entire nation drained of all hope? Is it ethical to deliberately bring about this state of affairs?

It was our Hiroshima. History will, I think, judge us with a degree of pragmatism. An atrocity, if you will, committed for the greater good. But examined more closely, our decision to resort to such drastic measures may be harder to defend. We effectively solved the problem of Iraq by destroying Iraq. Anyone watching the news that day will forever be haunted by those images of a country literally consuming itself, collapsing in on itself like a dying galaxy, leaving a vast tract of negative space.

That most of Iraq's neighbours were immediately sucked into the void along with it is something that I must live with for the rest of my days. On the other hand, however, is the world a noticeably worse place for the deletion from reality of the Middle East? 9/11. The Crusades. Our invasion of Iraq itself. None of it ever happened. And of this, I think Mars approves.

Campbell
If you let your bitch run around doing and saying whatever, then sooner or later you're going to wake up hanging from the ceiling by your feet with pasties on your tits, watching the cat playing with something in the corner of the room. After a while you'll realise it's a cock and balls. Soon after that you'll recognise it as your own cock and balls. And your bitch is shagging a vicar in the other corner.

A bitch needs to know who's boss. It needs discipline. Wants it. Iraq was a bitch that wanted a slap across the chops. Simple as. We had no choice. We'd be giving Iran a good kick up the cunt if I was still around.

Straw
I felt no real compunction, at the time, in attacking Iraq. I was, in fact, utterly convinced that Iraq was not actually a country, but rather a loose conglomerate of terrorist organisations. It occurs to me now that I may have confused Iraq with Al-Qaida.

And it was a confusing time. We were at war with terrorism itself. Nobody was entirely sure who the enemy really was. And so we closed our eyes and fired wildly in all directions, reasoning that we were almost certain to hit the culprit eventually.

Blair
Iraq: a screaming, hundred mile-per-hour apparition of a past love; an intense, passionate affair, as thrilling in its violence as it was terrifying. She was my glory and my nemesis. She flies, howling, through my dreams, puncturing the membrane upon entry so that the external world seeps in and the internal one out, intermingling as blood and heroin swirl in the dropper, dancing about one another - a dangerous, erotic dance - until finally they embrace and become one, an unholy union.

Memories: her nails would sink deep into my flesh as we made love, whereupon I would immediately climax in a tremendous rolling crescendo, pumping white sicks of rage, each spasm a punch thrown at her womb...

I lose sight of God in these moments. Catch myself longing to return to her scarred, sinewy arms. Reason deserts me, my will tossed like a carcass to my basest instincts, devoured in seconds. Too far gone to recall the material world. Too late to turn back. All behind me crumbles into oblivion. Two bodies alone in an empty universe...

As soon as it is over, reality floods my consciousness once more. I find myself back in my bed, whole body jerking with dry sobs, searing white-hot barbs of shame lashing at my skin. Cherie sits hugging herself by the door, eyeing me, her face weeping fear and disgust.

I am stuck to the sheets... and so there I lay... silent and motionless... for days...

For Fuck's Sake...

2009-06-08T22:56:00.002+01:00

Tuition fees. Meh. Fucking the NHS with sneaky part-privatisation schemes. Meh. Contributing to global recession by allowing our financial system to run wild and free until it eats itself. Meh. The widest poverty gap since the 1960s. Meh. A steady breakdown in social cohesion. Meh. Abolition of the 10p tax rate. Meh. Weaseling out of environmental commitments. Meh. Massive infringements of human rights and civil liberties in the name of 'national security'. Meh. Illegal war. Meh. Colluding in torture. Meh. Killing thousands of innocent people. Meh. FIDDLING EXPENSES?! Bastards! Bastards! They've gone too far this time!

What are we going to do?

We need to mount some sort of protest... Let's put a couple of racist Holocaust-deniers in the European parliament. Let's insult the memories of everyone who died fighting fascism. Let's raise a jingoistic salute to the flag and shit on it at the same time. Let's break into a British Legion residential home and be sick on the veterans' faces. That'll teach them.

Hello. I'm the British electorate, and I'm a fucking moron.

Morning Bellend

2009-06-07T01:10:00.015+01:00

Look, if this is going to work, you're going to need a daughter. If you don't already have one, and are unable or unwilling to acquire one, I'll have to ask you to imagine her. Take your time over this. Give her a name. A back story. A personality. She needs to feel real to you. What does she look like? How tall is she? What are her interests? What kind of relationship do you have with her? Do you even know? Do you actually care? It may help to write an exhaustive biography and character study; about 150-200,000 words should suffice. After you've done that, come back and read this.

So... We have a daughter. Now I want you to imagine that she's met self-styled saviour of Radio 1, Chris Moyles in, ooh, how about the Hemel Hempstead branch of Games Workshop? And he's asked her to join him for dinner.

Now that's bad enough, you might think, but wait! It gets worse. Let's imagine he's picked her up in his big, fancy, chauffeur-driven car. She's bowled over, as you'd expect. But see, this is where Moyles starts to show his true colours, because less than a mile into the journey he sets about dismantling her self-esteem with ruthless efficiency. Perhaps he says things like, "you'll wanna get them tits done, love," or, "I'll probably do you if I don't find anything better tonight." You might like to imagine that, every few minutes or so, he winds down the window and wolf-whistles at other women, perhaps asking the chauffeur to pull up beside one, giving her his number and telling her, "don't worry about this one," indicating your daughter. "I'm just giving her a do out of curiosity."

Once her ego is sufficiently trampled, he then starts his evil work in earnest. "Come on," he says, "don't be so uptight, let me see the merchandise, eh?" before ordering her to remove her underwear. "It's alright, I suppose," he says, inspecting her with a scowl. "I don't eat pussy, by the way. Keep 'em off, yeah?"

For the next few minutes, as your daughter quietly sobs, Moyles looks out of the window in silence, occasionally turning back to look her up and down, his round marshmallow face shot through with contempt. Eventually, he says, "for fuck's sake, love, cheer up, eh? You're bringing me right down. Tell you what, why don't you eat them panties? Eh? Go on, eat 'em, you silly bitch! It's just a bit of a laugh, innit?"

Hesitantly, she brings them up to her trembling lips. Moyles leans forward, and forces them into her mouth with his stumpy sausage-like fingers, cackling wetly like a malevolent, bloated Sid James might between spoonfuls of thick, rancid cream.

At the restaurant (actually just a Beefeater - "I haven't brought you anywhere posh 'cos it'd be a waste of money"), Moyles makes no conversation and ignores all your daughter's attempts to do so, instead leering at other women as they pass by. To the waiter who comes to take the order he says, "she won't be having anything, 'cos she's already ate. Hahaha! Only kidding, bring her a bowl of wedges. Can we get 'em cheaper without the dip?"

Moyles remains silent for the next hour, but for his chomping and slurping. Your daughter anaesthetizes herself with glass after glass of cheap house white. By the time the meal is over, your baby girl is almost unable to walk, stumbling into the other patrons as her companion drags her out of the restaurant and back to the car, which takes them on into town, tinned misery on wheels.

They stop on a side street. "Come on, skank," says Moyles. "We're gonna get you a tattoo."

He pulls her out of the car into a dark alley, and from there into a red-lit room through an anonymous doorway, throwing her into a chair. "Do a cock and balls on her forehead," he tells the tattooist.

Freshly tattooed, your daughter is led sobbing back to the car. "Let's just drop her off home," says Moyles to the driver. "She's no fuckin' good to anyone, this bitch." About three miles from your home, he tells the driver to stop the car by a young blonde in a tight-fitting dress, walking home from a night out. "Alright, love?" he says, opening the door. "How'd you like a shag off the saviour of Radio 1?" He turns to your daughter - "you can walk the rest of the way, can't you, love?" - and pushes her out of the car with one fat, clumsy hand, pulling the giggling blonde in with the other.

Your daughter arrives home an hour later, mascara intermingled with the dry salt tracks that stain her cheeks. You lay her head upon your chest and hug her, consciously radiating all the parental warmth that you can muster, but nothing seems to bring her comfort. Everything's different now...

Readers: as long as Chris Moyles is permitted to roam free, all of this remains a possibility. He cannot be allowed to get away with it. So please, join our efforts to bring this monster to justice. Boycott Radio 1, write to your local MP, attend our rallies, support us in any way you can. Chris Moyles must be stopped.

But first, if you do have a daughter, go to her and hug her. Hold her tight and tell her that you love her.

If, on the other hand, you had to conjure a daughter from your imagination, it's possible that she's now so real to you that there's a gaping hole at the centre of your being. I'm afraid I can't help you with that. Sorry.

And Again...

2009-06-04T20:00:00.002+01:00

I keep seeing reports all over the internet that the turn-out so far for the Euro elections has been pretty poor. This doesn't surprise me, but I had still hoped, perhaps naively, that enough of the less wrongheaded living among us might've been mobilised to try and make a difference.

It isn't too late, though.

We in the UK can't influence the way the rest of Europe votes, but we can decide who we choose to represent us in the European parliament. Staying away from the polls might not be just as good as putting that X right there by your friendly local racist's name, but it puts the pencil to the page, ready for someone to make the first mark.

If Europe's far right parties do as well out of this election as they hope, then we'll be taking a step into the darkness.

Could fascism become as powerful a force on the world stage today as it did back in the 1930s? Maybe not as quickly, not with the natural checks and balances provided nowadays by the internet and 24-hour rolling news. In fact, it'd be impossible for a first-world, ostensibly democratic government to even begin the slide down that route without enough people knowing about it to make a big fucking noise, all over the world, in minutes.

But what if they took their time, played the long game, and subtly gained the acquiescence of the majority? I'm reminded of an episode of The Simpsons where Marge, watching the TV, says, "Fox turned into a hardcore porn channel so gradually, I didn't even notice." It's a tactic that can work wonders for anyone who has the patience, and it's worked so far for the BNP, which, towards the tail end of the '90s, was still very much a party of bogeymen. Now, at the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it's poised for election to the European parliament.

And we haven't even noticed.

Am I being melodramatic? I probably am, and I hope so. But bear this in mind: 1930s Berlin was not a backwoods wasteland. It wasn't a medieval village populated by inbred dimwits. It was a modern city, a hotbed of intellectual debate, passionate activism, and above all, fraying tempers. A lot of people saw what was coming, and either turned their heads or found themselves being shouted down, or worse. 1933 really wasn't that long ago, but we have very short memories.

I posted this at 8pm. The polling stations are open for another two hours. If you haven't made your way down there today, GO NOW.

Yerp

2009-06-03T23:20:00.002+01:00

Picture the scene... A new world is taking shape against a backdrop of conflict. Seats of power are shifting. The global economy is stalling. Everywhere is uncertainty. Charismatic but ruthless politicians across Europe are blaming the outsiders, the foreigners, the Untermenschen. There are invasions. Tensions are rising. The world is teetering on the brink of war.

Sound familiar? It will. It's now.

Europe's far right, until now a fairly marginal voice on the international stage, is organising and positioning itself for a strong showing in the Euro elections throughout the next four days, making capital out of the global economic crisis and mounting Islamophobic and antisemitic sentiment. Which is why, just this once, I'm going to have the courage of my convictions, step out from behind the veil of irony for five fucking minutes and address you as me. Naked. Mano-a-mano.

Now, I don't know what the geographical make-up of this blog's readership is (assuming it has one), but I'm a British man writing from a British perspective, and so I'm going to assume that most of you out there are fellow nationals.

Tomorrow (Thursday, June 4), it's absolutely vital that each and every one of you goes to the booth and exercises your hard-won democratic right. The British National Party looks set to gain a foothold in Europe as a result of this election, and if they do, will go on to represent Britain in a powerful new far right coalition.

They have a single, but potent weapon in their arsenal: a currently massive disillusion in British politics, as a result of which a lot of British citizens are either going to vote in protest for a non-mainstream party, or stay away from the polls altogether. The BNP has been campaigning hard to pick up votes from the former, and with their small but fanatical and highly motivated support base, they can expect to benefit hugely from a poor showing for the three main parties that the latter scenario will inevitably bring about.

The fact is that nobody really knows what result is going to emerge on Monday. European elections have low turn-outs and are hard to predict at the best of times, but the British electorate at present is a loose cannon pointing in fifty different directions at once. The only way we can be even slightly sure of stopping the BNP from getting represented in Europe is by turning out in force and voting against them.

We're in an unusual situation, in that the most important result this time is 4th place. In fact, the battle for that 4th place makes this probably the most important election, certainly in my lifetime.

If the BNP gets there, if they get even just one candidate into Europe, it'll be a huge victory for them, and the birth of the biggest far right movement that this country has ever seen.

However. There's a ray of hope (and Christ knows, this blog alone is short on those) - if they're unsuccessful, if they lose out on 4th place, and if they fail to get an MEP elected... that, my friends, will be one motherfucker of a mighty blow raining directly down on the soft, malformed top of the BNP's thick, collective head. It'll shatter their confidence and utterly fuck their credibility for years to come.

And credibility is everything to this party. Their entire strategy depends on presenting themselves as a viable alternative to the Westminster elite. It's been under Nick Griffin, with his semi-coherent impression of an almost respectable human being, that the BNP has made such headway in recent years, selling itself successfully to otherwise decent people frustrated with mainstream politics. If he loses this election, he'll be gone in weeks, and the party will be back where it belongs, if anywhere, on the fringes.

So tomorrow: VOTE.

Preferably not for the BNP, of course.

And before I scuttle back under the duvet of sarcasm, I'd like to leave you with this one last thought. There's no such thing as pure British blood. Ours is a mongrel nation. The genes of half of Europe and some of the world beyond are in our DNA. We have one of the most eclectic cultures in the world, and this magpie nature, along with our famous reserve, makes up our national character. All of which is why Britain is rightly known for being a tolerant, moderate nation. If you don't believe me, consider the half a million of our grandparents and great-grandparents who died in the fight against fascism.

That's what Britain's about. The BNP are completely missing the point. But then they are a bit fucking numb.

Don't let history repeat itself.

Scowell

2009-05-31T04:37:00.009+01:00

Q&A: Simon Cowell
"Death offers no escape"

Simon Cowell, 49, was born at the centre of a raging inferno. He left school at the age of 16 and then did a bunch of other shit before going on to forge a hugely successful career, crushing the dreams of trapped, desperate people. He lives alone and loves nothing.

When were you happiest?
I can't remember the last time I was happy. Or sad. I feel nothing. If, for example, I were to kick a puppy to death right here in front of you, you would no doubt be horrified. But for me, it would feel exactly the same as if I'd, say, stumbled upon the cure for HIV. I'd be completely numb in either case. There's something very wrong with my soul.

What is your earliest memory?
When I was about 5, in a cave not far from my home, watching my best friend Tom disappear silently into the murk of a shaft so deep I never heard him hit the bottom. It's the eyes that I remember most clearly. The pleading eyes, catching the light from the entrance as he spun round to face me - one final glimmer of vitality, then swallowed up by the gloom. Darkness forever. The people who come to my auditions, they have those same eyes. That's why I want to hurt them.

What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?
This disgusting fleshy shell that I'm forced to inhabit. One day, the intangible part of me will break its shackles and merge with eternity.

What is the trait you most deplore in others?
Weakness.

What is your most treasured possession?
If everyone and everything in the world was to crumble suddenly to dust, right before my eyes, it would be of no real consequence.

