Fast and loose

With the advent of Ramadan, a notice was put on the work intranet today about ‘joining the sponsored fast’.

I’ve always thought that fasting was, at best, morally repugnant. I can’t see how anyone can think that it’s appropriate to go without food in order to prove their spirituality while there are people starving to death from want. If fasting brings you closer to God, then the Pope should come from Darfur, surely the holiest country in the world?

And sponsoring it? Are you kidding me? Giving people money to stop eating? Actually it’s not a bad idea, they should launch the policy outside the Krispy Kreme stand at the station. Probably be a waste of time though, the sort of fatties that eat there think that ‘fast’ is how they move when threatened with salad.

I don’t think there’s a God, but whenever I’m faced with the prospect of people doing things in his name, I always think it would probably make him cringe with embarrassment. Cathedrals? Lovely. Choirs? Great? But starving yourself? Fasting is just another form of flagellation The only difference is that at the end of it you rush for the fridge not the TCP and bandages and that nobody ever masturbated themselves to the point of delirium while watching videos of people not eating.

Jeremy Kyle in the dock

In sentencing a bloke who head-butted another during the Jeremy Kyle 'show' (one of those confrontational talk shows...well, how to describe? Talk show? Issues show? Loads of people screaming at one another show?) the Judge basically told JK and and everyone associated with the programme that they should be bloody well ashamed of themselves.

Much has been written, some of it by people who have actually watched the television programme, about JK. But while we’re at it…I had the grave misfortune of seeing a few seconds of this programme the other day, as I idly flicked up and down the channels looking for a re-run of ‘friends’ (never takes long). I unexpectedly came across what appeared to be a shaved baboon shoved into a nylon track suit talking about his ‘relationship’. The caption at the bottom read ‘I slam my dick in the fridges left outside my neighbours trailers - and society calls me a prevert’ or something like that.

Certainly, JK and everyone associated with that show deserves to have buckets of shit thrown at them. Buckets of shit that has been set on fire. Buckets of leper shit. Flaming leprous shit - now THAT I’d tune in to see.

JK is hells ringmaster, ordering the acts that closely resemble gargoyles (except that gargoyles serve a purpose) and whipping the audience into a frenzy through the careful use of drugs in the air con.

Wonder what he’d be if he wasn’t in teevee? Bitter, obviously. I think he’d be one of those temporary landlords that move from failing pub to failing pub, one step ahead of the boarded-up windows, an assassin of fun and good humour who is all too aware that his nickname has been ‘c**t’ since nursery school and who every night cries bitter tears of shame at his own sad existence and dependency on gnome porn.

KM and VB

There must soon be a tipping point where Kate McCann will have been on the front page of more newspapers than Princess Diana. At least she has good reason be look grim in all of her photographs, unlike Victoria Beckham who I saw a photograph of smiling and didn’t recognise. For years I thought that VB had bad teeth, now it appears that she’s just miserable. Still, if I had a wardrobe that denied me the occasional therapeutic beer and pork scratching binge, I’d be pretty glum too. Victoria's bitter? Very possibly.

The problem is not ‘Christine’

I’m pretty sure that, automobiles that have been possessed by malicious spirits excepted, cars are not actually evil. It’s just that the drivers of cars are stupid.

On my jaunt from office to railway station, I have to cross a few roads, thankfully with the aid of pedestrian lights. The problem is that some drivers think that it’s okay to sit in slow moving traffic right across the pedestrian crossing bit. I presume some of them have passed their driving test and so know the Highway Code prohibits this. One would also assume that they have a degree of common sense and are able to think ‘a-ha, a coloured strip in the road between traffic lights with a crowd gathered on the pavement, I will stop short of it so that if the lights change, I won’t obstruct anyone’.

Which is why, when the sort of gormless, drooling, self-centred arsewits do stop across the crossing, they must be either so stupid that they shouldn’t be in a car or incredibly self centred. Possibly it’s a result of being exposed to the sort of radio programmes that air at ‘drive time’, or maybe there’s some chemical they put in dashboards that make people stupid.

It probably doesn’t do to get too worked up about this sort of thing, after all, I can skip lithely along between traffic, while they sit there and fume in fumes.

