Where’s Lenny McLean When You Need Him?

This post has been inspired by an article on the BBC News web site this week about a mother who, having arranged a birthday party for her young son, is now threatening legal action against another parent for his son’s failure to attend said party (and failure to advise he was otherwise engaged), thus leaving her out of pocket.

*****

I don’t want to worry my old school chums but… actually, in reality, I really do. I want to put the frighteners on all of you. I want to get Ronnie and Reggie Kray on yo’ ass. Two Smoking Barrels and all that shit.

‘Cos it turns out you all owe me money. Loads of it.

Yeah. You heard me. You’re all into me for… ooh, taking inflation into consideration, at least £300 each.

And don’t all sit there with that nonplussed innocent look on your faces. You all know exactly what for.

All those birthday parties I had.

That you never came to.

Oh, you’re all crying and bewailing those RSVPs now, aren’t you? I don’t care if your gran / pet had died or your folks were taking you on holiday to Cornwall or you were double booked or even – cheap shot – it was your own birthday.

The point is, I had a birthday party and you didn’t come. So basically my family had catered for you, exerted a financial outlay – balloon animal, crisps, chocolate, Vimto and party bag – and you never showed up. We spent that money – money which we could ill afford, I might add – and you basically came round and threw it straight down the drain by not actually coming round and eating the food and popping the balloon animal we’d set aside for you. If we’d known you weren’t coming we wouldn’t have booked the clown and the money could have been spent on another present for me.

Yeah. That’s right. You denied me a present at my own birthday party. Two in fact. The one you didn’t bring me (because you didn’t come) and the one I could have had bought for me if we hadn’t wasted all that money instead hiring Kiddy Fiddler The Clown purely for your ungrateful and unexercised entertainment.

What a horrible bunch of friends you are. Utterly dispicable. It’s only because I’m a decent friend that I’m not suing you for emotional cruelty.

And you wonder why I’ve never stayed in contact over the years or indeed can hardly recall any of your names?

Well, stick your apologies.

Just pay up. The invoice is in the post.

Birthday card optional.

In The Firing Line

As a rule I don’t do reality TV shows.

As a rule I don’t – if I have any choice about it – do reality though being a hyper-cautious moral wuss my flights of escapism are normally fuelled by books and cinema rather than Charlie or H. My highs might only be literary or cinematic but at least they don’t involve kidney failure or brain damage. That said I have got the Withnail & I boxed set on order and there’s always the possibility of playing the traditional 'Withnail & I drinking game' whilst watching it.

The only reality show I do do is The Apprentice. And paradoxically it probably appeals so much because it is so not real.

The premise is real. The tasks are real(ish). The prize is real (though I imagine it to be something of a poisoned chalice).

The applicants are not. They are without fail the biggest bunch of fakers and self-deluded charlatans ever to dissemble across the face of the earth. And they get more fake each year.

Overblown. Pompous. Constantly self-centredly orgasming over their own self-directed, egocentric hyperbole. Totally blind to the way they willingly sacrifice what little shred of dignity they may possess on the televised altar of their own mistaken self-belief that they are “the one”. I utterly loathe them.

But I utterly love loathing them.

And that’s why I watch.

In a real sense The Apprentice is educational. This is how you do not do business. This is how you do not succeed. The dinosaurs and the outmoded concepts that still abound in this grubby little mercantile world are both amazing and appalling. In the first week the leader of the girl’s team urged her female associates to wear heels and a short skirt as it would help them all sell more product. A woman. A woman said this to other women. And could not understand why they objected. I would have loved her to suggest a shorter skirt to Karen Brady. Actually, sod that, I would have loved her to suggest it to Nick Hewer.

Nick is great. His expression couldn't look more sour if he was sucking a Haribo’s Tangfastic that had been soaked in vinegar from Craig Revel Horwood’s left armpit.

Ultimately though the true draw of the show is Sir Alan Sugar. I won’t pretend to like him. But compared to the applicants he’s the lesser of two evils. My enemy’s enemy is my friend, etc. And Sir Alan is certainly no friend to the contestants.

They’ve introduced a new schtick into this current series. Nearly twice the number of combatants but the potential for multiple firings in each show. It sounds like something out of a hard-core porn movie - e.g. last week Sir Alan dispatched 2 twats in one go. One before he'd even made it to the final boardroom stand-off. It’s beautiful; seeing all these plastically confident god-complexes crumble with the sudden realization that Sir Alan could finger them all out of the running at any possible moment.

And it’s good for them too. It humanises them. It strips away their self-erected façade of impervious eternally-ensured victory. Seeing them tramp away dejectedly with their Gucci luggage trolleys we finally get to see the disappointed (and disappointing) little children at heart that, without fail, they all secretly are.

But Sir Alan doesn’t go far enough. I want to see them tortured mercilessly with a constant weight of stress... I want to see them weeping snottily beneath a tonne-heavy sword of Damoclesiastic anxiety suspended by the merest spider’s web of Sir Alan's diminutive mercy... Psychologically waterboarded with the spectre of Sir Alan suddenly appearing at any given moment to kick them off the show with his career-ending fingerpoint of shame. When the telephone rings at the delegate's house at the start of the show to tell them where the next task is to take place I want Sir Alan to suddenly come onto the line and randomly fire whatever pole-greaser has got to the phone first to answer it. When they’re in the middle of Camden Town selling moody spuds from an Amstrad owned market stall I want Sir Alan to appear in the queue in a cloth cap and a Frank Spencer overcoat to hurl their Maris Piper’s back into their faces and tell them they’ve had their chips and the taxi is waiting in the gutter to take them back home to Crapchester. And most delicious of all, I want the boardroom showdown survivors to stagger back to the house at the end of the show, full of anecdotal PTSD and the lone survivor’s raconteur spirit only to have Sir Alan leap out of the wardrobe before they can get their hands on a conciliatory glass of Prosecco and say, ”Ha! Fooled you, worm! You have no right to your smarmy sense of relief! Get out – you’re fired! Fired just because I can do it and the all-sucking vacuum at the heart of my demonic and blackened soul is bigger and far mightier than yours!”

Boom. The ghost in the machine morphs into Frankenstein’s monster. Or a smaller, hairier, coconut headed Godzilla.

Now that, my friends, would be a show.

And true reality.

Because as we all know, that is how real life works.

It tests whether you’ve got balls. And then it kicks you in them.

Welcome to my world.

Now get out. You’re fired.

Ban The Berk

I knew something was wrong the minute I got home.

My letterbox was grimacing. Like it had a horrible taste in its mouth.

Behind the door, laid out on the mat like cat vomit, was the item pictured below.

I felt sickened and shaky. I felt besmirched. Like my home had been violated. I had been on the receiving end of a BNP leafleting campaign. One of their hate-monkeys had actually walked up my path and touched my door. And then had slid something bilious and nasty into my inner sanctum.

My first reaction was to screw it up and bin it without looking at it. But then I thought, “No. Know your enemy.” So I read the leaflet. Every word. And my gut ran through a gamut of emotions. Everything from contempt, scorn and vituperative ridicule to the confirmed belief that these people are genuinely missing a chromosome; that the wiring in their brain is missing a couple of essential connectors, forever denying them the opportunity to reason and feel like normal, adult, articulate human beings.