If you could bring something extinct back to life, what would you choose?
I'd like to know again what it is to feel joy.

What is your favourite word?
Words cannot convey the blankness.

What is your guiltiest pleasure?
My whims and desires are catered for night and day. Whatever I wish for, it happens, immediately and without repercussion - for me, at least. And it all leaves me so terribly, terribly cold.

What do you owe your parents?
I owe them nothing. I paid a very high price for my success. A very high price indeed.

What does love feel like?
It's been described to me. I must say I don't fully understand what it's for.

What was the best kiss of your life?
Kissing is something that men without immeasurable wealth and influence have to do.

Which living person do you most despise and why?
What reason have I to despise anyone? The actions of men are all utterly inconsequential.

If you could go back in time, where would you go?
To that cave, when I was 5 - those eyes wouldn't haunt me like they do if I'd only closed my own.

When did you last cry, and why?
I don't believe I ever have. I'm told I was an unusually composed baby.

How often do you have sex?
Constantly. In fact, I'm having sex right now - cold, joyless sex. It's all just so much heaving meat. And yet I'm controlled by this implacable hunger - it dominates every ounce of my being. I just wish I knew what it was I hungered for.

What do you consider your greatest achievement?
My achievements are all equally meaningless to me.

What keeps you awake at night?
I'm never really awake.

How would you like to be remembered?
Death offers no escape. I'll still be here, in this world, long after all other life within it has been extinguished.

Tell us a joke.
Piers Morgan.

Reproduced with kind permission from The Guardian Weekend magazine

La Rue

2009-05-18T21:30:00.008+01:00

Like most of you, I have difficulty finding the time and energy to actually think for myself in this non-stop, caffeine-fuelled, unlimited broadband, 24-hour society that we live in these days. What should my opinions be? Is racism still allowed? What's good? Can anyone tell me what things are good? What am I supposed to like? I have no idea. Please, somebody, instruct me: what am I to believe in!

But while no-one can help me with the racism issue, those niggling pop-cultural dilemmas are no problem at all, thanks to the efforts of all those tastemakers, trendsetters and winklepickered cultureNazis who decide for us what we should be thinking about the purveyors of the popular arts.

Take music, for example. Being of a certain age, I remember the last time we were supposed to like dance music. And I remember the fear and confusion of my early 20s being further compounded by the realisation that I was starting to fall behind the curve that fateful day on which indie was declared cool again, and anything without guitars and skinny jeans in it resolutely uncool. What was going on? I was lost and frightened. I knew, deep down, that I must've liked this stuff, because that's what I was being told to like, but some part of me - some stubborn, hideous part of me - didn't.

I'm ashamed to say it, but this twisted rogue element of my psyche was thinking, completely of its own accord, that a lot of those American boys with beards and ill-fitting t-shirts just sounded like rubbish Blues Explosions without the sense of humour, while their unambitious British counterparts sounded like the same old shit that unambitious British bands had been peddling for decades, only now they were selling records.

Luckily I killed that part of me with a programme of drugs, Hollyoaks and hot sex with slippery feline indie chicks. Which is why I've spent much of the last decade lolling around in shrunken period clothing, rakishly-angled hats and ironic facial hair. Now I hate dance music. Now it disgusts me, hedonistic pleasure music devoid of substance, not like The Automatic and The Ting Tings. Proper music.

But a wind of change is blowing confusion into my face once more. We're supposed to like dance music again? What? I had a look at some of it. La Roux, for instance. Video set in a shiny CG future: check. Video featuring sexy girl in high-end car: check. Artless, over-wrought vocals: check. Hollow, pseudo-profound lyrics: check. 'Attitude': check. It's exactly the sort of slick, soulless shite that all us guileless, fashion-conscious fuckwits were told to turn our backs on in the first place. It's like 1999 all over again! Fuck! What now? I set fire to all my chinos years ago!

I'm not too proud to admit that I cried, dear reader. Cried and masturbated.

Ah, but then I looked closer, and now it all makes sense. This isn't the slick, soulless shite I thought it was, for throughout her videos and in all her promo shots, she looks a bit wounded and vulnerable. There's the substance! It's not 1999 all over again at all.

It's 1996. She's Olive.

Fuckface

2009-05-13T21:34:00.009+01:00

Disgusting, useless, shameless, corrupt moral coward.

Thanks.

Multi-Coloured Housequarters

2009-05-06T23:30:00.004+01:00

Oh, for fuck's sake, Noel, look what you done: mess everywhere, broken windows, doors off hinges, twisted bicycles... "Bonkers Britain!" you cry. "Have we all gone mad!"

No, Noel. Only you. Just ask the 'faceless bureaucrat' (Sue, 47, single mother of three) that you punched in the town hall reception back at the start of this whole sorry episode. That was only two hours ago, but so much has changed since then, Noel. So many lives have been altered forever since you stumbled naked from the car that you drove into that bus stop, bellowing wordlessly with the white-hot fury of a man driven mad by the wind.

So many families, Noel, so many families, lovers and friends left confused and grieving since, crashing into the street from that grey municipal building, you blindly visited upon all and sundry the boiling wrath of the bourgeoisie, rocketing into the crowds at lightning speed like the angry word of a malevolent god, bursting through the fleshy cages of innocents, cars flipped through the air, tumbling tonnes of metal rolling over soft bodies, screaming Death following in your wake.

Whipped up you were, Noel, by Daily Mail headlines and rightwing talk radio hosts, you and all the other frustrated Middle Englanders sitting there frothing in your hermetically sealed rural bubbles beaming images to each other like mad satellites, images of immigrants, freeloading dole scum, teenagers and lesbians gleefully taking torches to Great Britain, kicking down her walls, pissing on her sizzling ruins, letting in terrorists, rampaging through the villages, turning us all foreign.

It sickened you, didn't it, Noel? It sickened you so that you tore the paper to shreds, hurled the radio smash it against the wall and leapt from your bath straight out to the drive and into your car, lurching through the gates - the whole thing was recorded by your CCTV cameras, we saw it - and out into the city. The godforsaken city.

And the journey just made it all worse, because for three miles on the motorway you had to do twenty as the emergency services dealt with the aftermath of a car crash (four dead). Ooh, it made you FURIOUS, didn't it Noel!

And now you sit, Noel, weeping on an upturned recycling bin. I thought they'd be disgusted, I thought they'd finally turn their backs on you, but no, here they are, your minions, they saw you on the TV and they rallied behind you and here they are, continuing your terrible work, taking the middle class revolution to the streets, fighting for the rights of the comfortable man, fighting against: taxes; speeding fines; parking charges; bus lanes and cycle lanes; political correctness; planning departments; the inconvenience of separating glass from paper from plastics; homosexuals on television; Jonathan Ross; modern art; modern music; modern everything; hooded outerwear; the proletariat... And there you sit, watching and weeping.

Because you called them, Noel. You called them and you offered them security and peace of mind, a world free of the strange and alien, a world in which they could happily sit in their neat little gardens safe in the knowledge that no black youths are listening to threatening music on mobile phones on the back seats of buses forty miles away, and they replied in the manner of a million-headed contestant on your tawdry afternoon squawkshow. And when you and your kind are finished with the rest of the country, Noel, then you'll start on each other, ruthlessly hacking your brethren to pieces until that day, that fateful day when all are dead but you alone.

And thereafter you shall beget a terrifying new reality; a new universe built upon hatred, where the moon is wrapped in razor wire and the sun is hidden behind a 15 metre high perimeter fence.

As it is written, so it shall come to pass.

Balls

2009-04-30T22:51:00.001+01:00

You know what I love most about global health scares? Whilst everyone's busy stocking up on tinned food and shotgun shells/attempting unsophisticated topical comedy in the office [delete according to hardness], we can sneak through proposals that would otherwise get us hanged by our entrails from the nearest tree.

Hi! I'm schools secretary Ed Balls, and I'm here to tell you about my latest fucking idiot escapades in the crazy world of government.

A little while ago, we asked Sir Alisdair Macdonald to tell us how we might go about introducing compulsory personal, social and health education to the curriculum, with the big hot throbbing potato of sex education nestling in amongst the goodies. Naturally, this presented problems. Because, as much as we want to play the shiny progressives, we also have to pander to a large number of faith schools, this being a secular, 21st century democracy and everything. I think it might be because we want them to accept our kids next year.

How could we reconcile our desire to turn our children into healthy, happy people, with our craven political cowardice?

Fortunately, clever old Sir Alisdair found a way round that. To sweeten the pill, he suggested that we give these schools "the right to put [sex education] in the context of their particular institution." This means that, having fulfilled the requirement of acknowledging the existence of homosexuals and contraception, the lunatic fucknuts would then be free to curse them all into the ground, thereby turning out yet another generation of shit-for-brains bigots, spraying babies and sexually-transmitted infections all over the place.

I, of course, accepted his suggestions and will now seek to make them law. Enemies of humanity take heart - your children may yet be fucked up beyond repair.

Boss Speaks

2009-04-25T03:19:00.005+01:00

Trust us. It'll all be alright. Of course there are some who regard the world as a jagged thing, a chaotic, vibrating, gelatinous wild beast with a nature all of its own and no regard for the whims of mere humans, but you must pay them no mind. They are pessimists, malcontents and liars. They are enemy agents, working to destroy this Eden that we have built, by undermining your confidence in it. They regard as Promethean arrogance our will to harness the unknowable forces that govern the fate of humankind.

Naturally, they are wrong. We live in a circular universe, in which we can make sense of everything. Answers will be found where there appear to be none. All we ask of you is blind faith. What effort does this require on your part? Why, none! Simply... stop thinking. Stop thinking and turn your brains over to us. Let us direct their activity.

When we say that we can create clean power from the dirtiest of sources, don't question us. We shall. The means may barely be available to us now, their effectiveness unproven, but in the future... ah, the future, where everything is bound only by the limits of the human imagination...

Would 100% carbon capture be feasible by, let's say, 2012? It is, we admit, doubtful. But would 100% carbon capture be feasible by 2025? Well, that's not unthinkable, is it? 2025 is a long way off. Who knows what might be possible by then? Who could have thought, 16 years ago, that the internet would become so prevalent that I would, today, be communicating this message to you in this manner, shooting data at your eyes down wires? Could Femi Oke - as she presented, in her inimitable manner, a 1993 edition of The Topofpops - ever have conceived - even in her wildest, most drug-addled dreams - of the donk?

Hardly! We call this the hovercar approach.

(Consider the hovercar: theoretically possible, but as yet elusive. Now imagine a point in the future, close enough that we may live to see it, but distant enough that we may entrust to it the realisation of all our most desperate imaginings... Do you see them? Hovercars abound!)

It is there, on the cloudy, far-off peaks of human endeavour, to which we hoist all hope. Let us build a new coal-fired power plant today, and assume that by 2025 it shall somehow run without belching filth into the atmosphere.

So sleep, my children. Sleep peacefully, and bury your fears, as E.ON shall bury their carbon emissions, in those exhausted oil fields deep beneath the sea.

The Erotic World Of Russ Abbot

2009-04-14T20:14:00.008+01:00

Gordon Brown's long-promised - well, sort of promised, by which I mean, of course, not promised, not promised at all - Iraq inquiry is almost very nearly certainly going to happen at some point after the British Army pulls out of Basra, the agreed date for which is July 31, which may or may not be adhered to, if the situation in Iraq demands that some troops stay on for a bit longer, in which case, the inquiry won't go ahead until after they come home. But as likely as not, it will happen. Behind closed doors. And probably dragged out until after the election. Great days for democracy!

Even better, to speed up the process, Herr Brown has written a suggested first draft of the inquiry's findings, which has somehow come into my possession...

Iraq Inquiry
by an independent committee

Don't worry about it. It's all good. Nothing out of order there. It's reet. Defo. No, really. No lies, no war crimes, no cover-ups, no torture, no needless deaths. It was all above board, and everything's just as it was, only better. In fact, fuck-all happened. It wasn't even a war, really, it was just a bit of shouting. If you could call it that. Actually, now we come to think of it, it was really more of a frank chat. I mean, yeah, there was a bit of tension and that, but there will be when one party is definitely hiding weapons of mass destruction somewhere. Which - granted - never turned up, but that must be because either Al-Qaida or the Taliban has them. Perhaps Iran. We could look there next.

Anyway, pretty much everyone on the goodies' side who was involved in the whole thing is cleared of all wrongdoing. Especially Brown. Maybe not Clarke. Definitely not Short.

Another thorny issue resolved there.

Bogan

2009-04-12T01:44:00.003+01:00

Terry Wogan

Yr soft Limerick dribble through the speakers
Middle England waffle
A Daily Mail from 1992 soaked in Baileys.

Yr cosy Thatcherite paeans to convenience
Yr uppity soapbox
Eurovision bitterness,

And yes, how we love yr gentle racism
As we clamber swollen-bollocked out of bed
Txt sxual harrassment to yr traffic totty.

I can picture you on the toilet,

Terry Wogan.

Shouting At Pigeons

2009-04-09T19:12:00.011+01:00

If you've been following the news these last few days, you've probably noticed that the global economy is currently floundering in the stale canal waters of recession. Lots of people are standing by, open-mouthed in horror, but these particular stale canal waters demand a brand new style of swimming that no-one knows how to do. All they can do is watch. Look! It's about to swallow a shit!

But before we labour this already weak metaphor any further, I command you to stop! Wait! And listen... For this is no ordinary recession. This is some new shit. Look, for an example, at the unemployment figures. Quite high, aren't they? Not a cause for concern in themselves, of course. These people are just the long-term unemployed and low-level redundancy fodder from the industrial and service sectors. Aren't they?

Well, brace yourselves for this, you dribbling fuckheads. This time, those figures include members of... yes... The Middle Classes! Now see, a middle class recession is the worst type of recession there is. Not only are the middle classes the richest people in the high street, they also vote, and do so with wild unpredictability. They cannot be allowed to get angry. They are fuel for government and must be harnessed.

But stop bitching, will you? It's often said that recessions are great for culture, and this one is no exception. Disaffected young neoliberals are putting pen to paper and producing a new wave of socially conscious theatre which is as sure to characterise the Summer of Rage as did the postwar period's angry young men.

Leading the charge, of course, is former investment banker Torquay Hennessy. I managed to get a look at the first scene of his brand new play, It Lied. Here it is...

It Lied
by
Torquay Hennessy
Act One
Scene One

Threadneedle Street, strewn with litter and rubble. The Scales of Justice lie mangled beneath a low-end powerboat representing the inflated expectations of the modern working class. A man in tattered rags (Yelvin) stands centre-stage

Yelvin: (Despondently) Office space to let! Office space to let! Office space! To Let!

A small crowd goes by, ignoring Yelvin's plaintive cry

Yelvin: Oh, won't you let this beautiful office space! Office space to let! (To audience) Have pity. I am but a poor symbol of the struggle against the oppressive forces of classical economics. (With raised fist) Yes, I am down, but I am not defeated. For my strength is great, and my conscience is nonexistent! I shall use any weapon at my disposal to destroy the demon of traditional socialism!

Three men enter, in fine clothing. They are The Working Class. Their leader, Barry, steps forward

Barry: Halt ye! Halt ye!

Yelvin: What is the meaning of this!

Barry: Do not be speaking, worm! I represent my brethren of The Working Class.

The Working Class: (Nodding) Aye! Aye!

Barry: We are come to crush thee!

