Missing In Action

 I'm currently spending my incredibly scant free time writing a blog for Imbibe.com, the drinks website.

 I'm very busy and trying to work for them, which is why I'm missing in action, not to mention missing inaction.


 The reason I'm so busy is demonstrated in fig. 1: PEOPLE WHO DON'T GET OUT MUCH:

And the drop in work rate is evidenced in fig. 2:

This picture is unrelated.

Paddington: A Nymphomaniac, Nihilist Masterpiece?

 Who's the bear that likes Marmalade sandwiches and is a sex machine to all the chicks?!

 Paddington. Apparently.

 This is what's to be inferred from the news that a new movie about Paddington Bear has been given a PG rating by censors because of sexual references.

 Those "sexual references," incidentally, consist of some bloke from Downton Abbey dressing up as a woman in one scene.

 I confess that I haven't actually seen the new Paddington film, and I suspect I never will. I'm actually allergic to any and all forms of childlike innocence. Still, I caught a synopsis of the plot on the radio earlier in a debate about the allegedly sexual nature of cross dressing.

 For the record, I don't think there's anything inherently sexual about men dressing up as women. For some reason that I've never really understood, it's a staple of British comedy and as a nation we seem to always find it uproariously funny. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't, but it's never remotely sexual as far as I can detect.

Not pictured: Erotica.

 What should be troubling people more is the main thrust of the story. I don't mean anything sexual by that.

 According to reports, the plot revolves around Nicole Kidman's taxidermist trying to catch Paddington and stuff him. Again, non-sexually. 

 This seems like a confused message at best, as Paddington (major spoilers for the under four demographic) is, in fact, already a stuffed bear.

 Maybe not in the movie, but he's definitely a stuffed bear any time I've seen him in person. My mother has a stuffed Paddington bear from god knows how many years ago. I've known plenty of kids who had them in my own generation.

 So what is the message, here, exactly? Is the new Paddington movie in fact some sort of gritty prequel implying Nicole Kidman eventually succeeds, murders the bear and that's why he's now lying, dead eyed and full of stuffing, in your room?! Are we trying to tell the kids that all is futile, and that Nicole Kidman is some sort of cuddly-bear terminator?! Is the message that if you're special or unique, you will be hunted until the end of your days, gutted and left as a hollow shell of what you once were?

 The existence of actual stuffed Paddington bears is implication of all this and more.

 Which is way more traumatic than Hugh Bonneville in a dress. 

 Maybe it should have been an 18 certificate.

He's Not Dapper, And He Doesn't Make You Laugh.

 It's been a bumper week for sexist, pencil-dicked tosspots in the news.

 First came the shocking info that professional wanker Dapper Laughs had his show dropped by ITV. Not for being crushingly un-funny, but because he'd been caught making comments at a live appearance where he said that a female audience member was "gagging for a rape."

 It's kind of ironic that the only way I could ever find Dapper Laughs funny is if he went to jail and was viciously buggered against his will.

 Hot on the heels of Dapper "Cunt" Laughs and his show being cancelled, pick-up-artist Julien Blanc was in the news as a petition to keep him out of Britain gathered momentum.

 Blanc - who calls himself a "pick up artist" because the term "sad bellend" isn't a recognised profession in a lot of countries - is one of those people who travels the world, being paid to talk to men even more pathetic and sexless than himself, riling them up with misogynist rhetoric and trying to convince them that they can be the exact kind of attractive alpha male that he, himself, clearly isn't. He was just booted out of Australia after he said that white men in Japan were free to imitate him by walking around, grabbing women by the necks and forcing their heads against his penis whilst yelling "pokemon." I promise none of that sentence is made up. Sadly.

 When you're too uncouth and sexist for Australia, it's time to take a long, hard look at your life. I digress.

 I'd quite like to see the petition against Julien Blanc succeed and ban him from the UK, but I didn't actually sign it myself as I'd really like the petition to succeed with only female signatures on it. The entire female population of a country telling him to fuck off would be the ultimate justice, and I thoroughly encourage all the single ladies (ALL the single ladies) to tell this prick where to go. And the married ones, too.

 The real question, to my mind, is not how tossers of the Blanc/Laughs magnitude exist in the first place, but what, exactly, causes them? These people don't just spring up overnight. They're a product of society, and as a member of society, I think we've all clearly fucked up if this is what we're creating.

 Possibly Laughs and his ilk are proof that "lads' mags" really did have a negative impact on the Zeitgeist. At 27, he would be smack in the middle of the generation that grew up with Nuts and Zoo as their cultural touchstones during their formative, sexually charged years. Magazines that many of us thought were harmless enough - all the time ignoring the damage they may have been doing to the minds of the stupid and gullible.

 It could also be, perhaps, blamed on the tail end of the Thatcher/Reagan years. Kids who grew up in the nineties nicked their older brothers' videos saw gung-ho, ultra-macho movies from the eighties with shirtless, indestructible bodybuilders who shrugged off bullet wounds and laughed in the face of death. Real men were ultra-tough to the point of being invincible, and it led to a hell of a crisis of masculinity in the next generation.

 It's why there are no modern action stars - nobody believes that anyone of the modern generation can be tough, which is why Bruce Willis was about thirty in Die Hard, and now when we want a hero, we still turn to a nearly-sixty Bruce Willis. Modern men are so insecure in themselves they can only really trust action heroes of their dad's generation.