What I hate most is the way this leaflet doesn’t pose any questions to the reader. It tells. It orders. It assumes. There is no facility here to interact mentally with this leaflet. It doesn’t care what you think. It doesn’t care what you feel. It doesn’t care for your life or the precious individuality of your particular existence. And that is nasty. That should be of concern to everyone who has any truck with this absurd political party.

And then there are the pictures, the images. The lazy buy-in to outdated, outmoded metaphors that only have meaning to idiots whose view of Britain is trapped in some fake, bromide stained stasis chamber of pre-war empire-fed glory full of working men wearing cloth caps, wives who stay at home to cook Beef Wellingtons and children who play solely with gender appropriate toys. And we all extol the Christian virtues of love thy neighbour as long as your neighbour is as British as you are. And don't worry of you have no idea of how to benchmark those Great British credentials because the BNP will do it for you.

Check out the picture of the Burka wearers:

They want to ban the burka because it is “offensive and threatening”. And to drive that singularly stupid and vapid point home they have pictured a couple of Burka wearers flicking their V’s at the camera – thus, in my opinion, totally proving their true blue British credentials forever. But that irony is lost on your average BNP member (and let’s be honest; they are all average). Is the picture mocked up? Is it real? Who cares. It’s like something out of Viz magazine. It is comic and laughable. But it is also tragic and lamentable because there will be some BNP mongrel somewhere, working himself up into an orgasmic fury of outraged indignation over this picture. It is akin to the fake Boer war footage that was played to English citizens centuries ago – shot in a London park but purporting to show Boer atrocities to galvanize the zeal of the average Englishman and give him fuel for the fight. It is nasty propaganda designed to spread hatred and xenophobia. And if that hatred and xenophobia already exist then it is designed to inflate it up into atomic mushroom cloud proportions.

And at the end of the day, is the Burka really, truly threatening and offensive?

Only if you are such a pussy you are scared of women’s clothing. It is no more threatening and offensive than a dog collar or a monk’s cassock and a good deal less threatening and offensive than a BNP rosette.

This entire leaflet does not seek to enlighten or educate. It does not seek to question. Because that would be dangerous and self-defeating. The BNP relies on the stupid misconceptions and inborn bigotry of its incestuous membership to continue its existence. The BNP more than any other party wants to halt upward mobility and free thinking and trap this country forever under a glass jar of anachronism and vile paranoia. This leaflet has but one purpose. To reaffirm the idiocy of those who are already tainted with stupidity and make them feel that they are right. Seductive. Comforting. And, sadly to some, a vote winner – those people whose innate cowardice prevent them from questioning and second-guessing their own assumptions and hatred of people who, if they got to know them despite their different languages and cultures, would be discovered to be just like them. More or less. Just without the silly haircuts. Possibly.

In all honesty, I would rather have had a urine stained tramp shove his cock through my letterbox than this leaflet. In fact, to piss Mr. Nick Griffin off even more I’d go as far as to say I would rather welcome a whole army of Polish / Arabic / Asian immigrants, each of them taking it in turns to make love to my door than to ever have one of these puerile leaflets land in my hallway ever again.

Ban the Burka?

No. Let’s keep Britain for the intelligent and the liberal and the fair minded and those with the guts and humanity to question and oppose hate-filled manifestoes and find a way forward that unites all cultures and all races.

Let’s ban the berk.

Privet

I’ve had to take the unprecedented step of leaving the Kate Bush Fan Club Facebook page.

Actually, it’s not unprecedented at all. I’ve left loads of pages on Facebook. When it comes to nixing FB related things I’m like Charles Bronson at the start of Once Upon A Time In The West. Sweaty, bristly, breath like Chicken Fajitas but with a lightning fast trigger finger.

And the Kate Bush Fan Club page, well, they brought too many horses (true Western fans will get that reference).

It was the whinging. The whining. The petty schoolyard arguments:

“I haven’t got a ticket to her live show and it’s so unfair ‘cos I’m her number one fan and all the touts who aren’t fans have got the tickets are selling them for the price of a Heston Blumenthal 3 course meal”.

“I have got tickets and I want to witter on and on about what songs she might sing and what songs I want her to sing and what songs do you think she will sing?”

“I haven’t got tickets and I don’t want to hear about what songs you think she might sing ‘cos I want to die for the entire duration of her shows so that I don’t have to live in a world where I don’t have tickets to see her.”

“Hello I’m new to the group and I want to show you a picture of a Kate Bush 7 inch single I bought from a flea market in Birmingham and ask if it is worth anything and does anybody have any spare tickets to sell, I heard she is going to play some live dates in September…?”

On and on and on.

Now I’m a fan. I’m up there with the most devoted and delusional of any of them. I can trace my Kate Bush pedigree back to the early 80’s – none of this “been a fan since Aerial” malarkey. I have all her records. I have tickets not only to her show but also to the hospitality party beforehand. I’m convinced she is going to personally serve me canapés and share her champagne with me in the toilets. And ask me to help compose the lyrics to her next album. It is meant to be.

But I know how galling it is to not have tickets. For 2 days I was in deep dudgeon because despite having early access to the fan only tickets I still missed out and felt that the general release was merely going to give me a cat in hell’s chance. I can remember the excoriating feeling of “I’m going to miss out on a truly rare event”. I know it came good for me in the end but I still retain the muscle memory of that previous failure. Like Frodo forever feeling the burning loss of his ring. Or something like that.

But joking aside it is not the end of the world or even the start of it. If I hadn’t got tickets I would have felt gutted but I would have moved on. I still have Kate’s music to enjoy and stalking is a perfectly acceptable pastime these days.

But the petty nit-picking and childish sourness of the Facebook group was too much. I know people are just people… but really! I expected more from Kate Bush fans. And I know how stupid and vapid that sounds. As if liking Kate Bush immediately bestows wisdom and first class mental health onto the patron. But it was like being back at school. The old “I’m a bigger fan than you are – no you’re not, I am” kind of thing.

I felt besmirched. I felt like I was a kid again and not in a good way.

Do adults really behave like this without being aware of it?

Plainly they do.

So I did the adult thing. I didn’t castigate everyone in the group for being pathetic; I didn’t lob a sarky grenade into the status box and then run for cover. I just revoked my own membership, left forever and instantly felt calm again.

See, I don’t need the others. I don’t need to be part of a big group or a gang. I don’t need to be part of a happening or “a thing”.

Kate and me, we’ve got our own thing going on. A special relationship.

She’s hired a private policeman just for me.

At least that’s what my lawyer has told me.

The Jackson 5

Amid all the news stories of rain battered Britain and Scottish and English politicians squabbling over the Queen’s head it was nice to come across something so completely ridiculous it could only have happened in France.