The Working Class set about Yelvin, delivering unwashed blows to his body

Yelvin: No! No! I say again, no!

Dim lights

Fuck, that looks ACE!

Budget Policing

2009-04-07T19:14:00.010+01:00

Oh, that's alright then.

Sir Ian Blair - former commissioner of the Met, wild exaggerator of professional achievements and overseer of such proud moments in the Met's history as those secretly taped telephone conversations with public figures, spending £280,000 of public money nosing into a supermodel's drug habits, and the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes - has told a Metropolitan Police Authority inquiry that the officers who mishandled the investigation into the 1993 murder of Stephen Lawrence were not "necessarily racist".

Apparently, it wasn't because he was black. It wasn't because he was black that they ignored evidence and generally approached their duties with the half-arsed manner of a McDonald's employee cleaning the toilets. It wasn't because he was black. Don't fall into that trap. It absolutely was not because he was black. You PC thugs just put your brass knuckles away and, like, chillax dudes, because it wasn't that he was black. Not necessarily. It was, said Sir Ian Blair, former commissioner of the Met, with the face of an unhappy potato, it was, said Sir Ian Blair, because he was working class.

So there you have it. Maybe now this whole sorry business can be put to bed once and for all.

Bigotry Update 2009

2009-04-03T21:13:00.003+01:00

Homophobia...
... directed at men
All-out hatred is still largely frowned upon. However, expressing annoyance at mincing queen types remains acceptable to a degree, but do be sure to test the waters before committing to a full-blown rant in social situations.

... directed at women
Angry, corrosive hatred of gay women is still pretty much OK between friends, but know your audience: certain awkward liberal types may choose to take offence. Such loathing can be expressed in public, polite company, the media, etc, provided it is done in sufficiently coded terms.

If you do decide to indulge in a spot of light homophobia, we recommend that you first invest in at least one or two gay friends (preferably out).

Racism
Tread carefully. Racism is mostly a no-no, and this isn't likely to change in the foreseeable future. However, attaching your hatred to political and social issues such as immigration, Islam, etc, may afford you some leeway with most people. It is still acceptable, when relating stories and anecdotes, to unnecessarily designate people of other races by their ethnic origin, or a vague approximation thereof (eg, "Asian woman", "black fella"). In any case, protocol dictates that racial epithets should be delivered sotto voce, following a brief, shifty glance around the room. Studies have found that allusions to racial stereotypes are most palatable when masked by a thin veil of irony.

Religious Hatred
Religious hatred is generally considered to be largely inoffensive, as long as you confine your hatred to the Big Three. Don't bother with the less newsworthy religions. No-one can remember what they are anyway. As with Racism, criticisms of Islam or Judaism produce best results when given a political slant. In order of acceptability (most to least):

Christianity
We're pleased to announce that all denominations of Christianity are fair game, more or less without qualification, for any reason. Avoid desecration of graves and memorials, but otherwise... have fun!

Islam
Do bear in mind that overly enthusiastic condemnations of Islam or its practitioners can lead to accusations of Racism from some quarters. However, due to recent atrocities committed by a tiny, extremist minority, it is usually possible to speak some ill of the entirety of its 1.8bn followers without fear of recrimination.

Judaism
Exercise caution, as sensitivities about the Holocaust still abound. But the behaviour of Israel's ostensibly secular government in recent history has helped to create a political and social atmosphere in which it is safe to, once again, heap shit on this relentlessly persecuted people.

Sexism...
... directed at men
Sweeping generalisations about almost half of the world's total population are more or less guaranteed to go unchallenged within social settings. The Home Office has produced an all-encompassing stereotype of a useless, drooling, farting, leering, emotionally illiterate, football-obsessed, beer-swilling fuckwit, into which the budding misandrist may bracket all men without fear of reprisal. Details are available online or at your local Jobcentre Plus.

... directed at women
Mostly unacceptable, but some casual misogyny is fine between friends. Do respect equal opps legislation in the workplace, although the Equality and Human Rights Commission has recently endorsed unequal pay, so there may be some wriggle-room there. Also, at the time of going to press, the seven-day grace period following a dumping stands, during which you may safely dismiss all of womankind as inherently evil and cruel, whilst holding yourself blameless. Outside of this period, if you must hold all women responsible for the perceived failures of your former lover, please try to confine your hatred to individuals (future partners, your mother, etc). Misogyny in the media remains a grey area.

Xenophobia
Xenophobia is still perfectly respectable, and can be safely enjoyed in all social situations. Indeed, it is actively encouraged by many. Remember: It's Not Racist If They're White.

Produced by the Home Office in conjunction with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

Poking Crocodiles With Very Long Sticks

2009-03-19T22:07:00.001Z

Gordon Brown, him release this statement yesterday by dog:

"We've all been shocked to see, in recent weeks, reports in the press of British complicity in torture on foreign soil. We were also, to a lesser extent, shocked to see such reports two years ago when only the broadsheets were interested. But the cat is out of the bag now the pleb media has got hold of the story, and so I suppose I'd better huff and puff and flap my arms about a bit in an effort to appease you sleepwalking twats.

"Let me make clear: the British government and our intelligence services do not engage directly in torture, and I condemn absolutely the use of torture for the benefit of the British intelligence services being made public. We deeply regret that it has, and all I can say in our defence is that we genuinely thought that the suspects in question would never again see daylight.

"This is why I propose today another series of guidelines for the Joint Intelligence Committee to figure out how to circumvent. I do so to reassert our commitment to British values and our moral authority in the fight against terrorism, and also in the hope that you'll all soon get bored, and that all the backbenchers clamouring for an independent inquiry are successfully waylaid by whatever distraction Peter Mandelson is currently cooking up in his sinister underground lair.

"Britain does not torture terrorist suspects. Our intelligence officials often just happen to be around when other countries are doing it.

"Now I'm going to sing you all a lullaby."

St Patrick's Day - Day Of Twats

2009-03-17T22:16:00.011Z

Oh, friends. Friends! Truly, we are blessed.

Remember the spectacular passing of Pope John Paul II? Remember the suspense, the whispers and misinformation? Is he? Isn't he? Wasn't it thrilling? And how many of us dared to dream that we'd ever be granted the opportunity to watch another famous person die in slow motion?

Yes! Undo your belts, you dreadful, dribbling, baying hordes, and get ready for another hot, bruising, but ultimately disappointing death porn extravaganza! Oh, the ecstasy! BREAK down the doors of the hospice, JOSTLE her nearest and dearest out of the way and STAND slack-jawed at Jade Goody's bedside, STARING at her with grim intent!

Or perhaps you can't make it to the live event? Perhaps you're too busy trapping wasps and spiders together in a glass box and watching them fight for their tiny lives? Well, never fear, because you can bet our great nation's tireless media scum will be on hand to bring you every groan and grimace of pain, every last gasp, 24/7, news rolling like the tears down the Goody family's faces.

Bravely fighting to keep their ongoing promise to be First For Celebrity News, OK! Magazine has brought us the news before it even happens, having taken the bold step of publishing their special tribute edition whilst Goody is still alive. And, according to completely unsubstantiated rumours, the editorial team had also planned to bury her at some point this afternoon, but decided not to on the combined advice of their lawyers and the denizens of the afterworld, prone as they are to freaking out when the live start walking amongst them.

Place your bets now!

A Complete Waste Of An Evening

2009-03-09T22:57:00.004Z

The Liberal Democrats - A Play

A meeting is happening. THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS are seated around a table.

NICK CLEGG: Liberal Democrats! Times are changing. The world is shit. The government is fucked, the opposition is as terrified as it is hopeful of winning the next election, and the voters are desperate. Things couldn't be better for the party.

Now, my predecessor Menzies Campbell often floated the idea of attaching this party like a fixture of mercenary barnacles to the hull of whichever of our rivals happened at the time to be heading in the right direction.

There was some logic to this. Reasoning that the key to any election lies in attracting the floating voters, we sought to win their approval by branding ourselves a floating party, always in tune to their beliefs, whatever they were, however radically they differed from one day to the next. 'The Liberal Democrats - an unscrupulous party for unscrupulous twats'. That was our motto. And yet still the electorate failed to take us seriously.

Liberal Democrats, we have identified the error in our thinking, and it was thus: we didn't go far enough. Moreover, it has come to my attention that, despite my countless directives on the issue, some of you still harbour consciences like Jews in the attic, almost as if you think that conscience has some kind of value in this day and age.

Well, no more! No more, I tell you! I hand the floor now to my esteemed colleague Vince Cable, who learnt a thing or two about this shit during his tenure at Shell...

VINCE CABLE: Shell!? I used to work for Shell? Fuck. I used to quite like me...

NICK CLEGG: (Pause) Anyway, having spent some time in the employ of one of the most black-hearted, bloody-fisted showers of bastards currently posing as a legitimate company in this supposedly civilised modern world, Vince is something of an expert in the field of moral prostitution.

VINCE CABLE: That's right, Nick. Because if working for Shell taught me one thing, it taught me never to let a bunch of human beings and their pathetic attachments to their 'homes' and their 'lives' come between you and oil. If it taught me another thing, it was that ethics are for losers. We are living in the age of pragmatism, my friends! That means fixing on your goal and following it blindly, implacably, like an automaton, whatever the cost, to your own soul or to any poor cunt unfortunate enough to get in the way! So what is our goal? ANSWER ME!

CHRIS HUHNE: Erm... Some sort of vague illusion of power?

VINCE CABLE: THAT'S RIGHT! For FUCK'S sake, that's RIGHT! NORMAN LAMB! Take this CUNT out of here and get him LOADED and LAID! Here's £25. DO IT NOW!

Exit NORMAN LAMB and CHRIS HUHNE

VINCE CABLE: Good. Now please... Please... I beg you for calm. Thank you. See, while I was working for murderers, I picked up a few things about preparing for any and all eventualities. Apparently I brought these skills to bear in my current role, in which I favour a decision-making process which involves the drawing of 'mind trees'. I won't go into those because I don't know what they are, but the way forward, my fellow Liberal Democrats, is clear: the end is some sort of vague illusion of power, the means don't matter.

No longer shall we waste any time ingratiating ourselves to one party or the other. The polls are all over the place. No-one knows who's going to be where this time next year. Which is why, between now and the next general election, we shall shamelessly court both Labour and Conservative, shedding any policies which may clash with those of either. To be on the safe side, I propose that we begin dismantling our entire manifesto. We shall be a party without policies. Weightless, fluid and completely insubstantial. What say ye?

LIBERAL DEMOCRATS: (In unison) AYE!

NICK CLEGG: Excellent! Then it is agreed. Any questions?

DAVID HOWARTH: Erm, yes... What exactly was the point of this entire post? Ooh, the Liberal Democrats are a bit flaky! Gosh, they'll align themselves with any prick they think stands the slightest chance of winning! Wow, what a fucking revelation! Who knew! Is this what passes for satire these days?

VINCE CABLE: For Christ's sake, Howarth, there's a recession on. What do you want, fucking Swift?

DAVID HOWARTH: I'm just saying.

Fin

They All Float Down Here

2009-02-19T23:21:00.005Z

I first met Justin Lee Collins during the second half of 2008, at a funeral for a mutual friend cum A&R showcase, Collins apparently keen to branch out into a music career of sorts. He'd spent most of the day launching at random into his passable Tom Jones impression, most noticeably during the service itself. I remember being struck by the adequacy of his rendition of It's Not Unusual as our friend (actually a former lover of mine) inched slowly towards the furnace in her elegant mahogany coffin.

We finally got the chance to speak later that evening, shortly after his set, in which he performed the Grange Hill cast's Just Say No dressed as a sort of grotesque, dragged-up, trouserless Roland Browning. He agreed to let me follow him for a few days, seemingly in the mistaken belief that I was journalist and not just a voyeur.

He slept fitfully that night, as I was to discover he did every night. Typically waking at noon, he would immediately curl into the foetal position and moan pathetically for about an hour, sometimes two. Having finally dragged himself out of bed, Collins would stagger without a word to the bathroom, where he would stare at his reflection for a good two or three minutes, a strange, low howl gradually nudging the silence out of the room until it filled the space like a tangible thing, an angry, slightly spongy blob of despair. At this point he'd punch the glass to pieces and finally finish his toilet by banging his head repeatedly against the wall.

After a light breakfast of vodka and painkillers, Collins would, on a typical day, be taken by car to Channel 4's secret bunker of television to work on that week's instalment of The Sunday Night Project, a highly successful light entertainment show which nobody watches, and which Collins presents with comedian Alan Carr and a rolling cast of dead-eyed celebrities, cultural bottom-feeders with shrivelled dignity glands, sleepwalking ever towards their next TV appearance like dry junkies towards the hit.

I was never allowed into the room in which the daily production meetings were held, and so I would spend the three or four hours in the corridor, listening and trying to peer underneath the door. Often I would hear that familiar, strange howl slowly gaining momentum, the rest of the team trying to talk over it until that became impossible. At its crescendo, this desperate, dying wail of the last shreds of humanity in Collins' ragged soul would be accompanied by the sounds of overturning furniture, breaking glass and cries of, "NO! Justin, NO!". And then a deathly silence would suddenly descend, punctuated occasionally by Collins' muffled sobs, whereupon the meeting would ordinarily reconvene, unless a member of the team required medical attention.

The recording of the show itself is an exciting experience for me. The guest presenter is Christopher Hitchens, who gamely turns in a superb performance in a very funny sketch in which, dressed as a baby, he shits in Alan Carr's mouth while Collins mugs inanely at the lobotomised, braying studio audience for the entire shoot. The latter leaves the stage as soon as the cameras stop rolling. I find him in his dressing room some minutes later, trying to wash away the memories in a pool of whiskey and tears.

Although I've been by Collins' side for the best part of a week, we have not yet said a word to each other. I take the opportunity to engage him in conversation. I seem to have caught him in pensive mood.

"Spirit long dead now," says Collins, eventually. "Body just an empty carapace, stumbling unseeing through the silence between the relentless ticks of the clock. Stumbling very slowly. Used to wonder what wrong turn had led me to this life of utter futility. Now just resigned to it."

This statement makes no fucking sense. Collins hasn't so far seemed very resigned to anything. I challenge him on this. His blank face suddenly contorts into the grinning idiot countenance that we all know and love, peals of West Country laughter falling like wingless bluebottles from his rotten, meaty lips.

"I ain't gettin' on no plane, fool!" he bellows into my face. His breath is a toxic, acrid cloud of whiskey and puke. I gag, despite myself, and stare at him for a few seconds. "I AIN'T GETTIN' ON NO PLANE, FOOL!"

I feel uneasy, and not without good reason. Backing away, I see that Collins is following me, his eyes wild with larks and murder. To my relief, Carr bursts through the door in that instant and plunges a needle into one of Collins' buttocks. Collins falls unconscious almost immediately. Carr slips backwards from the room without a word, as if on tracks. I will later discover that, in actual fact, he is.

Later on, I speak to Carr of the disparity between Collins' public buffoonery and his private turmoil.

"Beware the one called Justin Lee Collins," says Carr. His voice seems to come from everywhere, all at once. I note that he speaks without moving his lips. "Justin Lee Collins will bend a man until he snaps and suck the marrow from his bones, purely for a jape.