I do occasionally wonder though if they behave like this in all aspects of their life, do they stop with their shopping trolly in the supermarket doorway, or stand in the entrance to a crowded tube platform? I really hope the latter, because if they try that shit in London your average commuter would simply push them under the next available train - and if one wasn’t available simply kick them to death. It also makes you wonder to just what extent the flickering intelligence they exhibit allows them to get any joy out of life - do they know how to cook? Read? Programme the video? Doubtful.

Apron lifting?

Jim Davidson has left/been kicked off 'Hell's Kitchen' because he referred to pooves as 'shirtlifters'. This annoyed a fellow contestent, a shirtlifter who won a big brother contest once. But I bet he wasn't as annoyed as Jim, who found himself sharing a show with the winner of a f**king reality teevee show. Especially a poove.

But I’m shocked to hear that this chap dislikes being referred to as a ‘shirtlifter’. Does he not lift the shirt when going about an act of beastly ghastlyness - what sort of school did he go to? Surely such practices are unsanitary, not to mention costly in terms of wear and tear on the shirt material. I don’t care what the boasts of the washing machine manufacturers might be, you’re not going to remove direct evidence of that sort of thing at 30 degrees.

As for Jim ‘nick-nick’ Davidson - typically I have just learned that he was on the show by learning he was leaving it - meaning that there is now no reason to watch a programme about people struggling to boil water. I’d imagine that Jim would be hysterical in the kitchen - there’s nothing funnier than watching a recovering alcoholic under pressure, one never knows if they are going to reach for the bottle to drain it, or smash it over the head of whoever is annoying them, or both.

So Jim goes and we’re left with the poove - a man who probably thinks coc au van is banditry in a transit and who probably only got onto the programme because the producers thought that his career as a fudge packer meant a background in the confection industry.

Rebellion

Is it good or bad to be a rebel? It depends on what you’re rebelling against, the answer to which, if you’re a juvenile is: ‘what have you got’. People rebel against many things; smoking bans, going bald. They even rebel against getting fat, by wearing the clothes that were merely tight on them a few months ago but now are pushing the proprieties of lycra, the laws of physics and the principals of good taste to the limits.

We’re back in open plan. While in terms of office space it’s like an open prairie (if we’re raising pissed-off office drones, then it’s a bumper crop this year) but which kind of puts me in mind of a battery chicken farm, with everyone aligned just so.

Rebellion should strike at the repressor, not at society in general - the rebel alliance blew up the Death Star, they didn’t bomb bus-stops - and so the simple option of continuing in open plan as if nothing had happened is not really an option - especially if this used to include closing the door to your office and knocking one out. So how to stick it to the man? Well, I’ve liberated my PC from where it used to hang in a wire cage under my desk and placed it on my desktop as a start.

Under the desk, one had to bend over every morning to switch it on. I didn’t like this for three reasons - 1) it’s a bad back waiting to happen, 2) working here you bend over and take it in the ass figuratively, I don’t want to invite a literal interpretation and 3) I’m damned if I’m going to genuflect to a machine every morning, once we start doing what the machines tell us instead of having them do what we want, we’re on the path to making ‘Terminator’ a reality. I mean, who wants to be ruled by Arnie? Apart from Californians?

Who's who?

There’s currently speculation in the media, and nowhere else, that the announcement about Doctor Who being ‘rested’ for 2008 means David Tennant will hand over to a new Doctor in 2009. Complete tosh to fill up column inches, but it at least prompted the following thoughts:

In the short time between the revival of Doctor Who and the announcement of its hiatus, there have been a couple of changes to British cultural life that will make the casting of the next Doctor entertaining; these are the growth of Yooohoootube type internet sites and the ascendance of the televised ‘talent’ show as a) a way to find a leading man, b) a way to raise revenue for charity causes/evil masterminds depending on your channel of choice and c) a method of reducing the sum level of human decency on the planet by crushing the dreams of some Enya wannabe who is so untalented it boarders on being a learning disability and who’s expression on being told that they can’t sing is not unlike that of a bride being unexpectedly pelted with baboon excrement.