It seems that the French courts, that eternal bastion of sanity and commonsense, have decided to award 5 Michael Jackson fans (is this all of them?) a symbolic payment of 1 Euro each to recompense them for the “emotional damage” caused when Michael Jackson’s pet quack, Conrad Murray, caused his master’s death by blowpiping one too many anaesthetic pills down Mr Jackson’s falsetto oesophagus. Apparently a total of 34 Michael Jackson fans (OK, that must surely be all of them?) had actually sued Murray but the Orleans Court ruled that only 5 of them had sufficiently evidenced proven emotional suffering to deserve a pay-out. Presumably the other 29 were considered legally insensate to their own irrelevant sense of grief or were – shock horror – considered to be merely cashing in on the fact that they happened to own an original beaten up copy of Off The Wall.

Apparently the 5 successful claimants had proven their case “with the help of witness statements and medical certificates." Basically their friends and GPs had signed an affidavit to the effect that these people were “deeply sad”.

Their lawyer, Emmanuel Ludot, said: "As far as I know this is the first time in the world that the notion of emotional damage in connection with a pop star has been recognised."

It is clear to me that this is going to set a dangerous precedent - one that I mean to take every advantage of.

Personally I would like to sue Michael Jackson (or rather his estate) for having to watch him leg-snap his way through an utterly cringe-making performance of Earth Song during some UK award ceremony a few years back. The fact I can’t even remember the name of the ceremony is testament to how upset I am about it all. This is what happens when you suffer true emotional trauma. Your mind buries things and tries to forget. But I am haunted by waking dreams of Michael "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" Jackson hugging lots of children whose dress code appears to be “impoverished chic” and only the Messianic appearance of Jarvis Cocker ever brings the nightmare to an end.

I’d also like to sue Michael Jackson for the entire Bad album because, well, it was very very bad but I daresay they’ll use the old “does what it says on the tin” argument against me and, yeah, I’d have to admit I probably should have seen it coming. Caveat emptor and all that.

But I’m now wondering if I could perhaps throw this compensation thing even wider. I mean, why stop at pop stars? I’d like to sue Dave Lee Travis for describing himself as “cuddly not predatory” in his recent Operation Yewtree court case because, regardless of the fact that they’ve cleared his name, I just found that statement bone-squirmingly creepy. It emotionally damaged me for at least half an hour. That’s got to be worth 50 pence of anybody’s money. Not to mention the cost of bringing the whole thing to court.

I’d also like to sue Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer because I have never found them funny and as a consequence I feel inadequate when around those who evidently do. I’d like to sue Hugh Fearnley-Whttingstall for putting me off my dinner whenever he’s on the telly; Louie Spence for making me wish I had immediate access to a firearm and a clear line of sight; Katie Price for making me feel that actually, against all the odds and my every testosterone fuelled instinct, breasts can be too big; Eamonn Holmes for filling me with so much murderous bile I could actually conceive that one day it might be justifiable to commit global genocide if it guaranteed his individual demise and, finally, the guy who works in the newsagents around the corner from where I work who sits with his paunch pushed up so close to the till drawer he has to scoop my change out of his duodenum whenever I buy a Mars bar, I’m telling you it just doesn’t taste the same after pocketing those too-warm coins.

All I need is Emmanuel Ludot’s email address. Unless, of course, he reads this post first and then pre-emptively sues me for the future emotional damage I’m about to cause him.

*sigh*

I’ll just bung a pound into the kitty now, shall I, and have done with it?

Deadwood

100% true: in a recent episode of Jedward's Big Adventure on CBBC the following dialogue took place between the Jedward monkeys:

Jedward 1: "Yo bro, you're goin' down like the sunrise!"

Jedward 2: "Oh yeah? Well the sun ain't even out today 'cos it's too cloudy!"

It's saying something when even my 6 year old son turns to me and proclaims, "Word up, pater, but I swear to God the British Broadcasting Corporation is dumbing down kid's television."

And it got me to thinking that perhaps the Jedward twins are like a viral idiocy genome that is slowly spreading across the UK via HD cable signals, deliberately targeting and infecting our kids and corrupting their synapses so that in a mere generation's time George W Bush will be seen via the readjusted lens of History as a politician of Einsteinian proportions. The Jedwards are a virus. A virus with the big-eyed baby seal look of a stranded three-legged puppy dog and the asexual physiognomy of a Ken Barbie doll. They appear to be so harmless we just don't bother to defend ourselves. They are the perfect storm.

The only effective vaccine is a potentially lethal dose of cynicism. It's either cure society or kill yourself. Compared to the alternative that has to be a win-win.

Preamble over, onto the main thrust of this post. What if the Jedward virus started to manifest itself in other entertainment settings? Movies and the like?

Imagine The Twilight Saga (and I accept I may have lost most of my readership right here) with Bella Swan perpetually mooning over Jedward Cullen and his inability to consummate their relationship. I say "inability" not "refusal" out of some half-assed outdated Christian belief system where having sex out of wedlock leads to eternal damnation (and the production of children whose innocent state is revered in Christianity as a virtue worth emulating). No. The Jedwards can't have sex because (a) they are not sexually mature enough (both physically and mentally) and (b) they can't stay focused long enough to maintain even a half-mast erection.

Jedward 1: "Oh Bella, you make me feel all tingly down below, girlfriend."

Jedward 2: "Me too, boyfriend. She's a hottie, ain't she?"

Jedward 1: "Oh she is boyfriend. But who's gonna go first because if we both do it at the same time it'll be like doing it with ourselves and it'll all be gross and stuff and our mammy said we shouldn't do that again because it'll be like masturbating with ourselves but worse 'cos it'll be like you doing it to me as me and me doing it to you as you and I'll end up with all your warts and hairy palms like joke monster gloves."

Jedward 2: "Ooh I just love joke monster gloves. Let's go get some! We could play a joke on Bella and pretend we're wolves or something and then pounce on her in the forest and really screw with her already questionable emotional state..."

Or what about Jedward Scissorhands: our poor Jedward twins are artificially created in a weird Walt Disney Frankenstein experiment out in the American sticks but their creator dies before he can finish making their hands (and their brains). So our hapless boys fashion hands for themselves out of scissors and knives and other equipment they find lying around in a gentleman's barbershop and become known as Jedward Scissorhands. Unfortunately they are so stupid they can't even get jobs as letter-openers in a Home For Paraplegics and so starve to death because I really don't want to mess with my fragile psyche by thinking up a happy ending for them.

Or finally ('cos I'm already scraping the barrel here) they morph into a weird living dichotomy of Edward Woodward and become Jedward Woodward, The Equalizer. They decided to live a life helping the little people (you and me, as opposed to Leprechauns) and with that in mind put an advert in the local paper: "Odds against you? Need help? Call the Equalizer. 212 555 4200". Only the newspaper they put the advert in is The Bet and they soon find themselves receiving death threats from all the irate gamblers who have lost fortunes based on the boys' sage advice to bet against "the sun rising tomorrow 'cos it's just too damned cloudy."

And breathe.

Bile vented.

Thank you for listening.

Mayday

I haven't got a Kindle Fire HD. Yet.

I've just got a normal one. One that lets me buy, download and read electronic books.

But, I confess, the tech-head gadget-addict in me (that daily I virtually fight to repress) yearns for the ability to watch movies, play games, surf and read electronic books all at the same time. In colour. In High Definition. I mean, who wouldn't? At the end of the day this is how computers are going. A single highly mobile device that takes care of all your conceivable entertainment needs in a slim-line package small enough to be taken absolutely anywhere that you could possibly want to go on the entire planet.