"I shall tell you now a cautionary tale. For the one called Justin Lee Collins was once a man of ideals, just like you. He sought to harness the power of entertainment for the purposes of edification. But entertainment was stronger than he. With every contract, with every job, he found himself sinking deeper and deeper into the seductive velvet folds of idiocy, until one day he looked about him and found no foothold, no means of re-entering this world that we know, in which a man in his mid-thirties may expect the right to leave behind his childhood.

"How can any man live with himself if his life is naught but stupid, twatty facial expressions and pointless 1980s nostalgia? How can a man stand tall when his time is to be spent badgering former players of long-gone televisual entertainments with a view to reuniting them all for purposes beyond even his own understanding?

"Answer: he can't. He must split himself in two in order to retain the merest scrap of dignity. And it stops not there, interloper, for it is prophesied that one day the two halves of Justin Lee Collins shall meet; that they shall literally, physically, break apart, and at that moment they shall fight, as in Superman III. And I tell you this, interloper, that this day shall be the day of reckoning. There, in that arena, shall be fought the final, bloody battle for humanity's soul."

And that's how Justin Lee Collins gets out of bed in the morning.

Appeasefire

2009-01-18T01:41:00.004Z

It's a ceasefire! We're going live now to Ehud...

"Yeah, sorry about all that. We didn't mean to murder all those civilians, we just didn't care one way or the other. But it's come to our attention that indiscriminate killing as a military tactic is generally frowned upon within the international community, so we reckoned we'd declare a ceasefire, safe in the knowledge that Hamas will almost certainly attack our forces as long as they remain in Gaza, thereby allowing us to continue our campaign of terror with impunity.

"And our forces will, of course, be remaining in Gaza."

Phew! Everything's normal again and we can all stop thinking. Let's go back to the live coverage of Celebrity Big Brother. Look! Someone's asleep!

The Grimness

2009-01-11T02:21:00.002Z

Shit. This recession thing is worse than we thought.

Look, I want you all sitting down when I break this to you, and I need you to promise that you won't fly into a blind panic, invade the streets en masse and start rioting and looting, smashing windows, heads flying through the air, flaming bodies run screaming into schools and hospitals, overturn cars, call in the armed forces! Before we know it, the country is a barren, post-apocalyptic wasteland, corpses littering once busy precincts, now just concrete and steel skeletons, creaking and moaning in the wind. The only people left are the politicians, and they will start a new country, a much worse one.

No-one wants that to happen.

So please, sit down, shut up, and listen, actually listen for once in your fucking life, and I will give you the skinny.

The Guardian reported today that thousands, literally thousands, of graduates are having trouble finding work. Now calm down, concentrate on your breathing, remain in your happy place, but just take a moment to digest that fact.

Unemployed graduates.

Can you even begin to conceive of such a thing? Have those two words ever before gone together in the history of the civilised world? I doubt it. For a 21-year-old to be struggling to find a job, six months after graduating from university... That is some weird shit. We are surely doomed, people.

So that's it from me for now. I'm going underground for a while until this whole thing blows over. Don't try to contact me and certainly don't come within 50 feet of my shelter, or I will be forced to shoot you. It's every motherfucker for themselves now.

And please... don't have nightmares.

Got Any Underlay?

2009-01-08T19:24:00.008Z

Hey, you!

Who? Me?

Yes! You! Has the spark gone out of your relationship? (Nod) Is your marriage on the rocks? (Nod) Can you and your partner no longer bear to be around each other? (Sad little shake)

About three years ago, I found I couldn't stand to touch the woman that I'd promised to love for the rest of my life. Now I feel trapped and suffocated.
Martin, 39, Braintree

My boyfriend of eight years spends every evening on the sofa, picking his feet and fumbling surreptitiously in his pants whenever Kirsty Allsop comes on telly. I wish he'd have an accident and die.
Kat, 42, Durham

My feelings for my husband changed forever the day I discovered that he was having an affair with a co-worker. Now my skin crawls whenever he touches me, and in my dreams he is represented by a six-foot penis penetrating a corpse.
Sally, 31, Aberystwyth

Having successfully ushered my two children through infancy, I came to the realisation that I had effectively outlived my usefulness as a human being, and that the only thing preventing the brutal hand of nature from simply wiping me out like a salmon was mankind's ongoing, hubris-laden battle against death. Naturally I fell into a deep depression, which began to manifest itself in feelings of deep resentment towards my wife. Before I knew it, I was masturbating for teenage boys on my webcam in stocking and suspenders. I fear that the guilt, compounded with the aforementioned resentment, will soon find an outlet in so violent a manner that I will be unable to control it. Please help me, before something terrible happens.
Big Jim, 53, Rochdale

Haha! It sounds like you lot need to check in with the love doctor.

But fear not, you black-hearted malcontents, for Scientists are finally close to mapping the sequence of biochemical processes that we call love, which overwhelms all sense of reason and the self, tricking us into making rash, short-sighted commitments to other human beings - in spite of our nature, in spite of the hard-learned lessons of bitter experience - then finally cursing us with guilt and self-loathing when its stupefying effects inevitably begin to wear off and we cannot understand why. Wicked parasite, you, love! I command thee, slither back ye into the depths of Hell that birthed thee! I command thee in the name of all that is holy!

Fortunately, that self-loathing will soon be a thing of the past, when Scientists begin to synthesise and mass-produce love in pill form. If you bickering couples can just hold off from killing each other for a few more years, you'll be able to simulate those first flames of passion in mere minutes for the price of a prescription, or maybe £25 a pop on the black market. And those looking for love on a budget will only have to wait another year or two to buy the cheaper knock-offs out of the back of FHM or Psychologies.

Just ask one of the Scientists' test subjects:

I. Love. My. Husband.
Elissa, 24, Stepford

This post was brought to you by the Research Institute for Human Reprogramming - suppressing nature since 1952

Of Butterflies And Wheels

2009-01-04T19:27:00.006Z

The crowd is gathering, rumbling, taking shape. The rumble grows and grows. The atmosphere is electric, snap! From a blobby jumble of heads, the crowd turns into a razor-sharp swarm of jagged wasps. Fury, my friends! Wild fury!

But hush!

For here comes the man to speak. Shut your toothless flapholes, O buzzing horde! He is here and he speaks!

"People, people... I ask you for calm. Please... be calmed, or else be sedated. For I have been known to address piles of rotting corpses, and I shall do so again if need be.

"Now I, and for that matter my colleagues in the government of Israel, want to make it perfectly clear that we have no quarrel, no quarrel whatsoever, with the Palestinian people, that is to say, the Palestinian women and children. The Palestinian men, they can be classed as enemy combatants, militants, terrorists, dogs dogs, and they are and they will continue to be so. But the Palestinian women and children, that is to say, civilians, they are our friends. They, too, are victims of their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and lovers, that is to say, Hamas kill them kill them all.

"We don't wish to see innocent people crushed beneath the steel-toed boot of our military might. This is merely an unfortunate side-effect. Our intention is to crush terror, crush it with bombs and guns and angry, shouting men in army fatigues and gas masks. And we're trying to do so surgically. We're trying to direct our wrath at valid military targets. However, as such targets include all Palestinian men of fighting age, that is, 14 years and upwards, give or take, then it saddens me to say that we have no choice but to lay our wrath like a flaming blanket across the entire length and breadth of the Gaza Strip.

"We seek to engage with the Palestinian people. We recognise them as victims of Hamas spit spit, and we want to help them, by bombing their homes and their schools and by destroying their infrastructure, by broadcasting propaganda, air-dropping leaflets..."

Dear Cockroaches

We will be flattening your neighbourhood in two hours. Leave now. Please do not stop to gather your belongings or say goodbye to your loved ones. All who remain will perish.

Thank you!

Your friend,
Israel x

"Yes, people of the world! We are the goodies! Those tanks rolling into Gaza City, those artillery shells raining down on the civilians packed into an area the size of a windowsill in the tower block of the Middle East... they are not of our doing. They are the doings of Hamas cut em stomach open bloodclat.

"But in the end, when all's said and done, does any of it really matter? These people are foreign, sub-human, they live far away from you. You'll have forgotten them all by June. And if nothing else, it is a good story, isn't it? Come on: war death bombs fire blood guts fuck aaaaggggghhhh! You slags love that shit and you know it.

"So don't think of us as heavy-handed murderbastard agressors. That's not helpful to anyone. Think of us as entertainers, as showmen, as the directors of the moronic action blockbusters that you drooling fuckwits like to wank in front of in your godless multiplexes every single fucking weekend.

"Thank you, and happy new year, you fucking pricks."

Do You Feel The Power Of The Gladiators?

2008-10-19T01:14:00.005+01:00

Franz Kafka's few published works give us a remarkably sophisticated insight into the darker depths of the early 20th century psyche. His stories, in which the petty tyrannies of contemporary bureaucracy and arbitrary social mores were magnified to nightmarish proportions, speak as eloquently of the world we live in today. In fact, I often wonder what Kafka would make of life in this first decade of our current century, so I decided to channel his spirit. This is what he made me write.

When you live life to the extreme, you need extreme hold. With a twist.

With VO5 Extreme Style Reworkable Putty, I can live life to the extreme, confident that I look my best. All day. Every day.

VO5 Extreme Style Reworkable Putty lets me shape my look in extreme ways. And what's more, I can rework my style to suit the situation, as often as I need to.

Whether I'm chronicling the oppressiveness, absurdity and alienation of modern life, underwriting insurance claims or dying from tuberculosis, I have an extreme look for every occasion.

Franz Kafka, the Afterworld, 2008

Let's take a moment to ponder these words.

Burning Bush

2008-09-26T00:45:00.005+01:00

This is the full text from outgoing US President George Bush's speech on the global economic crisis, Wednesday

Good evening. This is an extraordinary period for America's economy.

Over the past few weeks, you've all been scared shitless for the security of what meagre savings you've managed to scrape together in our climate of massive economic disparity. I would've been too, except I'm the President and I'm fuckin' minted. Plus I don't even have to clean up the mess because I'm off soon. Off to my secret city of billionaires under the sea.

Everything's fucked. The stock market's fucked. Banks are fucked. All that cash that they've been throwing around over the last few years, now it's in lockdown. They're keeping it to themselves. All you families and small businesses are on your own.

I helped to create this situation. Partly because I'm a fuckin' idiot. But also out of sheer evil, seemingly bent as I am on fucking shit up for as many people as possible. Nevertheless, I'm here tonight to toss you a bone.

We panicked as soon as law-of-the-jungle, so-fuckin'-what capitalism became inconvenient, so we finally decided to exercise a little control over the very same markets from whose unchecked savagery people like me have been profiting ever since my daddy's predecessor took the muzzle off of it.

It's too little too late, of course. You're still fucked. Your mortgage has tripled and your house is worth shit.

So I'm gonna drop a little loose change on the floor and look at you with a mixture of amusement, pity and revulsion as you scrabble around fighting over it in dirty overcoats, fingerless gloves and hats with holes in them. And those things you guys always have, where you put all your shit in, like, a handkerchief and tie the handkerchief on the end of a stick and sling the stick over your shoulder.

This rescue effort is not aimed at preserving any individual company or industry. It is aimed at preserving my legacy. I may have stabbed you in the neck but I called you an ambulance, right? LOLZ!!!!!!!!

It will help American consumers get credit to meet their daily needs, meaning, upon presentation to your bank, by you, of a sound business proposal, you may be able to secure a food loan. This pathetic drop in the ocean may well be the last, desperate display of America's failing economic power before we finally hand the executive fuckin' washroom key to China, so enjoy it while it lasts.

I know many Americans have questions tonight: what the fuck happened? Who elected this buffoon? And what the fuck are we gonna do now?

These are good questions, but I'm going to answer them with a bunch of meandering, barely-literate bullshit.

First, what the fuck happened? Well, most economists agree that the problems we're witnessing today developed over a long period of time, like roughly eight years.

During this time, we've been careless, and we've infected you with our carelessness. Lovely cash, we said. Come and get it. And you did. Now you're sitting hungry in huge houses that you can't sell, surrounded by worthless shit that no-one else can afford to buy.

Because unfortunately - and believe me, this was as big a surprise for our great nation's finest economic minds as it has been for you - economies can't simply keep growing forever and ever. Apparently markets fluctuate. Who the fuck knew?

Mortgage lenders threw wads of money at any motherfucker who walked in off of the street. You said, "cool!" and took as much of it as you could, trusting that these great old financial institutions knew what the fuck they were doing. You fuckin' morons.

Buoyed up by this massive, collective illusion of ultra-prosperity, we went and built three houses for every single person that ever lived in this country. And oh, shit, guess what! Darn tootin'! Now we have too many houses. This is why you can't even trade yours in for a sandwich. (That is, those of you who still have a house.)

See, against this backdrop of abstract capitalism that I and my neo-liberal predecessors have been nurturing for the past 30 years, some very shady people have been doing some very weird shit with your money. No-one really understands how it works, but basically someone borrows money, pays it back with your money, and somehow everyone except you makes more money out of the deal and I don't fuckin' know what. No-one knows. It's all guesswork.

Because the most prolific practitioners of this bullshit art were chartered by Congress, no-one bothered to question whether any of this was responsible, completely legal or whether it even made any fuckin' sense, little realising that the phrase 'chartered by Congress' is about as meaningful an assurance of quality and ethics as the word 'Disney'. And we sure as shit weren't gonna bust the party because - fuck it - we were lighting cigars with fifties, motherfucker! So of course, some other morons with too much money, greedy natures and no understanding of what the fuck was going on, they started clambering over themselves to say, "you want more money? Hey, sure. You guys look honest to me. Here, take the financial security of the whole fuckin' western world."

Pop quiz, hotshot. What happened next? That's right: everything went to shit. These near-mythical money-laundering organisations displayed all the financial nous of fuckin' dead-eyed drunks in a casino and their precariously balanced books caught fire right in front of their stupid, arrogant faces.

Now they're fucked too. And the ones that aren't totally fucked yet have padlocked their vaults, posted mercenaries in their lobbies - shoot on sight! - and you losers ain't gettin' anywhere near dat money.

So in order to appear as if the situation had nothing to do with me, I'm making a half-assed impression of a leader dealing with some shit beyond my own self-interests.

I enjoy watching people strip each other of their skins in order to make a quick buck, so I don't much care for government actually, y'know, governing the markets.

18 months ago, I would have sat back laughing my ass off while Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac went to the wall. But now things are different. Everything's fucked, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are visibly drooling.

The government's top economic experts warn that, if we don't make some kind of token gesture, you slumbering fuckheads might actually snap out of your stupors and take to the streets with torches and pitchforks.

It doesn't really matter either way. Money will soon be worth less than pebbles and you will be reduced to sucking dicks in public restrooms for food. You will be living in shacks propped up against those towering glass-and-steel totems to the very forces of chaos and destruction that brought you to this point.

And if you own a business or a farm, you will be even more fucked. You will actually have to pay others to take it off of your hands, or you will be forced to eat all the poor son-of-a-bitches on your payroll.

Even if you didn't succumb to the collective madness of your fellow countrymen, saved some money, spent less and paid your bills on time, you will still be fucked. Everything is fucked.

Fellow citizens, we now need to wave our arms around in a futile gesture of defiance. It'll give me pleasure, as it gives me pleasure to see all the other idiots in Congress flap about trying to clean up my shit.

To make the deal even sweeter, I get to make my would-be successors really sing for their fuckin' suppers. In that spirit, I've invited Senators McCain and Obama to strip naked, grease themselves up and wrestle each other in front of my desk while I beat myself off like a chimp.