The BBC could make a fortune by having the role of the new Doctor as an open call. And of course at the end they could just fix the result. More than that, they could make a small fotune by having a ‘phone vote on the name of the show - ‘Is there a Doctor in the house?’, ‘Paging Doctor Who?’, ‘Who you?’, ‘Are you Who?’ are just four shit examples of how titling shows is best left to creative people rather than, say, me. Hell, I couldn’t even come up with a decent working title for the show, traditionally an anagram of the final show, although calling it ‘ghzxcvzrebshkjsiuhgs’ would mean it scored really high at scrabble and would automatically sell to Polish TV.

Want to be the next Doctor? Then get your audition reel on YouTube now! All across the nation Dads are depriving their toddlers of safety scissors and glue in a frenzy of set construction. Home-made daleks are coming to life in garages and sheds and Christmas lights are being turned into ‘special effects’ through the simple expedient of nailing them to whatever silver foil is left over from the manufacture of the cyber-man for showreel two!

Youtube is full of people who can’t act and who think they can. But that’s okay, because so is Eastenders. It’s the perfect place to house all of the ‘cast me as Doctor who’ videos. You would even be able to categorise them: ‘just a bit of fun’, ‘ironic’, ‘funny but hopeful’, ‘earnest’ and ‘terrifying’ and, knowing just how intense some fans can get about Doctor Who (they make the deranged fan in Enimenenenens ‘Stan’ look positively ambivalent), this is likely to be the most populous and popular category.

As for the identity of the 11th Doctor…please God let it be me! I know I can’t act and I’m not handsome or charismatic but I do have my own sonic screwdriver. Which you’ll see, sharpened to a point and held against the chubby throat of Russel T Davis in a youtube video I like to call ‘cast me you bastard or I’ll open you up like a gay welsh courgette!’

(Not really, I don’t condone violence, homophobia or the use of vegetables)

Back to school with Dr Atkins

The Atkins diet has come to Macnabbs Mansions. It’s like hell for vegetarians in the kitchen at the moment, the fridge bursting with not just meat of many kinds but eggs and cheese as well. Deliveries of the stuff are now made by Lancaster Bomber dropping cows into the back garden.

I, however, am not on the Atkins. Instead I’m showing support by helping out on the consumption of meaty stuff, but either served in a bap or with chips on the side - the Atkins with carbs…essentially the Fatkins diet.

The Atkins is the perfect diet for lazy sods. Eat as much as you like and take no exercise whatsoever. The only sacrifice you have to make is that you can’t have carbohydrates. These apparently exist in far many more foods than you could possibly imagine. Bananas for instance. Bananas are bad for you when you’re on the Atkins. Fruit, bad for you, when on a diet. Something tells me that the small print at the back of the diet books shows that the research was funded by the national associations of master butchers, hog breeders and cow-pokers.

With madness such as this being accepted as a ‘diet’, it’s little wonder that this week it was revealed that a lot of kids have stopped eating school meals now that a healthier diet has been introduced. I’m not intimating that the media is owned by the same vile corporations that own the sort of food outlets that have to give you a toy to convince you to buy food there, but surely the story is not that a few thousand chavs are not now having school dinners but rather that millions of kids are now enjoying a healthier diet.

I mean, genuinely, what sort of thick-as-shit parent is going to let their kid bunk off school meals in order to go down town and get a burger? - because it’s sure as hell not one who’s going to provide a packed lunch, unless that packed lunch is packed by somebody else, such as a spotty youth in a fast-food place. Kids go back to school today and, frankly, after seeing some of the chip-guzzling, lard-arsed, lank-haired, dead-eyed fag-sucking trolls* that squeeze themselves into their full-to-bursting leggings, it’s no bloody wonder that they don’t worry about their kids diet - it looks like the only time they break a sweat is when they are confronted by salad.

Food is a subject close to my heart - increasingly so as my diet lays down the fatty deposits on my arteries, and I’ve been eating long enough to be suspicious of anyone who thinks that a skinny body lies at the bottom of a plate of sausages. The only thing you’re going to make skinny eating sausages is the pig you get the pork from.

* I’m not kidding, they look like they should be spending their time lurking under bridges and subsisting on an all-goat diet