The world is almost at the point where we can all have a captive genie in a bottle for under £300.

Just give it's eager screen a rub and magic things start to happen.

But just like a genie that magic is now going to have a conscience and an opinion and instructional advice and a role that is going to impinge on your world in a manner quite unexpected.

I'm sure you've all heard about the new Mayday button that is one of the new features on the Kindle Fire HD?

If not, the premise is basically this: you need help with your Kindle? You can't be bothered to read the electronic manual? You want your Kindle to do something but you're not sure if it is actually capable of doing it and you're not sure what search term to type into Google?

Just hit the Mayday button. And you will then be able to talk for free - in real time - with a Kindle operator / expert / customer service guru (in apparently less than 9 seconds) who will then converse with you via video chat and tell you what to do to achieve your goal.

Wow.

Am I the only person who is already thinking up ways of how this service could be subverted and abused? I can't be the only malicious joker on the planet, surely?

I'm sure the Mayday service has checks and rules and ways to limit misuse but even so...

You're telling me that they're not going to get regular calls from customers who are just lonely and want someone to talk to? "Er... yeah, hi. My name's Josh and, er... well. Is it OK to talk to you about stuff? I know you're busy but I really like you. I don't really fit in with my friends, you see? They say I'm different. Do you like Goth music?"

Let alone the teenagers and drunk idiots who are going to call the Mayday service from the pub or a phone box and demand to be told the colour of the operators knickers. Or worse. The dweebs that mistake the Kindle service operator (deliberately) for a web chat girl. "Hey baby, do you take Paypal?"

And what about all the psychos out there? The ones who are going to call at 4am in the morning and stare into the Kindle screen for about 10 minutes without speaking a single word while the Kindle operator erroneously tries to instruct them on how to change the microphone and speaker settings on their Kindle before the late night caller finally makes the following threat-laden statement: "I know where you work. I can reach you at any time."

My own personal favourite is going to be the hypochondriacs. The ones who will abandon Dr Google in droves for the chance of talking to a captive live expert who is as unqualified as a GP as they are. "Excuse me, I know this is a bit unorthodox, right, but I live alone and I can't quite angle the mirror properly. Could you take a look for me? I think I have a growth of some kind coming out of my ass. If I hold the Kindle steady could you take a screen shot and then email it back to me? Thanks."

Yeah. I'm definitely going to do that one.

Either that or I'm going to hire a Biggles costumes from the local party shop and pretend to talk into a flight mask as my imaginary airplane ditches into the cold North Atlantic... "Mayday! Mayday! I'm going to have the ditch the old girl into the drink! Bloody hun has shot me up from behind! Mayday! Mayday! Aaargh!".

Honestly. I bet they'll never ever get tired hearing that one. Ever.

So. How long do you think the Mayday service will last before they either close it down completely or start charging a premium rate for it (and then they really will start accepting Paypal)?

Just hit the Mayday button at the top of the page and let me know.

Do Not Lend These People Your Ears

I managed to navigate most of 2013 without once having my existence bent out of true by the verbal crowbar that is Katie Hopkins. Sure I knew who she was, could surmise what it was she was working so hard to be and what she was aiming to become but she was as a gnat on the giant arse that is UK reality TV. And I make it my business to have as little to do with that particular arse as is humanly possible.

And yet, come the end of the year, with every web site, newspaper and chav mag producing a 12 month retrospective, Katie Hopkins is leaping out at me from photos, from sound-bites and no doubt from tomorrow’s fish and chip wrappings too.

Katie Hopkins said this. Katie Hopkins said that. Outrageous Katie Hopkins. Katie Hopkins, how could she? Kate Hopkins rent-a-gob.

The latter moniker – rent-a-gob – I’ve seen in more than one publication. If I were her I’d copyright it right now; she seems the kind of girl who’d be up for making a fast buck.

My initial response was probably akin to that of many people: revulsion, a knee-jerk reaction to dismiss her as just another transient sneery mouthed reprobate. The shrew equivalent of a one hit wonder in the Gallup pop chart. Someone mad enough (and hard hearted enough) to make some money out of being universally disliked and then forgotten about.

But then it hit me that the most revolting thing about this kind of media event isn’t the poor hapless individual at the eye of the storm but the storm makers themselves. The thunder and lightning of the newspapers and TV execs who book her on their shows and shovel the excrement that falls out of her mouth into their column inches. The howling wind of the glossy mag editors who deliberately provoke her with irresistible punch-line issues and un-PC bandwagons that she can’t stop herself from jumping upon. And worst of all the all-pervading insipid rain of the general public that read and watch and Tweet and Poke and Klout about all the immaterial, unimportant nonsense that Katie coughs up just so she can watch us splutter and retch in joyous outrage and thus feel justified in doing it all again and again and again (and then smugly listen to the chink of cold coins falling hollowly into her deep, deep, soulless pockets).

I feel sorry for her.

She plainly craves recognition. Craves “fame”. Wants people to know her name, to know her by sight.

But it’s a bit like accepting the job of village idiot just because you can’t bear to be anonymous.

I daresay she’ll make a killing. I don’t know what the going rate is for appearing on a TV chat show these days but I bet it’s easier money than a real job. There’s already talk of her being on the next series of Big Brother. I’m sure they’ll make it worth her while just as she’ll make it worth their money. And then there’ll be the inevitable fall from grace. Then the carefully planned radio silence. And then the abashed, contrite, redemptive return. The cathartic outpouring of all her issues and how horrible it was to be so universally reviled. There’ll be a book deal on that particular horizon. Maybe even a regular appearance on kid’s telly or a TV magazine show with plenty of conscience.

And of course her opinion will be sought and bought on the next poor rent-a-gob that the media people will have temporarily shoehorned into the limelight by this point. Because there’ll always be another one. It's a fast moving queue. Like the role of Master of the Dark Arts in the Harry Potter books, nobody stays in the job for long; it’s cursed:

“So you want to be the next village idiot? Fantastic! We’re the people who can help you do it and we’ll all make a lot of money out of it into the bargain…”

Lord knows I’m more than happy for the village idiot to be reformed and redeemed but do we have to go through the endless pantomime of salacious baiting and vampiric bloodlust first?

Can’t we quieten the great god rent-a-gob once and for all by just choosing not to listen?

Because at the end of the day, who’s the greater idiot? The idiot who shouts or the idiot who drops everything to listen?

Oi!

Did any of you lot actually hear what I just said…?

;-)

Crank Call Ho Ho Ho

The many vagaries of my job means I am pretty much on call 24/7 365 days a year.

Now this isn't as bad as it sounds as there are a quite a few procedural steps and procedural get-out clauses that for 95% of the time means I am saved from a small-hours walk to my place of work and the onerous task falls to a third party who is paid a hell of a lot more to do this element of the job than I am. I won't go into details for security reasons (i.e. I'd have to kill you all).

So. When the telephone rings late at night I have been systemically programmed to awaken and answer it not matter how tired or how previously unconscious I might have been.

I do not do this, as a rule, with any grace or magnanimity. I do, however, do it being of a conscientious mind and bent.