I know no-one's really gonna be happy about this bail-out package that I'm proposing. Why would they? You poor bastards graft every hour of every fuckin' day, pay your taxes, and now the few dollars that didn't get frittered away on illegal wars is being spent replacing Wall Street's broken toys, while you still have to pay for basic human rights such as healthcare.

But, meh, what you gonna do?

Many Americans are asking, how would a rescue plan work? I have no idea that it even will, but if you really wanted a baseless best-case scenario, I could reel off a bunch of economist jargon that means nothing whatsoever to about 98% of you. You want that?

Nah, I thought not. Suffice to say, if we all cross our fingers and wish real hard, we can imagine it might stop things being fucked.

The final question is, what does this mean for your economic future? Well, in truth, you will still be fucked. It's all bullshit. It's always bullshit. You've had eight years of this. Have you learned nothing? The next decade will bring recession, misery, pain, disease, famine, suicide, murder, crime, corruption, the rule of the underworld, scapegoating, scaremongering, accusations, civil unrest, martial law and ultimately, fascism. I keep telling you, you idiots: everything is fucked.

But hey. This is America. We fuckin' rule. We'll just ride this shit out, forget about it and then make all the same mistakes again in another couple generations. Laissez-fair capitalism brings misery to millions all over the world, and now it's started shitting on your doorstep. But do you have any better ideas? Me neither.

So fuck it. Carry on as normal. Leave it to Congress. Daddy will take care of everything.

Thank you for listening. May God have mercy on your souls.

Handsome Fighters Never Lose Battles

2008-09-13T04:54:00.011+01:00

You join us at a shocking, even terrifying, but undeniably exhilarating juncture. We are thick in the world of 'rock and roll', my guide and I, disguised in the dress of these young hellions: our hair draped over sweatbands, arms covered in transfer tattoos relating to the sport of WWE (World Wrestling Entertainment, which is popular with the frightening creatures that surround us), Paisley print shirts and leather trousers. We have infiltrated their temple of sin. This, dear reader, is a concert of the rock and roll trio The Scouting For Girls.

And it almost shames me to say as much, but I must confess that - were my moral fibres not starched and pressed with due diligence every fucking morning without relief - then I, too, may well have been swept up like a naked dervish on the foul swell of The Scouting For Girls' river of fleshly abandon. Their music and their lyrics speak of unfettered free love, hedonism and revolution. They aim to bring our society to its noble, shaven knees. The British government is right to be wary of these... these sexdevils.

Fortunately, my reverie is disturbed as I am shocked back to God by a lithe young man with murder in his eyes and a chest free of shirt and hair. He leaps as if from nowhere and, with a taut, sinewy arm raised, screams at the top of his throat: "maximum rock and roll decadence! Here we go!"

I am startled. My guide, however, has seen many such things before. He says, sensing the unrest that shakes the very foundations of my soul, "have no fear... surely you remember the earnestness of your own youth?"

And I do remember. With a tear, I remember the cricketers of my salad days, the brave airmen in my boys' own comic adventures and the filthy seaside slide shows. I remember the passions they stirred up within me, the same passions that threaten to shatter my stiff, adult façade at this very moment.

"Hold me," I say. My guide slaps me acheek.

"Dammit, man!" he chides. "Pull yourself together!"

I fear that my God has abandoned me. How can He even allow such a place to exist, let alone permit one of His own flock to wander blindly into this sweaty skin-pit, no less than a vivid re-enactment of the last days of Sodom?

And at the centre, no mere witnesses, not simple cowardly appeasers, but conductors, directors of this vile orchestra of the senses: The Scouting For Girls. Their frontman Kurt Cobain bangs his upright pianoforte with a vigour, the source of which I cannot fathom. Is it rage? Is it a grotesque mockery of joy? Perhaps in the keys of his pianoforte he sees the face of his mother, the mother for whom he feels some unnatural lust?

Beside him is the band's bass guitar player, Mr Noel Gallagher, a man who famously polluted Britain's then sacred parlours with his foul language on my good friend (Satan, be gentle with his confused soul) Bill Grundy's television show in the year of 1976.

Behind them both, the masked drummer. A mysterious figure, whose identity is the subject of endless gossip and idle speculation within the phonographic industry. I am, of course, referring to the man known only as Beatz Krunt. Some say he once shat in a pie and then ate the pie. Far be it from me to perpetuate such scurrilous nonsense, but I bring it up only in the name of journalistic rigour, that I may fulfil my mandate as the unflinching reporter of things both good and rotten with the stench-filth of misery.

And misery permeates every molecule of the fetid air in this forgotten place. All around me, shiny, quivering young ladies (though I hesitate to call them such) in various states of undress, with arms naked, legs unclothed, cleavage exposed, sicking out screams painted thick with deep, voluptuous colours of unholy ecstasy, pleading for congress with some dreadful beast of lore; their unworthy escorts in their tight denim trousers (oh, so terribly tight!), gorging on pills of crack heroin, cannabis and even marijuana. A golden calf breathes flames, worshippers frenziedly dancing and fornicating at its cloven feet.

I have seen enough. I turn to my guide and ask him to escort me safely to the relative sanity of the street. It is here that I note with some horror that the face of my guide has been replaced by a giant drug. My own guide has been gobbled up by the madness of this sinister cult of rock and roll and has become a living metaphor. I take a step back. Nothing left for it but to run. I try to insinuate a path through the crowds, now wild with the tangy genital odours which invade their nostrils. Faces leap out: cackling, dribbling, speaking in tongues. I wade through this sea of lost souls. Splish. Splash. But after what seems like hours, I find that I am back where I started, faced as I am by my monstrous, narcotic guide.

So this is how it ends. I am Edward Woodward, appealing to his God, to the crowds, to anyone for mercy. I go as a martyr.

Thankfully, here the concert ends, and my drug-friend and I make our egress, hand-in-hand, from the auditorium. All in all, a rollicking, roistering rollercoaster of rock and roll razzmatazz. Largely recommended ★★★★

© 2008 The Times

An Open Letter To Ronan Keating

2008-09-05T00:13:00.016+01:00

Dear Ronan

I don't know if you're reading this, though if you've got any decency at all, you will be. Firstly, I wanted to apologise for the way I got last time I wrote to you. I was out of line, I'm sorry. But surely you understand why I get so angry? Why do you ignore me, after all we've been through?

I write to you on a weekly basis, weeping raw emotion and various bodily fluids onto the page, and you act like none of it means anything. I mean, where do you GET OFF treating me this way? And yet, when your mouth opens and out comes that thick, treacly honk, it vibrates my innards to the frequency of love and I think, this must've been how Charles Manson felt. Where do you sing it from, Ronan, if you really don't feel what I do?

Whenever I hear your lumpen, flat-footed fireman soul... I don't know how to explain that feeling. It's like a kind of sex that's so intense it tips into violent rage. You know when you go out late at night and beat a man's face so hard that it makes you erect? They say it's a thin line between love and hate, but I can't tell the difference. One minute I want to stroke your hair with the slightly inappropriate tenderness of an overbearing mother, the next I want to cut you open like a dirty nappy. Don't you think that you owe me for making me feel this way?

Who do you think you are? It was bad enough watching you get so successful, to see you give yourself to the world, yet cast me aside if I were a long-forgotten childhood copy of The Beano that you found down the side of your bed whilst looking for some porn. But then you broke up the band and started playing on your own. I felt so betrayed. And then you disappeared for years! Oh, you disgusting angel! I was so confused. I never knew where I stood with you. And now you think you can just come back and carry on like nothing ever happened! You make me so MAD, Ronan. I don't know what's worse, not having you around at all, or you being out there, with all those SLAGS' hands all over your dumpy body. I sometimes think I'd be happier if you were just silently rotting in a thicket by the side of the A59.

Why do you hide from me? Are you afraid to feel love? Oh, but of course you are! Your heart is COLD and BLACK. You don't want to feel the warm, tingly fingers of forever; you want cheap, guilty teenage hand-relief in the communal area of your tour bus. But Keith is trying to watch Ten Years Younger, Ronan. What chance have I when you won't even consider the feelings of your own brother in pop?

But I know the real Ronan is in there, and I remember when he reached out to me that fateful night, when you were singing Words on Top Of The Pops, and you broke off, looked at the camera and said, “I do it for you, Buzz”. That bitch who keeps replying to my letters 'on your behalf' and testifying against me in court says it never happened, but I know it did, and I know if I could just hear it from you, you'd confirm it.

I love you, Ronan, even though you're a fucking SELFISH PRICK. Please please please write back.

Your #1 fan,
Buzz

Youngest 16-Year-Olds EVER!

2008-08-19T20:35:00.008+01:00

Newsways were busy today with the, well, news that Hammaad Munshi has become the latest terrorist bastard potential murderkiller to get his collar fingered by the long arm of the judge. And here comes the shockerbit... I hope you're sitting down...

At the time of his arrest, he was only 16.

Well, goodness. Excuse me while I spit my tea all over my keyboard in disbelief. Except I won't, actually, because I'm not even vaguely surprised. In fact, I'm only surprised that we don't see more of this from kids his age. Along with furious masturbation, evil scheming is exactly the kind of behaviour I expect to see from all teenage boys. Bitter, withdrawn, obsessive, fuelled by hormonal rage and lacking the intellectual and emotional maturity necessary to think through the consequences of their intentions, I'd have thought the average teenager would be the perfect recruit for any would-be terrorist mastermind.

Man, when I was 16, I wanted to bring the whole corrupt, sick world to its knees. In my dreams, I was Christian Slater in Heathers, dispatching the unworthy, breezing into school with dynamite strapped to my chest. If I'd had access to the tools available to all young, aspiring terrorists today, you can bet your cock that I'd at least have been sorely tempted.

No, what troubles me is when grown adults - apparently rational, intelligent adults - choose to spend the last few months of their lives plotting to commit mass murder, with time enough to contemplate the enormity of what they're about to do, before finally heading out into the world with rucksacks full of hate. You wouldn't readily associate most adults with a passionate commitment to anything, much less a willingness to lay down their lives, of their own volition, for any beliefs that may possess them, whatever the rights and wrongs. That one would choose to do so in such a horrific manner - that's when I see a person with whom something's gone seriously wrong.

Allbran

2008-08-09T01:43:00.000+01:00

Sir,

There is a disturbing new cultural trend developing, enticing impressionable young fleshlings to cast aside the supposed shackles of civilised society, gather in groups at seedy drinking holes and 'groove' to the atonal mewlings of uneducated oiks brandishing (barely) musical instruments such as the 'electric guitar', the 'synthesiser' and the 'drum'. Its practitioners adopt monikers so ridiculous as to both boggle and rankle the brain: for example, the four-piece group McFly, or the solo woman artiste Kylie Minogue.

It is called 'popular music', and having been quietly fermenting for a mere 50-odd years, there is little wonder that the scene has remained largely invisible to most right-thinking people.

Indeed, some of the unsavoury characters who foist this nonsense upon our children cannot even read or write music, a fact almost too terrible to contemplate, but one that I am afraid is true. It is also a fact that understandably provokes the continued bafflement of broadsheet newspapers, not to mention the ire even of former 'pop star' turned flouncing, deluded artspretender Mr Damon Albarn, Esq.

Mr Albarn believes that our nation's schools must take it upon themselves to impose upon our children a solid comprehension of musical score. And rightly so! I accuse of the most shameless balderdash those cads, bounders and knobbers who would claim that recent innovations such as recorded sound have rendered obsolete the initial function of notation as a means of preserving musical compositions for posterity. Score is simply better, so shut up. Without it, the art of music would be opened up to society's rougher elements.

Can we afford to let culture fall into the hands of the lower orders? The arts, music especially, whilst generally beneficial to both mind and soul, are unfortunately prone to inflaming the passions in the weak-willed and unrefined. This cannot be allowed to happen. Imagine your wife's severed head landing - still screaming silently - on the floor of your parlour, having been flung through the window by your hitherto friendly local coal man, his face now a picture of twisted, godless savagery.

Eternally yours, my love

Col. Bert Wasserbeutel

Who Told You That You Were Naked?

2008-07-29T22:06:00.006+01:00

You will, of course, forgive me for not collapsing into a snotty blubbering heap at the news of Ryanair's predicted loss for 2009. Please, don't cast me as the cruel, jaded sociopath that I undoubtedly appear to be. But I try to maintain a certain stoicism at all times, no matter how difficult it may be, so that I might retain the strength to drag myself from my bed each morning and face the fresh horrors with which life - that twisted lemon tormentor life - sees fit to burden us at all hours of every day. Also, I don't care.

Honestly. A fucking airline has some money troubles. Oh, my bleeding heart. One less unfettered, uncontrollable killcorp buzzing around poisoning the atmosphere. At crazy prices! Whatever will we do? Fly with Easyjet, I suppose.

The zany, emphatically ex-hippie Clive Sinclair of entrepreneurship Richard Branson, meanwhile, persists with his plans to put bloated, moneyed twats in space, for no better reason than "the sheer fuck of it".*

It may seem as if I have some sort of agenda against Branson. I don't, really. No more than I do against any other freewheeling multi-millionaire shyster with a stranglehold on about 98% of the British commercial sector. It's just the way he insists that flying planes and shooting people up into space can, realistically, in this day and age, play any kind of part in the environmental effort. Perhaps clean air (even space) travel will one day become a reality, and we'll have pioneers like Branson to thank. That day, however, is a long way off yet, judging from the current limitations of modern technology. In the meantime, the rest of us would rather concentrate on finding a way of buying food and getting to work with a relatively clear conscience. And having a bit of money left to clothe ourselves afterwards.

To date, Branson's most notable contribution has been to fuel a flight on twice Indonesia's entire yearly coconut crop. Now he claims that repeatedly puncturing the ozone layer with tin cocks full of the rich and famous will somehow serve to highlight the fragility of the earth's ecosystems. Possibly, Richard, but not in the way that you imagine. It'll certainly illustrate the problem when the world's marine population is floating lifeless and rotting on the surface of the ocean and we're all running vainly under dead trees for cover from corrosive acid monsoons. (Branson's clients shall, incidentally, be oblivious, living with the other sexy plutocrats at the top of fantastical sci-fi sky towers, where the air will be clean.)

* Not a direct quote

New Wave Dave

2008-07-12T01:44:00.011+01:00

Can you think of anything more radical to be in 2008 than anti-PC? I can't.

Alright, you big cocks? I'm David Cameron. Oi, fatso! Dump some lard! How refreshing is that? Fuck me, I'm ACE! You know the poor? Lazy, useless fuckers, the lot of them. OOOOOH, that was a GOOD one!

Seriously, though... I pulled myself up by my bootstraps. Through Heatherdown Preparatory School. Rough place. That was where Princes Andrew and Edward went - the shit princes. I got myself through Eton. Through Oxford. Once upon a time, I couldn't even TALK. I couldn't FEED myself. I SAT there all day in NAPPIES and SHAT myself. I was so poor, I literally had nothing. Nothing of my own. Everything I had was given to me by others. By my parents. Fucking MUGS.

But I fucked them right off and made my own way. I entered this world bollock-naked and now I'm the leader of the fucking Conservative party. Now why can't you do that? Eh?

