Distilling Life into Moonshine

2007-11-01T16:43:00.000Z

Yes, yes, two months and all I do is post crude Japanese toilet humour. I know- but I've been busy.

Lazy blogger

2007-09-03T13:17:00.000Z

Been a bit slack blogging recently. This is mainly to do with the fact that:

a) Work is busy
b) I've been to two (excellent) weddings, one of which was in Ireland
c) I've got nothing to say

On that final theme all I can post is a story about a woman suckling a monkey.

But hey, isn't that enough?

'Barrister got willy out'

2007-08-14T11:48:00.000Z

Well, if you're going to get your cock out you may as well get hanged for a sheep as for a lamb:

"A DRUNK barrister stunned wedding guests by whipping out his willy, then beating up a man who complained, a court heard yesterday."

Creative output

2007-08-10T14:46:00.001Z

While singularly failing to achieve anything solidly creative this year, I have managed to put the artistic equivalent of a revision timetable together. Therefore:

My next book will be entitled 'The Pointless Farm'. It will be billed by my (no doubt thrilled) publishers as 'The Archers' meets Fyodor Dostoyevsky's 'Crime and Punishment'.

Dostoyevsky above: Beating a horse to death with an iron bar or Pointless Farming?

My next album will be entitled "Mining for Nickel" and will be less of a musical experience and more of a aural technical overview of the difficulty in extracting nickel ore from hazardous deep shaft mines.

My next painting will be called, rather poetically in my opinion, Dr Strontium's Jaw, and will offend the vast majority of people with its crass avoidance of taste and form.

Right, now to get to work. Oh look, Big Brother's on tonight....

Ashes to Ashes

2007-08-07T14:38:00.000Z

Seems Keith Richards did snort his father's ashes after all. However:

"The cocaine bit was rubbish. I said I chopped him up like cocaine, not with", said Keith before confirming in an interview on NME.com that the rest of it was 100% straight up legit.

"I pulled the lid off (my father's urn) and out comes a bit of dad on the dining room table. I'm going, 'I can't use the brush and dustpan for this'.

"What I found out is that ingesting your ancestors is a very respectable way of ... y'know, he went down a treat."

Cained

2007-08-01T10:54:00.000Z

I read with amusement that Michael Caine is releasing an album of chill out music eponymously (well, sort of) entitled 'Cained'. WTF?

"Not a lot of people....er....know...what were we talking about again?"

Reid it and weep

2007-07-30T12:51:00.000Z

As moste peple (reading this anyway) will be aware, Mike Reid has passed on. I love the BBC's final summary of his life:

In the late 1970s, Reid hosted the ITV children's TV quiz show Runaround, remembered for its incomprehensible rules and the incongruity of him as presenter. "

Der Untergang von Sheffield Utd

2007-07-20T11:02:00.000Z

This is very puerile but rather amusing:

Submarine race

2007-07-20T10:58:00.000Z

Not a spectator sport.

All in a spin

2007-07-10T08:05:00.000Z

Listening to Campbell on Radio 4 yesterday morning brought back a whole lot of repressed anger I thought I'd suppressed effectively to deal with later, perhaps in therapy. Most of it was just mildly enraging, and in some areas I found myself agreeing with him. For instance, I think the public's cynicism about politics is engendered by the media although most politicians, like some celebrities, try to bend it to their own agenda and are therefore complicit.

What got my proverbial goat was the talk again of the run up to war in Iraq. This faux indignation Campbell adopts that he could actually have 'sexed up' the evidence in favour of war. The chutzpah! The very idea! That a man such as Campbell or, heaven forefend, Tony Blair would actually do something like that!

Which is, of course, precisely what they did. I think I'm more offended by the fact he takes us all for eejits more than the act of duplicity itself.

Needled

2007-06-22T15:32:00.001Z

I have to applaud Doug on his latest Star Wars salvo. Most impressive. Almost too good. In fact, could this be you Doug?

Animal Baths

2007-06-08T11:41:00.000Z

An oft-posited cause for the First World War was the mental state of the Kaiser. By all accounts he was a vain man with a real inferiority complex, especially with regards to the British. Hence his building of a fleet of Dreadnoughts to rival our navy's own, causing an arms race and adding to the unbearable tension of the pre-war years.

Well, given the fact the Kaiser was as a child forced regularly to endure something called an animal bath who can blame him? The Kaiser had a difficult birth and, as such, suffered nerve damage to his arm. He was forced to immerse aforesaid arm into a freshly slaughtered hare in the medieval belief that it would somehow cure him.

Helpfully, I've drawn a graph to chart the potential effect of animal baths on renowned people as a warning to physicians. As the Kaiser is the only famous person I know to actually undergo the animal bath procedure there is, admittedly, some conjecture in the individuals chosen.

Subjects were selected using guesswork, the Delphic pronouncements of nearby birds and bits of the Evening Standard read out randomly by candlelight in a pentagram until the individual was named, and their souls dedicated to Asmodeus. Mostly the first one, though.

Terrifying dummies

2007-06-07T07:08:00.000Z

Inspired by Antonia's experiments I came across this rather disturbing item.

What gets me is that it has 'As seen on TV' writ large across the packaging. On what programme? Presumably the US equivalent of Dispatches.

iPhone

2007-06-05T14:44:00.001Z

States within a State

2007-06-05T11:11:00.000Z

I read with interest today that the sleepy, vaguely hippy dippy town of Totnes is adopting its own currency.

On that note I'm thinking of declaring my own house an independent state. The fun part is deciding what form of government to adopt. A republic is too boring (everyone's a republic nowadays) and so is a constitutional monarchy (who wants to sit around signing off other people's laws, ffs?). An empire, unfortunately, is too grandiose (I'm talking about a house in York after all). Which is a shame, as being an emperor would be cool.