The telephone rang last night at 12.33am. Given the high winds I feared the worst - a smashed window or a blown open door at my place of employ; a 45 minute round dash out of the warm comfort of my own home and into the freezing cold elements just to close an effing door and silence and reset the alarms.

As it was, it was neither of the above scenarios. Neither was it that even more rare event: a genuine break-in.

No. It was a crank call.

And not even a crank call. A crank text / voice message.

Some joker (and I use than moniker very ironically) had decided to sent a text message to my landline which is then recited to me by a computer.

The message was innocuous but subtly malicious; something along the lines of: "Sorry. My mistake. I did not mean to call you. Boo hoo. Boo hoo. Boo hoo. I hope I did not wake you up. Boo hoo."

The voice messaging service is such that, had I not taken the initial call, the phone would have rung out again and again and again until the message was delivered.

I was not amused. I was awake. Awake and pissed enough to check my phone to see if I recognized the originator's number.

Because the cretin obviously did not realise that along with the message, the computer also logs the telephone number of the twat sending it and gives it out to the recipient.

The number was and is unknown to me, mores the pity.

Now, I have developed 2 theories to describe the night's events.

1) This was someone who was drunk, infantile and comedically challenged and who on a whim decided to waste their immorally earned money on a random text message to a random telephone number that they picked out of a phone book by flopping their infinitesimally small penis onto the yellowing page flapping in front of them. In short, I (literally) drew the short straw but may have inadvertently helped this small pewling, emotionally backward baby of a human being feel momentarily like they were king of the world. Or at least king of the bus shelter that they were trying to unsuccessfully masturbate into.

2) This is some lowlife scum who knows me, has got hold of my landline number, knows I am on call and therefore will be primed to answer the clarion call of the telephone and decided it would be funny to wake me and potentially my wife and children via a prank call that only highlights how pathetically passive-aggressive and emotionally stunted their entire existence is. Oh and they may have a have a very small penis too and / or saggy tits that droop down to their toenails.

Either way I don't really care.

But I do want recompense.

I am reliably informed that if you dial 141 before dialling someone's telephone number the call goes through anonymously. They won't be able to see your caller ID. This, alas, does not work for text messages but no mind. Normal voice calls are good enough.

The person who woke me so rudely last night has the following number: 07817 449153.

Now, I am not inciting anyone to do anything. Not anything at all. But should, you know, you feel like making a random late night telephone call or feel like signing the above telephone number up to services both dubious and ridiculous, well, who am I to stop you?

This person plainly has a marvellously over-developed sense of humour (alongside a curiously under-developed sense of personal data security) and would, I like to imagine, be well-up for some jolly japes of a likeminded manner.

Do go and fill yer boots, good people.

It is, after all, Christmas and the season of goodwill to all men.

Ho ho ho.

Foam

Much as I'm enjoying the current series of Masterchef I nevertheless find myself shaking my head in unpalatable despair at the current trend for flavoursome "foams".

I say current trend but the reality is foams could have been on the menu of high class restaurants for the last 3 years for all I know; I'm not known for patronizing either Le Gavroche or Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons on a regular basis and get funny looks whenever I get sniffy about the size of the bread sticks in Carluccio's. I'm hardly a professional diner.

But Masterchef has brought foams to my attention. Suddenly I have a foam radar and, really, I'm amazed I've got through life so far without ever having one.

I've lost count of how many foams I have now seen on TV.

Foam of quail. Foam of celeriac. Foam of DFS sofa.

Without fail they all resemble cuckoo-spit. Or worse: real proper human spit. A great big gooey lugey that somebody has hawked up onto the plate. For all the customer knows the sous chef has swilled his mouth out with cream of chicken soup, sucked on the cork from a bottle of cheap red wine and then gobbed out the scrapings of his molars all over the dauphinoise potatoes and then charged some poor hapless diner £78 for foam of coq au vin.

The poor diner won't know whether to sip it up with a straw or wipe it down with a napkin. Either way he's as stuffed as Scotch egg. Not so much et tu Brute as et tu veloute.

Is this really the way fine dining is going?

Foams? Essences? Sprays?

Are we going to end up with some hoity-toity overly-superior waiter spraying an aerosol can across our faces and claiming we have just imbibed spray of beluga caviar with a fine jus mist of sea bass and then charging us a four figure sum for the privilege? Couldn't I just save myself a load of money by eating the contents of my bathroom cabinet?

I've got a can of Lynx upstairs... mix that with foam of Bisto and I reckon I've got a meal that would set most people back a few hundred quid. Suddenly Old Spice takes on a different meaning too; I could save a fortune by boycotting Pataks and my curries will be the most fragrant in the street.

Maybe I just ought to let my mouth water more and get onto the gravy train?  After all, I could charge for the steam... I'm sure I could rustle up some foam from somewhere too... something with a very personal touch that'll get your umami taste buds a-tingling.

So anyway, next time you're about town and you see some lowlife spitting onto the pavement, just remember you could be passing up the opportunity for a free meal.

Don't be proud. Hunker down and enjoy.

Heston Blumenthal will be charging £150 for it guaranteed.

Crossing The Thin White Line

I've written frequent posts about Nigella on this blog. Originally because I quite like the cake-making queen of tease and then later because I was quite happy to acknowledge that she was good for my stats. Even now "Nigella Lawson hot" is one of my biggest referral terms and with her name once more in the headlines I'm receiving more hits than usual.

Are these new visitors seeking edification and information? Or just a nice picture of the curvy brunette spilling o-er her cups? I suspect the latter but that's by the by.

I kind of feel I owe Nigella's current predicament some kind of comment even though I'm sure she would rather I kept my nose out of it (no joke intended) as at the end of the day the accusations of cocaine abuse are nothing at all to do with me.

But of course this hasn't stopped the world and his dog offering a multitude of opinions on what are as yet unproven accusations by her embittered and estranged husband. Do you think he might be biased in his attempts to discredit her?

Part of me thinks that this story is not at all in the public interest. What goes on behind the closed doors of a marriage should stay behind those closed doors. But then I daresay Mr Saatchi would like to have used the same argument when the infamous throttling story hit the headlines. Though of course he did this in a public place not in the privacy of his own home. Or should that be "allegedly as well as"? And to be honest, domestic violence should never remain hidden away in the dark where it can be allowed to grow and spread like a virulent fungus.

But being a public figure, of course, makes almost anything at all that happens to a celeb "in the public interest". For me the idea of "public interest" has long taken on a moral dubiety but we'll leave that aside.

I hope the accusations of Nigella's cocaine use are false. I haven't read them, I must admit, or even watched the news. And yet somehow, via social media and gossip, the gist of the story has spread. I find it hard to believe that a ten year cocaine habit could have gone unnoticed and gone uncommented upon for so long. Mr Saatchi claims he has only just found out. What a truly dreadful husband he must be then. (1) Nigella turns to drugs (I surmise) to make life with him more bearable, (2) he's so dreadful he doesn't even notice and then (3) he increases his dreadfulness by bringing it to the attention of the tabloids and throws the kids into the mix at the same time. What a wonderful husband and father he must be. Even if we could waive aside the sundry acts of domestic violence.