I don't give a fuck, me. Not anymore, anyway. Not now that I've won the confidence of that directionless, nihilistic fart cloud of nothing that the papers politely call 'swing voters'. Fished you cunts right in, didn't I? You think I had to compromise anything to position myself left of Tony Blair? You massive twats. Hug a hoodie? Only because it's easier to nick their wallets that way.

Well, there's a new David Cameron in town now. No more of that liberal ponce faggot shit here. I say the unsayable. It's all good. I'm like the Little Britain of politics. Haha aren't foreigners funny with their funny moustaches and the way they talk and the fact that they don't wash and they kidnap your daughters?

So yeah - fucking sort it out, you poor cunts. Hopelessness is just a state of mind. Get out of them fucking comprehensives and get yourselves into some proper schools. Or, at a pinch, get down the fucking Jobcentre and get some wanky middle-management job or something to bring in the bacon until you sort yourself out with a political party of your own. Fucking beer money, innit?

Now fuck off.

It Came In A Hat

2008-06-25T23:55:00.015+01:00

Watch this filth, take a few moments to contemplate the enormity of what you've just seen, and then come back and carry on reading. That is, if you manage not to run screaming from the house, begging for the mercy of the Lord.

...

You made it back. Steely is your resolve, pilgrim. But can't you practically hear the terrible, ominous crack as civilisation slowly tears itself apart, like the surface of a frozen lake splintering beneath your helpless feet?

No?

Me neither. Someone did, though. Actually, quite a few people. Roughly 200 of them, in fact. 200 is, admittedly, rather a lot of people to have, say, in your living room. I don't expect a great many living rooms in this country could comfortably accommodate that number.

But as a proportion of the entire population of the United Kingdom, it's small potatoes. Very small potatoes. Tiny potatoes. About 0.0003% of the full sack, if you will. If you ever came across potatoes that size, no doubt you'd think they were no more than grit and rinse them from the surface of the larger potatoes to which they were clinging, or otherwise leave them lingering at the bottom of the sack until such a time as you believed yourself to have emptied it of potatoes and, after a day or two of deliberation, made the decision to dispose of the receptacle.

Still, as a proportion of the entire population of the United Kingdom, it's significant enough for Heinz, who decided to pull the advert from our screens after receiving so many complaints.

Let's say you were dissatisfied with some aspect of the overall service provided by central government. Hard to conceive in these times of peace and prosperity, I know, but just concentrate really hard. Perhaps you caught a minor in possession of a tube of very strong glue. There's something to get the blood a-boiling. Now, let's go on to say that you sent a petition, graced with 200 signatures, to Number 10. A few days later, the Prime Minister would likely call you at home, as is his wont. And you would rightly expect to be granted an ear, an ear of genuine concern for your troubles. But you would be disappointed, for he would simply say, with a sinister lilt, "daddy's busy now," and then chill your bones with slow, dark, hollow laughter before hanging up. Forever.

Perhaps, even, you yourself had cause to complain to Heinz for some reason. Maybe the company, in a moment of madness, had elected to tinker with the recipe for their ever-popular stewed haricot beans, and the result failed to live up to previous standards. Why, a mere 200 complaints would trouble them not, my friend! The bespectacled men in pinstripes and bowler hats that comprise the board of Heinz, having expected a deluge of angry letters, would consider themselves fortunate to have escaped with their reputation more-or-less intact.

But this was an advert, see. Adverts try to sell you things. And I'm no economist or marketeer or nothing, but I know it's generally considered bad form to annoy your audience during a sales pitch. More to the point, advertising exists within the realm of the media, and the crazy world of the media operates by its own rules. In the media, 200 complaints is an unmitigated disaster. Most people in this country aren't technically insane, and for this reason, the media isn't often faced with mass expressions of anger from the general public, give or take the odd frenzy in Fleet Street. Most people in this country have better things to do, like watch the telly. The ASA received 24,192 complaints about 14,080 adverts in 2007. That's an average of less than two complaints per advert.

But the media can't simply ignore the maniacs who do complain. Mary Whitehouse saw to that. So what can they do but assume that the doubtlessly unwell minority who do make their voices heard speak for a less vocal majority? They therefore have to extrapolate the level of their dissatisfaction to the rest of the public. Essentially tar us with the same brush. It's vital for their self-respect. Otherwise they're just pandering to lunatics.

Therefore, when 200 people say, "this advert raises the grim prospect of having to discuss with my children the issue of same-sex relationships," no-one says, "why are you not happy to discuss homosexual relationships with your children when you're happy to discuss heterosexual relationships with them?" or, "what administrative oversight allowed you to breed?" Instead, the sick, bigoted twats have to be taken seriously. I suppose it's the same mechanism that compels you to smile and nod when you're addressed by a twitching malcontent at a bus stop.

(The ASA, for its part, has yet to decide whether it'll investigate the matter.)

Perhaps it's for this same reason that society, by and large, continues to allow the Anglican church to wring its hands, unchecked and unquestioned, over the ordainment of gay ministers. It has to be. Otherwise there'd surely be massive demonstrations disrupting every day of the Global Anglican Future Conference and the British government would be threatening the communion's very status in this country unless it came correct and dragged its shit into the 21st century. Surely.

Hair

2008-06-11T21:19:00.006+01:00

Donald Trump. Footsoldier of Reagan. Unreconstructed PR disaster for 21st-century capitalism. Optimistically-coifed totem to the ugliness of the American Dream. Next to him, Alan "Sir" Sugar is a study in good-natured humour and quiet dignity. He is a tool.

And yesterday that tool stepped, with no apparent sense of his own ridiculousness, into the arena for the first day of a public inquiry into his plans to build "the greatest golf course anywhere in the world" on a site north of Aberdeen which just happens to be a conservation area of considerable fragility and scientific interest.

It's alright, though. He may well have ignored two environment reports commissioned by his very self, which warned, in no uncertain terms, that the area would be completely fucked if Trump's sweaty, graceless hands got anywhere near it, but that's only because the experts behind them don't know anything. And he may well decimate the rare dunes in the area, but he will move them safely out of the way and make the place "better than it was before". Because, let's face it, nature is chaotic and mad. With a dash of plastic, human symmetry here and there, even morons can appreciate it.

And he won't bend. "I am at a point in my career that if it is not going to be the best, I would not want to build it," he has said, with typical eloquence. Yesterday he added, "I'm going to do the greatest golf course or I'm not". It's a forceful argument. I don't want to imagine what horrors would befall if Trump decided not to deface the land with his playground for twats.

Indeed, it was the "magnificence" of the dunes that first attracted Trump to "do" his golf course there. That and his strong Scottish roots: his mother was born on Lewis; he spent three hours there on Monday reminding everyone of the fact; he spent 97 seconds in the place of his mother's birth; it was his second visit (his first was as a toddler); he didn't stop for lunch. "I think I do feel Scottish," he said. Presumably between sobs.

When it was put to him yesterday that Scotland's right-to-roam laws would leave the golf course open to ramblers, Trump replied, "the law is the law. But... you don't want to be sitting there with your family and be smashed by a golf ball." There may or may not have been a chilly tone of menace in his voice as he said this.

There are glimmers of hope. The RSPB, Scottish Natural Heritage and various local busybodies have offered stiff opposition to the proposals, which were initially declined by Aberdeenshire's council last November after one wretched, meddling Liberal Democrat councillor used his casting vote incorrectly. Having said that, they've been backed by local trade and tourist-board types, in turn lent no small weight by Scotland's slightly Mafia-esque first minister Alex Salmond. We're assured that no shady backroom manoeuvring has taken place. Although meetings in luxury hotels have.

And there you have it: yet another gory battle in the ongoing war between big business and the very earth from which, back in the day, we sprang. Money versus Life Itself. It's on.

Also, while I'm here, let's take a few seconds to mark today's positive vote on the 42-day limit on detention without charge. I would've given it some invective, but everything that needs to be said is right there:

42-day limit on detention without charge.

It provides its own invective. Bye for now.

Occasional Political Post No. Something

2008-06-03T22:52:00.007+01:00

Immigration minister Liam Byrne today tried to resurrect his idea of hijacking the August Bank Holiday for a national celebration of 'Britishness'.

"We are not a nation of Alf Garnetts," he said. "British people, in essence, want no more of newcomers than four commitments: to learn English, to work hard and pay taxes, to follow the law and to make an effort to integrate."

I'll leave the language thing aside for now, but I will point to a survey published earlier this year, which found - disturbingly - that we, the people of Britain, are apparently more interested in immigrants learning the language than we are in them paying taxes. What irks me most about Byrne's pronouncement (although it's becoming more of a catchphrase) is the insistence on integration.

I would have to ask how much of an effort the average British-born national makes daily to integrate. I'd suggest to anyone who talks about the importance of integration that they spend some time using public transport and see for themselves just how 'integrated' most of us are. Walk down any street in any town or city and see the thousand-yard stares of human beings desperate to avoid any kind of contact with other human beings, then talk about integration. Or perhaps list ten things we know about our next-door neighbours. I suppose I could name some of mine, but only because I live in a flat and see their post.

What the fuck is 'integration' anyway? We in Britain are famous for our coldness and remoteness, and not without good reason. Of all the places I've been in the world, Britain is, by far, among the least friendly. We shut ourselves off from each other. See someone in the street who looks like they need help, we might just about stop shy of walking into oncoming traffic in order to avoid them. Fights break out when people look at each other. Strike up a conversation with a stranger and you'd be lucky to get away without being committed. There's no such thing as integration in our society. Why demand that newcomers make efforts beyond those which we ask of ourselves?

In other news, following the stabbing of a 15-year-old girl in London yesterday, Boris Johnson has decided to take advantage of the city's mounting sense of hysteria to make another case for stop and search. He also expressed concern that young people (including - shock! - girls) are "growing up angry and disengaged from society". He wants to know why.

I would say the reasons are myriad, and deeply complex. But I, for one, am fairly certain that it has nothing to do with the fact that the young people in question are growing up in the kind of society that would elect to high office a racist, callous sociopath bastard clown with no discernible interest in said society.

He was always funny on Have I Got News For You, though, wasn't he?

Peter Kay for PM, motherfuckers.

Saturday Kitchen

2008-06-01T01:22:00.007+01:00

Hey, gang! It's your old pal Dermot O'Leary here. Ssh! Not so loud... You'll wake granddad.

You remember me, don't you? I used to have some sort of relevance, if only for contributing to the eventual death of culture by dint of my involvement in Big Brother. I had to leave, though. It was all a bit too much for little me. These days I prefer to sit, cardigan and slacks, on a pile of my own dust in a Radio 2 studio. I'm a sort of Bob Harris for people who think Bob Harris is a bit obnoxious. Was ever a Dermot more deserving of the name?

Hey! You know that band I had in session last time you listened to me? Did they sound familiar? They should've done. You'd heard them the previous time. And the time before that. Tee-hee. Only kidding. They're different bands; it's just that they all aspire to be the same band. Athlete. The very apex of modern music, man. Oh, goodness me, they're brill. You know that one about wires? What's it called? Ooh, I can't remember. Normally I have my producer on-hand to deal with tedious details like knowing stuff about music. Hey! I'm only a DJ. What do you expect me to be, some sort of musical encyclopedia internet guy?

Hey! Chill, gang. I think we're all getting a bit too excited. Here, wear these slip-ons. They're comfortastic.

But yeah, that 'wires' tune. I can't remember what it's called, but hey! That's cool. Who needs to know titles with songs as great as that? Every time I hear it, I'm transported to another world. The first 60 seconds of a particularly moving episode of Hollyoaks. Everybody doing their morning thing. Looking a bit down in the dumps. Max has electrocuted himself to death. "You got wires going in." Get it?

OK, gang, here's a funny old tune from the '80s. Let's get funky. Ironically funky. But not too funky! It's Saturday afternoon. Don't want to get too worked up, do we? We've got an early night tonight, don't forget. Clearing out the garage tomorrow.

Hey, you know that moment when, at last, you escape the terrible clutches of youth, carelessly cast aside all that bothersome drive and ambition (watch where you throw it, though... might have someone's eye out... actually, just place it gently by your feet) and you finally resign yourself to becoming your parents? You and your photogenic young family, in your lovely little beige world of flat-packs and extra virgin olive oil. It'll be 2007 for the rest of your life. You know that moment? That's me. Here I am, gang. Come on in, don't be shy now. Embrace mediocrity. It's not so bad, like a nice tepid bath followed by a warm fluffy towel.

And just think... all those adverts for mid-priced family cars are aimed squarely at you. How cool is that! Now, how about some Supergrass? Ooh, no, that's a bit noisy, isn't it?

Hey! Take it easy.

This post was brought to you by Bosch

Animals Say The Funniest Things!

2008-05-31T04:14:00.004+01:00

Hey, you. Do you remember what TV was like before it yielded to nihilism? God, wasn't it dull? Entertainment, information... some of it was even edifying. What were they thinking?

We didn't want to engage with the world; we wanted to pretend it didn't exist, or at least, sneer and laugh at it. So it was cause for celebration when the bigwigs at TV Central finally listened to the mewing public and started treating us like the animals we are. At last, TV became a Garden of Earthly Delights into which we could retreat from life's merry-go-round of horror and humiliation, car-crash pornovision dancing baby-oiled before our lifeless eyeballs.

And this new golden age of television has surely reached its zenith with the centrepiece of ITV1's 2008 summer schedule, Vernon Kay's Saturday Bang-Bang (6pm Tonight, ITV1). Literally dominating the channel's new Saturday night line-up (it runs from 6pm to 6am Sunday morning), Saturday Bang-Bang is a veritable marathon of low-brow endtertainment. And make no mistake: this is good shit. You'll snap to on Sunday morning in a pool of your own piss, dribble and seminal fluids with no memory of the previous 12 hours.

I was lucky enough to see a preview copy, and shreds of certain items have since returned to the forefront of my mind, flashback-style, a red-eyed beast vibrating deep within me with every recollection. I see Kay in a nappy adorned with a gigantic plastic phallus, gleefully running amok through the British Museum, smashing exhibits to pathetic smithereens with his comedy appendage. I see a man trying to eat as many Ginster's pasties as he can in the time it takes a celebrity (I think it was Gabby Logan) to have a shit off a stepladder. I see a massive game of soggy biscuit. I see a cat being chased through the studio by a cackling Vernon, his face a hideous mask of primal hatred. I see every university and library in the country burning before crowds of baying, pitchfork-brandishing yokels soaked in chip fat and beer. Now, every time I hear the theme tune, everything goes black, and I wake up naked beside the twitching, mangled corpse of an intellectual.

Rejoice! It's Infogeddon.

bin

2008-04-29T16:27:00.005+01:00

And that leads me to Rick Rubin. He was a bit interesting for about five minutes twenty years ago, until everyone cottoned on to the fact that he was just producing the same record over and over and getting different people to rap on it, but now the words "produced by Rick Rubin" strike fear into my heart. How come he only ever 'produces' music by lone men with acoustic guitars, eh? That's not production. That's recording. That's setting up a couple of microphones and pressing a button. Maybe he'll adjust a fader or two. I dare say he might. It's still not production. Any cunt with a music BTEC could do that. I have a music BTEC. How much would I get paid to record the next bauble of shit that flops out of Neil Diamond's old mouth? And how much if I started dressing like a Montanan surivalist?

ond

2008-04-29T16:24:00.004+01:00

And while I'm about it, fuck Neil Diamond. How does someone so shit get taken so seriously for so long? I don't think he even likes music. He likes slip-on shoes and clicking his fingers.

nna

2008-04-29T16:20:00.001+01:00

Madonna. Not so much a pop star as a vacuum, cultural dark matter, a black hole blithely and indiscriminately absorbing everything that crosses her event horizon.