So, I'm left with some kind of grand duchy (which has a pleasant sound to it) or maybe a militant theocracy (which would probably and amusingly annoy the Anglicans. They're quite the thing in York y'know. But despite this, I'm not really fired up with any kind of maniacal religious zeal as, perhaps, the infrequency of my blog postings might indicate).

I've also considered some form of ancien regime absolutist monarchy but I think the survival chances of my new state-within-a-state hinge on a cordial relationship with my erstwhile ruler, Queen Elizabeth II, and I figure her government may not be as tolerant of an absolutist king living in one of her archbishoprics than a less controversial ruler, like a margrave or something.

So, lacking marches to be a grave over, I have decided on Landgrave of South Bank. Now to convince the wife to live under my benign munificence. Maybe I'll do the washing up first (that often helps with things like this).

Navman

2007-05-25T09:26:00.000Z

I have a Navman. It's an ingenious invention for the directionally challenged (i.e. me) as it helps me find where I'm going to. Or it least it should.

Travelling to Warwick from York yesterday I noticed that, rather than driving along the road as my primary senses were telling me I was, according to the Navman console, drifting eerily across fields and rivers, lakes and woodland near to, but not on, my supposed route. A strangely liberating but wholly inaccurate reflection of the true sequence of events unfurling on the M1. Puzzled, I let the matter pass once it seemed to right itself.

I was trying to get to IBM which is, allegedly, on Warwick’s Birmingham Road. Except Navman questions the existence of a Birmingham Road in Warwick. It doesn't even accept there could be one (the German word 'Unbestimmtheit' or 'Uncertainty' in quantum physics terms would have been reasonable and I would have reluctantly nodded in compromise). But no. Point blank, categorical refusal. I eventually ended up in an industrial estate nearby and found my way to my true destination by good old fashioned aimless driving.

And then on my return journey human error came into play. I was exorcising troubling memories of the morning’s Navman weirdness by listening to the radio turned up very high and I couldn't hear the lilting, ethereal commands emanating from my computerised navigator. So I missed a turning. Ok- my fault. But that soon set Schrödinger’s Cat amongst the pigeons. I had, according to Navman, ceased to be. I was an ex-car. My Citroen was drifting, like so many dark matter particles, amongst the vastness of space. Well, I wasn't on an M40 tributary at any rate, or anywhere else according to Navman’s understanding of the UK road network.

I solved this existential crisis through the expedience of turning the thing off and on again, which saw me abruptly de-cloak, apparently driving towards some form of sports complex near Leamington Spa. Soon, my newly conscious Navman was able to calculate my route again pretending coyly the whole incident had never happened.

This brush with the space-time continuum has not destroyed my faith in my Navman. Without it I would never have even got there at all and would be still driving forlornly around Coventry, screaming my frustration hoarsely though several days of beard growth, given up for lost by kith and kin. Rather, this Damascene experience has highlighted that one should never entirely place one's metaphorical John Thomas in the hands of a gadget as it could be periodically and utterly deranged.

Rabid Monkeys

2007-05-23T13:58:00.000Z

If Death has a monkey suit then who has his robe?

Joy Division

2007-05-18T13:24:00.000Z

The launch of a new film about the Ian Curtis, Control, reminded me how much I like the Joy Divison. YouTube, inevitably, delivers. What a sound. What brilliant dancing:

Star Wars round up

2007-05-17T14:42:00.000Z

Lots going on in the world of Star Wars. Thanks again to the Sith Guards of my blog content, Andy and Doug. You're welcome to an afternoon of Sarlacc feeding aboard my pleasure skiff anytime.

This I found highly amusing. Star Wars Toys that were never made:

Granny grows horn

2007-05-17T10:32:00.000Z

All a bit weird, really.

Rugby Silence

2007-05-14T14:48:00.000Z

Whilst enjoying the rugby World Cup and Six Nations, I only take an interest in day to day domestic/European games when Andy's team Gloucester crashes and burns. After singing Te Deums to their progress up until this weekend, there is now a crashing silence resounding on offmessage.

Don't worry, you can twist the knife if Forest or Shrewsbury (or both) don't make it in the playoffs, Andy.

Taiwan legislature- get ready to rumble!

2007-05-08T16:31:00.000Z

Taiwan is an unusual place. It's a small island off mainland China and is actually called the Republic of China. It's where U.S.-backed Nationalist Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek fled after being defeated by the Communists on the mainland. So U.S. backed, in fact, that it even occupied the Chinese seat on the U.N. Security Council until 1971(!) when the Communists got it, courtesy of Nixon.

One thing the Taiwanese do really very well is have massive kick off brawls in their parliament. In fact, there was another one just the other day. Why not sit back and watch a compendium of the very best fights Taiwan's MPs have to offer:

News just in- married goat dies

2007-05-03T16:02:00.000Z

Earlier, we talked about man/goat love and the joy and misery it can bring. A seemingly happy story was relayed of a caprine marriage in the appropriately named Horn of Africa. News has reached The Still that the goat has died.

This tragic demise was caused by it "choking on a plastic bag she swallowed as she was eating scraps on the streets of Juba."

This, surely, is riddled with euphemisms?

Whilst we're talking about human/animal love...

2007-05-03T15:45:00.000Z

...a man being pursued by an amorous mule:

Music and blasters and old Jedi masters

2007-05-03T13:58:00.000Z

Many thanks to Doug and Andy for these. Firstly, wookie suits for kids (would that make them Ewoks?) . Then an R2D2 projector- sweet. Time to try and get that ordered for the boardroom.