Cocaine is a distasteful drug. It makes arseholes out of all who use it and bigger arseholes out of those who are already arseholes. Nigella has never struck me as being an arsehole. Of course, I could be wrong - I don't know her after all - and chasing the white rabbit could validate the myth of Nigella's constant munchie-runs to the fridge for midnight snacks as perpetuated by her many cookery programmes.

But I'm hoping Mr Saatchi just can't tell his icing sugar from his Esnortiar. Despite being married to Nigella for years he doesn't strike me as the kind of man who spends much time in the kitchen but would certainly have seen talcum powder being smudged across a glass topped coffee table from time to time. Any white powder at all is going to produce a big knee-jerk reaction from him.

Personally, next time I would recommend he try Tetramethylenedisulfotetramine.

After all, if Nigella has a rat in her kitchen, what's she gonna do?

My MRI

Before you start sending bouquets of flowers and high class hookers to my hospital bed can I just point out at this point that I am not, in actual fact, having an MRI scan, I am not hospitalized and as far as I am aware I am pretty damned healthy?

That being said I am sure there are a great many of you who would be glad to accompany me to the hospital should an MRI scan ever be called for purely out of curiosity to see what the hell showed up on the results.

Some TV science programme earlier this year (actually, scrub that, it might have been The One Show) pointed out the startling fact that MRI scanners need helium to work. And helium is a very limited resource on this planet. It is incredibly finite and compared to other resources available to us helium is pretty darn rare. Worst of all, once we have liberated helium from the planet's core (or wherever it is hiding), if we don't make careful and painstaking attempts to contain and hold onto it, it tends to float up and up into the upper atmosphere and then free itself from all bonds of gravity and drift off into outer space where it is lost forever.

Forget oil, we are going to run out of helium pretty darn soon.

Now, I was in a greeting card shop the other day and like most card shops, the entrance was festooned with helium filled balloons. Loads of them.

And I couldn't help but feel a sense of chagrin at the foolishness of the human species.

MRI scans are a great technological leap. We finally have a non-invasive method for diagnosing whether invasive surgery is necessary without having to undertake invasive surgery to prove or disprove it. MRI scanners need helium to work. As a planet we don't have much helium in the universal scheme of things. And we are pumping tonnes of the stuff every day into little rubber bags that are then batted about at children's birthday parties or inhaled so that unfunny dads and uncles can perform a brief and unconvincing Chipmunk impression in the vain hope that their peers will see them as being on a par with Jim Carrey.

This is madness, surely? Stupidity, even.

So I did the only sane thing I could do.

I bought all the balloons. And then I moved onto another greetings cards shop and bought all theirs too. I'm going out again today. Quite where I'm going to store them all, I don't know, and the cats are already freaked out by all the bloated Mickey Mouses that are currently bobbing their way around the living room.

All I know is, when you or someone close to you needs an MRI scan in the (hopefully distant) future and the helium has all run out... you will know where to come. Sure, I'll charge you for it. I hate Disney so I'm paying a high price here for your future medical insurance. And, of course, I'll hold back my own personal supply.

And when, one day, I have my own MRI scan and you accompany me to see what is bubbling away inside my head, well, you'll be blown away by the sheer amount of business acumen.

That's if you can't see it already.

Call Me Mr Science

I've toyed with the idea of legally changing my name many times over the years.

E.Z. Rider. Ace. Salami Tsunami. Juswan Cornetto.

All these names and more were considered and discounted as not being quite right. Not quite the real me. But finally I've reached a decision I can live with. A name with very material benefits.

Mr Medical Science.

See, it was Professor Alice Roberts that gave me the idea. It seems that, according to a recent report in The Metro, the glorious Professor Alice has decided to donate her body to medical science because she "hopes donating her corpse will help doctors and students to develop their surgery and dissection skills."

Laudable as that wish is I personally think screw the doctors and students I'm a far more deserving recipient. And the added advantage is that unlike the medical fraternity I really don't require Professor Alice to drop down dead anytime soon. I'd much prefer to have her body on weekend loan while it is still living, breathing and pumping blood around her exquisite arteries. She can have it back for work days and documentary shoots for the BBC and things like that. I'm not unreasonable. We can devise a rota.

My only real concern is what I do with all the brains removed from idiots and psychopaths all over the world which are now suddenly going to arrive on my doorstep...

Because I already have one of those.

Sonic Doom

I don’t, as a rule, like other people’s music.
 
This is a conclusion I have reached through a lifetime of empiric research.
 
“Other people” – certainly in Leamington Spa – invariably have poor taste, play 'up' and 'slow' tempo songs at times that are not appropriate to my mood or are white and like to think that below the surface they are Dr Dre’s main man and spiritual bro.
 
The above facts, on the whole, do not impinge on my life too much or cause me to impinge on others.
 
Except when, as happened yesterday, I was walking down the street minding my own business when the keys in my trouser pocket began to oscillate to some kind of sonic disruption that was fast approaching me from the rear.
 
To my eternal regret it was neither Matt Smith with his Doctor Who screwdriver or Keeley Hawes with a vibrator. It was in fact some teenager’s third-rate pimp mobile from the bowels of which was emanating the kind of low level bass frequency normally associated with fracking operations in Canada.
 
I felt the car’s approach long before I heard the actual music and longer before I heard the tinplate rattle of the engine. I swear the air shimmered in a sort of heat haze halo around the extremities of the vehicle. Like some kind of vibrato field had been created that would pulp anything solid that dared to cross its boundaries. Anyone with gallstones in the immediate vicinity would have found themselves instantly cured.

I cannot for the life of me tell you what musical track the guy was playing. There was nothing but a solid, constant bass rumble. The sound a black hole makes when it incessantly sucks all matter and light around it into its greedy maw. And let me tell you that this guy’s music etiquette certainly sucked like a black hole. He didn’t give a damn about anyone else. He didn’t give a damn about the asphalt powdering beneath the shadow of his passing. He didn’t give a damn about the rivets and bolts that were undoubtedly being shaken loose from the engine of the very vehicle he was enveloped within. He didn’t give a damn that even when he had driven four hundred yards down the road from me, the recycling boxes that the good people of Leamington Spa had left out for the sake of eco-conservation were still audibly vibrating from the residual shockwaves he had left behind.
 
That last is a God's honest actual fact.
 
The whole episode just made me want to sneer out loud. In fact I probably did precisely that but nobody heard me, not with the blood still pouring out of their ears.
 
Why do people do this kind of thing? Why? It is invariably men that do it which leads me to think that testosterone is a contributing factor. Are these tectonic plate shifting mega-rumbles the human male’s equivalent to birdsong and stags flexing their bruising antlers? Are women attracted by the possibility of having their DNA granulated at the quantum level by the bass line of Showaddywaddy’s “Under The Moon Of Love” played at a decibel level that can actually be heard on the moon?
 
Is that what women go for these days? Having their atoms split open by a sonic scalpel?
 
Is this both safe sex and its soundtrack?
 
I don’t know.
 
Once my eardrums had returned to their normal concave state I really wasn’t sure if I was coming or going. I only knew that the earth had moved for me and I was still not at all satisfied.