Every few years or so, the High Queen of Bollocks unveils her latest 're-invention' (although rational people might instead use the words 'new album' and 'costume change'). Thereupon, those of us with half an ear to the ground immediately see that she's cobbled together a weird mish-mash of pop-cultural trends that were mildly sexy two years previously. Others, however, fall prostrate at her feet, hailing her grand new vision as some sort of innovation, a bold leap forward for pop music. Not all of these people are obviously idiots. Many of them are journalists and media commentators - people who get paid a lot of money to be aware of these things. Someone inform their employers. They are imposters.

Examples? Look at her last album, Confessions Inna Dancefloor or something, where she did electroclash, a genre that was knackered out within six months of its first appearance, way back in 2001. She also, round about this time, discovered parkour, which even the tweedy giffs at the BBC already noticed, having used one of its rising stars in an ident several years beforehand. Or how about when she released Ray Of Light in 1998, and introduced the world to a thrilling new thing called 'ecstasy'?

This time around, she's enlisted a small band of new! young! fresh! exciting! producers: one called Timbaland, and a pair called The Neptunes. Trust me, people, you may not have heard of them yet, but these guys are gonna be shaping the sound of 2009. You saw them here first. Remember old Madonna when you're grooving to their funky jams at the discotheque, kids, won't you?

She's the musical equivalent of high street fashions, years behind the innovators on the left-field, but taking all the credit. Scruples don't buy babies, motherfucker. I imagine her rubbing her hands together with fingerless gloves on.

Out Now On Telstar: Jeremy Kyle Coughs Hank Marvin

2008-04-24T22:34:00.007+01:00

Bitches and hoes. Steve Sutherland here. Readers of a certain age will remember me as the last half-decent editor the NME ever had, before I jumped ship, leaving it lost and baffled in the weird, foggy, millennial hinterland, the stalking ground of nu-metal and UK garage (what was that time for? no-one knows). Readers of another certain age (and possibly others) will not remember me. The truth is, I'm neither. I'm a secret. I'm British music's own Machiavelli, its Alastair Campbell, its Dick Cheney. I'm the most powerful shadow slinking silently down the corridors of the country's record industry. I'm the black dog that will bark suicide at music, bark it into the grave.

You remember music. It was that pleasing combination of sounds that used to mean something to you, before it started trying to sell you hair products (and yes, I facilitated that arrangement). I hated it: bloody useless drug-addled layabout fop, poncing around smoking draw and fucking about with a guitar. "Get a job!" I said. We used to have screaming rows. But I worked the old Sutho magic oh yes. For I never abandoned the NME but I merely decided to continue my work in the background, 'Brand Director', director of the brand, that was me. I made music lose weight, gave it some focus and direction. A purpose. The killer instinct. You're one of life's winners, music, you're an achiever, a Darwinian top-hatter, murder murder murder. And I sent it hair-gelled and suited round your neighbourhood, knocking on doors, pushing mobiles, student bank accounts and Fred Perry, the label that once adorned the chests of the very people that used to beat up your older brothers and sisters, oh you delicate indiethings, ooh the delicious irony!

Your sons and daughters are beyond your command, and under mine. Woo-ha. Got them all in check. All those pretty boys and girls in the high street with their fashionable clothes and blank stares, go on wave your hands in front of their pretty faces nothing happens, I put them there. I created them in my laboratory of anti-culture: a pinch of Top Shop here, a dash of Alex Zane there oh joy. I would be pumping hot cream into my shorts right this second if I was only human.

Arf! It's my attack dog!

Conor McNicholas: "The shoes! The shoes! The shoes the shoes the shoestheshoestheshoestheshoestheshoes! I am the one who introduced to you the shoes! That was my genius!

"Less books! Less films! Less culture! Less reality! Less text! MORE pictures! MORE adverts! Everything brought to you by someone! Foals interview, sponsored by Carling!

'Drink Carling!'
Singer out of Foals

"I AM NO MAN! I AM MEGOR THE ENSLAVER, CORRUPTER OF YOUTH! I am dark Plato! Kneel ye and take it!"

Hush now, little dog. Ah, youth culture. Once you were a strong, strapping creature, lean of frame but tight of thigh, ooh so very tight. Now I got you pissen blood and snot and so you will until the afterbeing. I stripped you of all meaning. This is my legacy. How are the adverts, Michael? They're adverts, Michael, you're listening to adverts.

Mine is a cross-platform conspiracy, Channel 4 in the mix and the ones who sell you the things, the lovely things. T4, Hollyoaks, Skins, not to mention Radio 1 the bars the universities the cities the big smoking cities. Scorched-earth policy. Flatten everything and replace it with row upon row of homogeneous Conversed Vodaclones twat behaviour tomorrow's Conservative voters today vacantly bellowing unconversation into the mouth-hole of your mobile on the top deck of the bus.

We call it synergy.
The law calls it first degree murder.
I hover above the law like Murdoch's ghost.

I am Sutho, playtime is here.

And remember:
I hate you. I hate you and everything you believe in. You will grow up hopeless.

Entirely Predictable Liberal Position On Music Festival Controversy

2008-04-14T23:49:00.010+01:00

What, exactly, is the problem with Jay-Z headlining this year's Glastonbury?

I was unsure myself, so I decided to have a look at that bastion of rational, intelligent debate, Have Your Say at bbc.co.uk and see what the haters were 'thinking'.

John Lilley of Kings Langley weighed in with:

"Keep the RAP 'music' for the MOBO's and the real music for Glastonbury."

Meanwhile, Baz of Bishops Stortford ventured that:

"this is not a festival for this rap rubbish its for real music played by real bands."

Ann Bennett, 'Brit working in US', had this to say:

"If you enjoy watching a bunch of people with their pants round their knees and trying to hold them up by their crotch and can't understand what the hell they are singing about then why not?
But since when did the Anglo Brit's have any kind of say or opinion with this kind of issue? If we opposed it I,m sure we would be called racist's."

And Kevin Ritch of New York believes that:

"Hip Hop and Rap are not honestly "music" in the truest sense of the word, but are more along the lines of steady shouting rhyme with an ethnic base."

So there we have it. The reason these people have a problem with a hip-hop artist headlining Glastonbury is because they're semi-literate, mouth-breathing idiots.

Perhaps I'm being unimaginative with my bleeding-heart liberal viewpoint. Perhaps, but not half as unimaginative as those who can always be relied upon to bleat endlessly about any slight variation on the Glastonbury template. Noted cultural commentator Noel Gallagher, for example, who's "not having hip-hop at Glastonbury." Why? Because "it's wrong."

The last time Glastonbury provoked a war of words on this scale was when the Eavis camp had the temerity to book Kylie Minogue for the headline slot in 2005. Ooh, those cro-magnon types with their knee-jerk hatred of anything mainstream, they weren't happy with that. I can just imagine the smiles breaking out like open wounds on some of their hideous, pustular faces when Minogue succumbed to breast cancer and pulled out. I can also imagine, with no mere hint of glee, those smiles shattering on the floor like fine bone china when it was announced that Basement Jaxx were stepping up to fill the slot.

Hip-hop is 30 years old. I shouldn't need to say this in 2008, but it's a legitimate genre, with its own history and at least as many varied arms as the music of guitars. Taste aside - and I'm willing to accept the views of those who might say, calmly and reasonably, that they simply don't enjoy the music - if the Campaign For Real Rock's dullard mouthpieces can't even begrudgingly grant it at least a little credibility, then the problem is with them. Perhaps that problem is myopia. Perhaps ignorance. Perhaps - with apologies to Ann Bennet, 'Brit working in US' - racism.

Daily Mail, The Country

2008-04-13T22:29:00.005+01:00

It's Zimbabwe that gets all the attention as the world looks to Africa at this present time, and with good reason. Perhaps that's why Susan Shabangu, South Africa's deputy safety and security minister, decided that now would be the time to instruct her charges in the police force to up the brutality, safe in the knowledge that the news would be buried deep under a pile of Mugabe.

"You must kill the bastards," she said, "if they threaten you or the community. You must not worry about the regulations... I want no warning shots, you have one shot and it must be a kill shot... you have been given guns, now use them... if criminals dare to threaten the police or the livelihood or lives of innocent men, women and children, then they must be killed."

And a shiver runs down the spine.

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L10373394.htm

The Serious Post

2008-04-10T22:51:00.005+01:00

I'm a miserable, cynical old fuck who despairs constantly at the mindless apathy of the rest of his species. But every so often, the world behaves completely out of character and both humbles me and sends my heart a-leaping to the sky yelling, "praise the Lord! Woah, bothers and sisters, praise the goddam Lord!"

The last 24 hours have seen me riding a rollercoaster of emotions... Well, 'rollercoaster' may be putting it a bit strong, emotionally constipated as I am. Let's say, instead, 'miniature railway'. The last 24 hours have seen me riding a miniature railway of emotions, as stronger and stronger indications have emerged of an actual global boycott of this year's accursed Beijing Olympics. Though few have admitted as much.

It began last night when I first heard that Gordon Brown had decided not to attend the Olympics' opening ceremony. He did, however, insist that it wasn't a boycott and that he only ever said he was going to attend the closing ceremony. So while apparently acting the principled politician willing to eschew politics and take on the world's fourth largest economy on a point of ethics, he then goes and, um, plays politics and mutters an excuse. Bah!

But what's this? As today rolled on, more and more important people the world over started jumping on the bandwagon and being a bit non-committal, or very carefully saying words to the effect of: "China's brutal and oppressive occupation of Tibet for most of the last 60 years has maybe not been entirely on. Or maybe it has."

According to Reuters, UN kingpin Ban Ki-Moon "might not be able to accept the invitation [to the opening ceremony] because of scheduling issues". Meanwhile, the EU has passed a non-binding (that's non-binding) resolution to make a dialogue between Beijing and Tibet a condition of the attendance of member state heads at the ceremony. Even the normally apolitical-to-the-point-of-being-fucking-mercenary International Olympic Committee (famous for such past glories as the 1936 Berlin Olympics) has conceded the right of competing athletes to exercise free speech. Which probably means they'll disapprove really quite strongly should any of them be found floating face-down in the Huang He this August.

Alright, I'm being cynical again. In all seriousness, what with the recent protests in London having been met with some fairly heavy-handed resistance from both the police and some mysterious Chinese "thugs" (© Sebastian Coe 2008), not to mention the recent 40th anniversary of the Vietnam protests and inevitable comparisons (unfavourable, from some quarters) between it and today's anti-Iraq war movement, it's genuinely encouraging to be presented with some evidence that the stupefied, spoon-fed West is still anything but, and that some elements within can still be counted on to turn a worthy but fairly marginal cause into a matter for worldwide debate. Which is more than I'm doing, sitting here, smoking fags, drinking a cup of tea, listening to The Reggae Show on Radio 2 and metaphorically shaking my fist at the sky from behind a laptop screen. Jesus. What a wanker I am.

Fortunately, not everyone is like me. Some people care and do something about it. Let's give it up for them.

The Non-Serious Post

2008-04-10T19:21:00.006+01:00

When knackered, leathery-skinned old bands get back together for that one last hurrah/attempt to recapture lost youth/top-up of dwindling pension funds, the usual course of action is to either: get with the times daddio and bust out some funky fresh grooves rock tha grime party in a acid stylee boyo; or cobble together a turgid, woolly ballad in an effort to demonstrate that, hey, we've been away, but all this time we've been developing as artists, or grown with our fans, or forgotten how to write memorable songs, or some such bullshit.

ABC, on the other hand, chose to make absolutely no concession whatsoever to anything that's happened since their heyday, and instead turned in a song that sounds like it was - and might well have been - written 25 years ago, seemingly arranged entirely with General MIDI instruments. And it's ace. Listen and learn.

Now Even The Uneducated Can Enjoy Nihilism

2008-04-06T00:20:00.007+01:00

Last Wednesday, The Guardian dropped a bombshell on a scale matching ten Hiroshimas: children are homophobic. I believe that's what's known colloquially as 'stating the bleeding obvious'.

But in so doing, they've inadvertently shone the light on a wider issue. I have to hold my hand up here and admit to slightly over-simplifying the story - actually about a recent Stonewall report which concluded that children are in fact becoming more homophobic. I don't know if there's ever been a point in history in which they haven't been, but it both depresses and fails to surprise me if what the report claims is true.

The Guardian piece (by Polly Curtis) opened with the assertion that "Britain [is] more gay-friendly than ever", which - with all respect to Curtis - carries a whiff of Planet London ivory-towerism. I don't imagine for a second that the trend is confined to the under-19s. It seems to me that homophobia has been gradually regaining respectability for several years.

In 2006, Radio 1 DJ Chris Moyles, chargrilled of soul, caused a minor uproar by using, on air, the epithet 'gay' in its not-as-modern-as-everyone-likes-to-think guise as a general term of disapproval. Radio 1 swiftly rebuffed all calls for it to live up to its remit as a public service broadcaster and exercise a degree of editorial responsibility, choosing instead to make a pathetic cop-out statement about 'gay' being of the argot of the yoot and you wouldn't understand because you old and anyway shut up in them shoes.

It isn't just a 'youth' thing, though. My generation used the word in exactly the same way when we were at school and many of us continue to do so. In fact, at some point during this decade, somewhere a floodgate opened and British society has been enjoying freedoms of self-expression that we felt to be denied us during the dark, oppressive years of political correctness. These freedoms basically extend to feeling safe to make jokes about bumboys again.

What was the watershed moment? If I had the time to investigate it properly right now, I would - and I probably will at some point in the future - but for the time being, all I can offer you is speculation.

There has definitely been a sea-change in popular culture. After years of right-on leftism in the alternative arms of popular entertainment, there was a tangible rejection of such values around the turn of the decade. TV shows like Little Britain and Big Brother, and publications such as Heat and Popbitch joyfully indulged in a new strain of nastiness never before seen in British culture. Perhaps it was a reaction to political correctness, perhaps it was post-modernism, perhaps it was nothing more clever than a case of marauding baboons overpowering the zookeepers. Whatever. Suddenly, for better or worse, the old taboos were once again on the menu.

Still, despite the odd assault on liberal sensibilities mounted by the likes of Little Britain, the mainstream media is, by and large, more tolerant than ever. And this is why people such as Curtis make the mistake of thinking that the actual human beings that populate this country feel the same way.

Of course, even the media has apparently succumbed to a certain peculiarly modern vice: that newly safe branch of racism, Islamophobia. To the extent where now, even once enlightened souls such as Christopher Hitchens are happy to appear on TV and radio spouting the sort of corrosive, blinkered shit about Muslims more befitting the medium of BNP leaflets. Meanwhile, the BBC is having its own crack at BNP-style pamphleteering with programmes perpetuating the image of immigrants as a vicious, many-headed monster intent on destroying the lives of working-class Britons.

Let's not be complacent, eh? London's liberal elite may think it's safe now to congratulate itself on a job well done, but those of us living in reality are in a position to see different. We're going the wrong way. Sort it out, you cunts.

It's The Parky! Scarper!