Soft Boiled

I’ve never watched Britain’s Got Talent – partly because a show like that tends to prove that Britain absolutely doesn’t and mainly because it just seems to be another star vehicle / cash cow for Simon Cowell. So it was with interest that I read that one of the participants had thrown some eggs at the judges live on last Saturday’s show.

To be honest my first reaction at reading that a woman had thrown her eggs at Simon Cowell was to think “blimey, that’s someone really desperate to have a baby but the alimony would be worth the 3 minutes of discomfort” (that’s the conception not the giving birth). And then all glibness aside I actually felt a pang of regret that I’d missed the glorious spectacle of Simon wiping egg smegma from his forehead onto the waistband of his trousers. It seems the young lady in question (I can’t be arsed to publicise her name) wanted to protest at the “dreadful influence” Simon has had on the music industry.

And much as I’d enjoy jumping onto the “let’s give Cowell a drubbing” bandwagon I have to say “hold your horses” at this point. The influence he’s had on the music industry? I daresay he’s had some. Once. Occasionally. But let’s not build his part any bigger than it has to be. He’s not that powerful. He doesn’t hold the entire music industry in the flat of his hairy palm. Anyone who’s at all serious about music views Cowell and his annual Cowell Bots as a bit of an irritating joke, surely? They rarely have any credibility and rarely last longer than the chocolate your Auntie Doreen bought you for Christmas. His influence is truly negligible. It’s just that, such as it is, it is well publicised. That is the result of 2013 celebrity sick Britain not the result of Simon being a god-like impresario.

And to be honest, if Miss Egg wanted to strike back at those who have ruined the music industry she’d have to take out half the population of the UK, i.e. all those daft buggers that bought the ruddy music in the first place and made Cowell’s crapola so popular.

That’s going to take a lot of eggs, believe me.

On the bright side, someone throwing eggs at Cowell sure beats millions of tasteless teenagers throwing their money at him… And I’m sure somewhere there’s a joke to be made about battery farming and Simon’s cheap celebrity production line that churns out so many rotten eggs each year… I just can’t be bothered to make it.

I just ain’t got the talent, see?

Jamie Oliver Child Abuse

In a move guaranteed to ensure his twatdom for evermore, “cheeky chappy” TV “chef” Jamie Oliver has claimed that an unhealthy packed lunch is on a par with child abuse and the providers of the packed lunch – the hapless parents – are the abusers.

I kid you not.

Being a regular internet surfer my sensibilities have long been bludgeoned to insensate dullness by the proclamations of idiots and emotional amoebas the world over but even I, desensitized oaf that I am, found myself reeling in shock at the sheer magnificent idiocy of Jamie’s latest outburst. It is idiocy on an Olympian scale. Stupidity big enough to gag a black hole.

Jamie needs to take the same care over what comes out of his mouth as to what he puts into it – and wants to put into ours.

A packed lunch, no matter how comprised of donuts, lard sandwiches, liquefied sugar and cholesterol shakes, cannot in any way compare with child abuse.

Does Jamie need to attend a corporate training course on what child abuse actually is? You’d think with Operation Yewtree currently decimating the BBC’s summer programming schedule, Jamie would be a bit more clued up. Maybe the BBC could spend some of our license money sending Jamie off to make a programme about child abuse and how learning about it affects him and, of course, he can throw in a few recipes for conciliatory vegetable and nettle smoothies while he’s at it to make the kids feel better about themselves? Except the last thing those kids need is king dickhead Jamie Oliver criticizing them over their choice of comfort food.

Most bad packed lunches are not formulated by parents setting out to wilfully harm their kids or even by parents who take evil, predatory pleasure from stuffing their kid’s Power Rangers lunch box with enough fat to make a McDonald’s burger feel positively anorexic. Most of the time a bad packed lunch occurs due to ignorance, poverty and, let’s not overlook the biggy, the fact that the child in question refuses to eat anything else to the point where the family’s own doctor advises them to just let him / her eat whatever the hell they like just as long as they are eating something and ingesting enough regular calories.

And what about those ordinary families who occasionally slip a treat into their kid’s lunch boxes? The occasional Mars bar or Twix? The infrequent chocolate mousse? Is that child abuse too? Or are we just the equivalent of chat room “lurkers” grooming our kids for worse things to come? Sucking them into an underground world where their dependency on chocolate and sugary drinks will make them easy prey for Machiavellian techniques to make them more biddable in years to come? “Do the hovering and there’s a Milky Way in it for you, son…” Christ. I’ll hand myself over to the Yewtree investigation squad right now, shall I?

Dear Jamie, do you know what one of the most soul destroying aspects of child abuse is?

Guilt. Being made to feel guilty about something that wasn’t your fault and something that you could in no way have any responsibility for. Abusers love guilt. It really does make those in their power more biddable.

Guilt is a nasty, insidious thing when it is not deserved (but nevertheless keenly felt).

Spreading it about and using it as a leverage tool to sell your own branded personal ethos to the country and bolster your flagging celebrity status is abusive in the extreme.

Isn’t it about time you turned yourself in to the cops, Jamie? (I hope one of them fucks you over with a Curly-wurly.)

Never Event

A Never Event, for those of you in the dark about such things, is a quasi-medical term to describe an unfortunate incident whereby a top surgeon accidentally leaves his Rolex inside a patient’s abdomen after performing some kind of life saving operation. It’s kind of similar to the aeronautical term, Near Miss. Except where Near Miss describes something that is actually a miss (as opposed to the more factually correct Near Hit), Never Event describes an unfortunate event that did actually occur. But never should have.

I’m not sure what the official statistics are but it’s something like for every 100,000 operations in the UK, 750 odd people will wake up after the anaesthetic has worn off to find they have been stolen by rogue gangs of Polish scrap metal dealers intent on liberating the MRI scanner that has accidentally been left inside their colon so they can get their hands on the copper wiring.

In percentage terms you have a 4/1000ths of a percent chance of somnambulistically shoplifting a pair of titanium forceps during a UK hospital operation and then paying for it with months of agonizing pain, another operation to remove it and another 4/1000ths of a percent chance that this time all they’ll leave in you is a cheese straw or a rolled up copy of Heat magazine.

Talk about an embarrassing hernia.

Apparently the bigwig experts are quick to point out that statistically this is bloody good and just shows what a bang-up operation (excuse the pun) the NHS really is. I don’t doubt it at all.

But for the unlucky 750 who inexplicably trigger off airport security scanners even when they’ve stripped down to their skimpies it is cause for little consolation.

And, at the end of the day, it is needless stupidity.

I’m sure that with the simple application of real-world logic Never Events can be eradicated completely from the NHS statistic sheets. And I have the answer.

It hit me the other day when I was in the bank and needed to fill out a deposit form. I didn’t have a pen on me but I knew the bank would have a couple lying around for me to use. Lying around but so cunningly contrived that they would be impossible for me to accidentally steal - either deliberately or in a fit of medical absentmindedness.

Because the bloody things are attached to the walls and surfaces with one of those metallic strings that appear to be made of hundreds of linked ball bearings.

This is what the NHS needs. Every piece of surgical equipment from endoscopes to the smallest laser scalpel needs to be attached to a bit of metallic ball bearing string which is in turn anchored to the hospital infrastructure. Hey presto, no hospital would ever misplace an item of beneficial butchery ever again.

And even if a speculum did end up accidentally deposited inside an OAP’s orifice, just attempting to wheel them out of the operating theatre and back to their ward would soon cause the problem to get flagged up pretty sharpish – especially if surgeons are suddenly garrotting themselves on the tautened string that is now stretched across the entire length of the theatre.

There. I declare operation Never Event a complete 100% success.

Sew him up, nurse, and let’s head down to the pub.

Oh bugger. Has anybody seen my watch?

Told You

A little while ago I was extolling the many potential virtues of 3D printing and opining that a few of the applications could be somewhat dubious.

Ne’er-do-wells printing themselves off a Bowie knife or a nuclear warhead for example. I was quite glib in my choice of examples.

Unsurprisingly – because, let’s face it, you don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict this kind of thing – somebody has now printed off a working handgun. And not just printed it off and fired it to prove that it can shoot bullets but has also uploaded the blueprints so that anybody – anybody at all – can print off their own gun. And fire it.

This somebody is from Texas. Which is so fitting it is beyond me to make a joke about it. Candy from babies and all that.

Various anti-gun groups are already up in arms about it (OK, that I will make a joke out of) and have expressed concern about such guns and blueprints falling into the hands of people too mentally imbalanced to safely be allowed to own a firearm (basically anybody who wants to own a firearm).

And I quite agree even as I sigh and shake my head at the ridiculousness of it all. Because although I warned off this type of thing happening I am very aware that a cheap version of one of these 3D printers costs over £5k to buy. I’m pretty sure you can buy a black market Colt .45 / Magnum / Star Trek phaser for less than a quarter of that these days – basically a metallic weapon that isn’t made of plastic and won’t melt in a house fire that you can buy quite cheaply off a bloke in the pub for less than a fortnight at Butlins.

So what’s the problem?

For me it is just the fundamental waste of designing a printable handgun. The world was hardly crying out for yet another handgun, now was it? Not being able to print one off was hardly an inconvenience of global proportions. We need less access to guns not more.

What we need more of are things that could improve health and life conditions for the majority of people on this planet. Printable medical equipment. Printable water purification devices. Printable artificial human limbs. Just three examples off the top of my head. I’m sure there are many, many more.

A plastic handgun that kills living things surely doesn’t appear on any sane person’s wish-list.

Nice try Mr Texas.

But next time try printing off the obituary pages of the local newspaper in Newtown, Connecticut and thinking a little harder.

Google Predictive Death

Predictions are nearly always gloomy. They are rarely about good or happy things. It doesn’t matter whether the source is Nostradamus or your local TV weather presenter the forecast will always contain more grey skies and depressing precipitation than sunny weather and good times. Let’s face it, most predictions are synonymous with the end of the world anyway – and this is only backed up by modern science going one step further and predicting the eventual death of the entire universe according to their current theoretical model.

In short, if anyone can see the future it is always so dark you might as well forget about acquiring a pair of shades and go in for that heavy duty Maglite instead.

So why, with that in mind, do people and corporations persist in their thinking that predictive activity of any sort is a desirable thing?

Because I know to my cost that it isn’t.

Take Google predictive search.

Trying to guess what somebody is searching for is only ever going to be deeply annoying to the person doing the searching. It’s like going into a warehouse full of junk to search for a specific object only to be met by a doorman who holds up every single item contained within and who continually asks “Is it this? Is it this? Is it this?”

No. It effing isn’t. Just shut the eff up and I will tell you what I am searching for!

There are other problems too.

I’m currently 5 books into a 14 book serialised story. The first book was published over 20 years ago and the final instalment was only published last year. I have purposely – possibly insanely – not read the last 6 books. I got to a point and thought, “I’ll wait until they are all published and then start from the very beginning and read through them all, properly indulging myself.”

In an idle moment on Monday – it’s never good to be idle with the Google search box open in front of you; it only ever leads to trouble – I thought I’d type in the names of some of the main characters from the story just to see some fan art, just to see whether other people’s perceptions of what these characters looked like matched my own.

It should have been a harmless activity. I just wanted some pictures. Some casual art work.

Thanks to Google predictive text though, I’d no sooner typed in a particular character’s name when Google very kindly proffered the suggestion “[character’s name] dies in last book”.

I refused to follow the link. I even tried to unsee it. I tried to not remember it. Tried to wipe it out of my mind but I knew that would be an impossible task (see, another negative prediction).

I know how Google works. That suggestion was there because lots of other people have searched for it. And they’ve searched for it because it is a fact. So-and-so dies in the last book.

Great.

So I now know that this character is going to die. For all I’m trying not to let it, the knowledge is hanging over me now as I continue to make my way through book 5. And I know it’ll be there through book 6 and 7 and all the flaming rest.

Thank you, Google. Thanks a lot.

If I type in the word “butler” will you append the words “did it” to the end?

So. If anybody still wants a prediction allow me to provide one:

All predictions, whether by psychic or computer, are always, always going to lead to deep dissatisfaction.

And unlike Nostradamus’ my prediction is going to come true and come true very soon indeed.

I 100% guarantee it.

To DVD or Not DVD

Normally I’d be deriding the shameless consumerism of Christmas.

The special editions, the special offers, the special prices, the special gifts to make loved ones feel special because it is unheard of to do that at any other time of the year...

But this year I am mystified by the sheer bad planning of DVD vendors during the seasonal period.

DVDs make great presents. They make easy presents. But easy in a good way; not lazy. A great movie can be a family treat or just a treat for an individual that they can enjoy again and again. A good movie can be an immersive experience, a flight of escapism. A good movie can uplift and enlighten.

It can also keep the kids occupied and out of your hair for up to 2 hours.

Movies are great.

I had a list of DVDs that I knew would make great presents for people this year.  I’m not going to list them; just take it from me that they were all great, I have superb taste and I would have got you all something wonderful (because, yeah, I was going to send you all presents this Christmas but the vendors have foiled my plans).

I ploughed through my list online, tapping into my usual stockists and suppliers.

About 70% of the DVDs on my list aren’t being released until the New Year. That’s right. A frustratingly whopping 70%.

DVD after DVD crossed off my potential gift list.

DVD after DVD which I am now not going to buy.

To me it seems idiotic. The film industry is being hit by the recession like every other industry. Surely their marketeers must know that Christmas is the prime selling point of the year? The time when their wares fly of the shelves like chestnuts from an open fire proffered by an old bearded man in a stovepipe hat and fingerless mittens?

This is an immense lack of foresight and forward planning. Idiocy on a fathomless scale. It’s like Quality Street not selling their Christmas selection tin until March.

Now I know this is just a small gripe in the bigger scheme of things. Worse things happen at sea. Or even at the BBC. I know this. I’m not getting angina because of it.

I’m just saying, if you’re wondering why you haven’t received a Christmas present from me this year it’s because Debbie Does Derby isn’t being released until mid April.

And that’s it. There's nothing I can do about it. The DVD vendors plainly don’t believe in Father Christmas.

Sorry.

It looks like you’re stuck with Harry Hill’s Festive Burp on the telly.