2008-04-05T02:08:00.004+01:00

Robert Mugabe: things might not be looking so good for the poor mite these days, but you'd think, even with what little power he has left, he'd be able to put his glasses on straight just once. Seriously. I'm looking at loads of pictures of him right now, and they're all over his head in pretty much every one.

Fucking wanker.

Why Are You Making Me Hurt You?

2008-03-30T17:50:00.009+01:00

I already hate myself for what I'm about to write.

I'm only mildly ashamed to say that I've been worshipping at the feet of Jamie Lidell for many years. Since first encountering him as one half of Super_Collider (with fellow genius wonkboffin Cristian Vogel), I moved steadily from impressed to fascinated to obsessed with everything of his that I heard.

For the uninitiated, Lidell has, for the last decade, been a poster boy for uncompromising, unapologetically experimental electronic music - some of it fashioned from little more than treated vocals - while, in between, making hilariously dark, monged R&B with the much-missed Super_Collider. In fact, he's been a poster boy in more than one sense: he's far better-looking than any producer of weirdy-beardy electronic music has any right to be.

Which is partly why, granted, he makes sense as a pop star. He's also an incredibly charismatic performer. And I wouldn't dare to begrudge him any degree of commercial success. He deserves it. I can't think of many white soul singers, past or present, who can touch him.

So, given Lidell's fine set of pipes and obvious love of the music, which manifested itself even on his brutal debut album Muddlin Gear - otherwise a collection of dense, clattering nutterfunk and stark, apocalyptic soundscapes - it was no great surprise when 2005's Multiply turned out to be, for the most part, a relatively faithful trip through the history of soul and R&B, give or take the occasional tricksy edit and The City, which bore closer relation to his earlier output. And it was ace. I still cane it to this day. For someone - signed to Warp, no less - who'd spent his career making music for lonely boys who don't go out, it was a brave move, and certainly a polarising one. But for every pallid, bumfluffed chinstroker who dropped away from his fanbase, a whole raft of much higher-functioning human beings arrived to filled the gap.

All the while, however, Lidell was still doing the live show that brought him to prominence - himself, a microphone and an array of samplers, sequencers, keyboards and effects, crafting headsplitting techno on the fly from beatbox phrases and other vocal ejaculations, with light sprinklings of synth lines and drum machines. Which made for an odd experience as he was touring Multiply, watching, in the presence of advertising executives and grey-haired professors, this techno mentalist produce the sounds of worlds colliding over pounding 4/4 rhythms.

I'd heard from someone close to him that Multiply was a one-off; something he had to get out of his system. It wasn't, but it wouldn't have mattered to me either way. Though initially a little underwhelmed by the news, I certainly wasn't totally disappointed to learn that he'd chosen to come back with another soul album.

I was, however, disappointed to hear its first single, Little Bit Of Feel Good. Its cold, steely gaze is fixed firmly on your coffee table. I guarantee, you will hear it soundtracking an elegant dinner party scene full of impossibly sexy London types in a one-off ITV drama this autumn. Think of the most middle-aged, cack-handed attempt at funk that you've ever heard on primetime Radio 2 and you've got it. It's truly awful. I hear the album isn't much better, and on evidence of this song, I doubt I'll waste any precious time finding that out for myself.

In all my years as a music lover, I've never seen any artist that I've admired so much lose it so completely and so suddenly. Lidell's never put a foot wrong in my eyes, whatever he's tried to do, so you'll understand that I'm extremely confused and hurt at this present time. It's like being dropped by a dear, long-standing friend for a crowd of glamorous spiritual cripples. And it hurts to say as much. I still can't quite bring myself to let go.

You must leave me now. I need to be left alone in my tragic fanboy grief, quietly soaking through with tears the immaculate packaging of Super_Collider's Raw Digits.

Everybody Hates/Loves/Hates Chris

2008-03-20T03:47:00.006Z

If this blog had any readers, no doubt they would be emailing me a lot these days, saying things like, "why's your blog gone all serious and worthy recently, Buzz?" And my reasons would be twofold:

Because the world is heading with tremendous speed straight into the gaping maw of Satan
Because I'm unhappy

It's for these same reasons that I've been moved to register my dissatisfaction with Chris Evans' current incarnation as Radio 2's drivetime presenter.

He came to his current job - what? - two years ago? I'd look that up, but I'm already wasting enough energy by writing this nonsense in the first place. Initially, his appointment was greeted with widespread cynicism.

I'm sure you hardly need reminding that Evans was both deeply unpopular and seemingly unemployable at the time, having spent years struggling to get arrested after apparently devoting much of the middle part of his career to becoming a living, breathing embodiment of the word 'hubris'.

The wont of success is to go to the head. A few manage to put fame into perspective and rise above it. Yet more seem to forget they're of precisely the same species as the rest of the human race. Evans, for a while back then, actually seemed to think he was a god. A hideous, drunken bully, he got his kicks by humiliating his staff and crew, his own audiences and his succession of partners who looked like his ex Kim Wilde. At the end of his reign of terror, with his world already crashing down around his ears, Evans was sacked by Virgin Radio for his constant skiving. And from that point - barring a few production roles on a series of abortive TV projects - little was seen or heard of him until the BBC, with what seemed to resemble the folly of a lonely ex-lover blinded by nostalgia and low self-esteem, offered him his current Radio 2 slot.

As reasonable as our suspicions may have been, however, Evans confounded them. You would never have expected humility from him, and yet humility is exactly what he demonstrated. He seemed almost human, perhaps even likable. Had he really digested the lessons of the earlier half of the decade? Who would've dared to dream that? Audiences grew, awards followed. Evans was, once again, at the top of his particular tree.

But in recent months, his old tendencies seem to have begun to creep back in: the arrogance; the bullying of those unfortunate enough to share airtime with him; the belief that TROTTING OUT EMPTY COURTESIES AT THE TOP OF HIS VOICE might somehow pass for sincerity. And the flaws of humankind are laid bare. For what worth the lessons of failure when the corrupting influence of success never wanes? A Labour government drunk on power and money. The Land of the Free seeking to enslave others. Fascism once again on the rise in Europe. Chris Evans is just the tip of the iceberg.

We're all fucked.

The Same Ingredient That Dentists Use

2008-03-11T21:50:00.008Z

It's the comeback that everyone's talking about now that Take That and the Spice Girls have already done theirs. Yes, the pop world is all a-cream over the return of Boyzone, the boy band whose album sales spiked around Mother's Day. Ronan Keating's failure to establish himself as a credible, bankable or even halfway tolerable solo artist may have brought crushing humiliation upon him, but for the rest of us it's ultimately proved to be a boon.

Or has it? Because while we're all surely heartened by the prospect of hearing their cynical, barely human, sub-MOR balladeering on the radio again, their comeback has robbed the world of something far, far greater.

To accommodate his new commitments, the group's lynchpin Mikey Graham has been forced to put on the back-burner a project over which he has laboured for these past eight years - a series of exciting forays into musique concrète.

I was lucky enough to bump into him at an Autechre gig a couple of years ago. We hit it off straight away, especially after Graham revealed himself to be a keen musicologist. He told me that he was never happy in Boyzone. He'd enjoyed some aspects of his former career, such as earning "fuckloads of money", and the "endless teenage pussy", but he was unfulfilled. While the rest of Boyzone were playing Ghost Castle in the tourbus lounge, Graham would be holed up in his bunk, recording strange cutlery soundscapes onto his pocket-sized digital multitrack.

Not long after our meeting, he dropped by my place with a bag full of minidiscs which contained the rough mix of his first album, Cavlx In 6ngh Begkk. At 27 tracks and just over 24 hours in length, it isn't easy going, but it rewards repeated listens. My favourite is Rvd Ablanktfrüt: 53 minutes of a beer bottle being dragged to and fro on the ribs of a household radiator, heavily processed with various buffer effects and bursts of reverb. At 32'06" you can hear Graham's mum bringing him a cup of tea and an Eccles cake. I'd like an Eccles cake.

It is, however, on the album's penultimate track, ", that Graham really pushes the boundaries, challenging the listener's very idea of music and finally distancing its creator from his work with Boyzone (for all its experimentation, the rest of the album is still heavy with five-part vocal harmonies). It may even challenge the listener on a moral level, as the piece involves Graham very slowly crushing twelve mice to death, one by one, in his hand, before sobbing like a broken man for 42 harrowing minutes as a two-second loop of Take That's Back For Good (the bit where Gary Barlow sings, "got a fist of pure emotion") plays throughout, buried deep in the mix. As both a vegetarian and a human being, I must confess to having some difficulty with the piece initially, but it really is astonishing. The final track is a relatively straight cover of Mr Mister's Broken Wings on guitar and voice.

I wish you, too, could hear the album. But with the resurrection of Boyzone, it will likely be several years before Graham's explorations into the musicsphere's outer reaches finally see the light of day, if indeed they ever do. Thanks a bunch, Ronan. I'll be taking all of your CDs to Help The Aged first thing Saturday.

Good Old Yellow Pages

2008-02-26T22:22:00.011Z

"Today marks a biofuel breakthrough for the whole airline industry. Virgin Atlantic, and its partners, are proving that you can find an alternative to traditional jet fuel and fly a plane on new technology, such as sustainable biofuel." Those were the words of Richard Branson on Sunday morning, before the world watched with baited breath as the airline flew a Boeing 747 from Heathrow to Amsterdam, fuelled on coconut and babassu palm oil.

To be honest, this revolutionary new biofuel was only used in one of the jet's four tanks. And 80% of the fuel in that tank was good, old-fashioned, rootin' tootin' pollutin' jet fuel. So only 5% of the total fuel consumed was 'sustainable'. And it took 150,000 coconuts to produce that. But, still... biofuel! Waaayyyyyy!

We're saved!

A Boot Stamping On A Human Face

2008-02-12T20:46:00.007Z

Is David Miliband out of his fucking mind? "The means need to combine both soft and hard power." The means to what end? Why, "the goal of spreading democracy," of course.

I'm a little bit concerned about the pronouncements made in Oxford by our foreign secretary today. "Soft and hard power," for Christ's sake? But more of that later. I'm also disturbed that, at a time when the world - and even much of America - has woken, or is waking up to the fact that the neo-con agenda is one born, quite simply, of PURE EVIL, Miliband should have the presence of mind to stand up in front of an audience and express not merely sympathy, not merely admiration for that band of soulless, glassy-eyed bastards, but also... well, let me quote:

"[In the 1990s] the neo-conservative movement seemed more certain about spreading democracy around the world. The left seemed conflicted between the desirability of the goal and its qualms about the use of military means."

Did I read that correctly? Did Miliband - New 'Labour''s David Miliband - really publicly denounce the ideologies of the left in favour of the cold, imperialistic ambitions of the new right? Does the word 'imperialistic' seem a little hysterical to you? I don't think so. When you talk of travelling the world, using politics and - where politics fail - military might to impose your own way of life on other peoples, forcing not only change to regimes, but cultures and ways of life, imperialism is what you're proposing. You don't roll up in, say, Zimbabwe with a diplomat in a tank and go, "I say, have you considered democracy?" and watch the whole place turn overnight into a model of lovely Western cricketness.

Miliband claimed to "understand the doubts about Iraq and Afghanistan, and the deep concerns at the mistakes made." I don't think he does. If he did, he would understand that doing the same thing again would simply yield the same results. Remove one despot from power and all you do is clear the way for countless other factions of bully boys to try and wrest control by any means necessary. The very same thing was still happening in Europe until relatively recently. Our great, 'old' democracies took hundreds of years to evolve.

Ah, but Miliband has second-guessed me and and anyone else who'd make the same arguments. He accuses us of retreating "into a world of realpolitik". This coming from the neo-con sympathiser. Say no more.

And there is new danger afoot. Now democracy need no longer fear only terrorism, for China has recently presented a new, viable alternative. Shock! Something other than democracy works? Well, yes, if by 'works', you mean 'generates a shitload of cash', and generating a shitload of cash is to be taken as the yardstick for a successful political regime.

Never mind the talk of morality and realpolitik and the dangers of isolationism. These are pretty words to justify what is essentially the imposition of one way of life on others, through words or violence, whichever does the business. This, Miliband proposes, is "the best long-term defence against global terrorism and conflict." I can't read that as anything less than a suggestion that we simply wipe from the face of the earth all those who would have otherwise.

The need for "soft and hard power." Not letting "the debate about the how of foreign policy obscure the clarity about the what." Should we accept a British politician using this kind of language?

It's Got All Sick On It

2008-02-11T20:53:00.004Z

Since last Friday, a few people have come out in defence of Rowan Williams, and I have to say that heartens me. What exactly did he do wrong? Is debate unwelcome in this country now? Is it to be considered un-British to suggest things? Have the years of endless attacks that haven't happened, at the hands of screaming, mad-eyed terrorists who hate our freedom and way of life, rendered our lovely democracy so fragile that it can no longer withstand any kind of comment beyond some lobotomised celebration of the status quo?

I read an edited extract of Williams' original speech in The Guardian on Friday, and maybe I got distracted, but I missed the bit where he said anything more inflammatory than, "perhaps we can maybe consider incorporating certain aspects of Sharia law into certain aspects of British law (namely civil law, the law that doesn't really matter)". I think that's because he never did say anything more inflammatory than that. But still, predictable as death, out come the ranting, knee-jerk maniacs from both right and left, frothing at the mouth, beating their chests and condemning Williams to death by drowning in shit for demanding that stoning and the lopping off of extremities be introduced to the British penal system.

Slightly more rationally, but still incorrectly, Trevor Phillips, the head of the equality commission (and a man for whom I usually have a lot of time), suggested that Williams' vision of multiculturalism is "not modern multiculturalism, it's old-style, divisive multiculturalism"; that Williams' comments gave "succour to extremists who basically want to say, 'Muslims, they're different.'" Now, I'm all for different cultures uniting by a common thread and shared values, but isn't Phillips suggesting something more along the lines of homogenisation than multiculturalism? Of course multiculturalism is going to be uncomfortable from time to time. So is free speech. Should we reject that too in favour of a big list of things we can all say without offending anybody at all?

The most common complaint on Friday, however, concerned the implication that there be a two-tier legal system. To that end, a Downing Street spokesman chipped in with: "the prime minister believes British law should apply in this country, based on British values."

Gordon Brown has, from the start, been very vague about these "British values". What are they? What does he mean? I can't help but think that something quite sinister exists at their root, and Brown's apparent refusal to elaborate on what he thinks constitutes 'Britishness' doesn't do anything to allay my distrust. "Hello, Johnny Foreigner! Come in, sit down, shut up... here, put this bowler hat on." Are we being eased into a new regime of soft nationalism?

Phillips did in fact hit the nail on the head by bringing up multiculturalism. Because the only 'crime' that I can see has been committed here is the resurrection of an unfashionable idea (and call me a naive idealist, but I fail to see why the idea that disparate peoples can live together in something approaching harmony should become so unfashionable). Like it or not, this culture that we have in our country, this freedom that we're so desperately scrabbling around to defend, the very notion of democracy is based on mature, intelligent, and above all, free discourse; its evolution depends on the occasional suggestion that things could be different. Williams did nothing worse than that. He hardly called for all-out revolution. And frankly, after the way he handled (or failed to handle) the recent furore in the church about the ordainment of gay ministers, I'm quite happy to see him stick his neck out. I also think it's quite a good idea. So stick that in your pipe and smoke it.