 Normally this doesn't result in anything worse than a few "Taken" movies, but amongst the truly dickless and impansied* it festered and wrankled. These guys knew they were pussies. They knew they weren't macho enough. They were scared of girls, scared they'd never lose their virginities. Fear turned to hate. And hate led them to the Dapper Laughs side.

 Fans of Julien "I'm Clearly Not Happy About My Girly Name" Blanc and Dapper "Suspected Micropenis" Laughs are seemingly actual grown men who are so insecure that they need classes on how to manhandle women. Think about that. Julien Blanc actually makes a living instructing adult males who don't fancy their chances against a girl in a fight and therefore need some pointers on how to physically assault someone half their size in the completely worthless hope of somehow getting laid instead of arrested.

 The solution to the problem is twofold, at this point. Either we get all the men who don't have the balls to talk to a real-life girl, give them a rifle and a parachute and drop them over Iraq in the hopes that the ones that make it back are at least now tough enough to build their own Tinder profile, or else we do something even more unthinkable: We try to get these guys to talk to actual women.

 The ones who don't get arrested or beaten up might actually have a shot at pulling their heads out of their asses.




*Dibs on that word. I think it's an original.

Movie Review: The Babadook.

If it's in a word, or in a look, this film might have worked better as a book...

 I've been looking forward to Australian horror movie The Babadook ever since I came across the impressively creepy trailer. For those unaware, a single mother with a problem child stumbles across a strange book ("Mr. Babadook") and after reading it, begins to suspect that the monster her son is obsessed with might not be imaginary.

 And it isn't. Except it is. Look, here's the problem: the opening two thirds of this film were great. Forgoing the normal horror movie rhythm of quiet moments interspersed with jump scares, the film is one long, tense, sustained note of dread and simmering madness. Or it is until it gets stupid.

 Generally speaking I try not to put spoilers in film reviews, but I really don't think I can talk about The Babadook without discussing the last act. So, if you want to drop out now and judge for yourself, all I'll say is that I'd give it three out of five, points for effort, and label it an interesting failure.




...still with me? Good.

 As single mum Amelia becomes more sleep deprived and stressed by her son's behaviour, she begins hallucinating Mister Babadook in the shadows everywhere she looks. In probably the creepiest scene, she lies in bed, terrified, as the Babadook slowly eases open the bedroom door, skittering into the room as a jerky, stop-motion hybrid of ventriloquist doll, serial killer, insect and mammal.


 Sadly, this is also the scene where everything goes to shit, as the Babadook possesses Amelia and she begins to grow increasingly hostile to her already problematic son. Which isn't bad, as horror plots go, except that we already saw "haunted parent goes mad" done in The Shining. It would be wrong to say The Babadook is derivative, but it's definitely fair to say its influences are on show. What really lets it down, however, is thuddingly heavy-handed symbolism and a devotion to its own metaphors above plot coherence.

 The only way to make this film scary, frankly, would be to have Amelia kill her son at the climax. Instead, the son fights back with home made weapons that briefly take us entirely out of the horror genre and into a Home Alone movie. Demon-possessed mothers trying to stab their children don't normally feature in scenes that draw laughs from an audience, but damned if people weren't giggling in the screening I saw.

 Eventually, Amelia overcomes the Babadook's hold on her and in the process, learns to protect her son. Because, in case the film didn't make it abundantly clear already (and fuck me, did it), The Babadook is an expression of her repressed grief over the death of her husband and her resentment of her son. This is spelled out when, finally confronting the Babadook, Amelia is made to live out the moment of her husband's death again. Which is already un-subtle from a story point of view, but becomes outright naff when bad CGI is employed for no real reason.

 The film then takes another unexpected turn when the Babadook goes to live in the basement. Yes, really. No, I don't know why, either. One minute the Babadook is an analogy for fear and repression, the next it's a real creature, and even the film makers themselves can't decide which is the case, so eventually settle for having it live in the protagonist's basement and fed on worms from the garden. Again, I'm not making that up. We get a happy ending in which Amelia learns to get over the loss of her husband and rebuild her relationship with her son, but also has to feed the monster in her basement. Which is yet another representation of her buried emotions. Except it's not, because it's a literal monster she has to feed, because this whole film can't quite get the hang of metaphor.

 Horror is always difficult to pitch correctly. Too subtle and the audience may not cotton on, too bold and things get trashy. In the case of The Babadook, however, what should have been subtle themes are instead used to bludgeon the audience over the head. It's possible that a longer run time may have given the eerie, nauseous qualities that are present in the first half more time to breathe and resulted in a better film. It may even have worked better as a TV series, giving time for the Babadook itself to be more ambiguous, the slide into madness much slower.

 As it stands, however, the film is ultimately a great buildup to what feels like a rushed, histrionic finale that never quite trusts its audience's intelligence.

Kicking the Porn-ets' Nest...

 Like courduroy pillows, Jennifer Lawrence's tits continue to make headlines.

 After the initial scandal of leaked nude photos, the debate has meandered on and on (and on) and, just when you thought it was safe to go back on the internet, Ms. Lawrence does an interview with Vanity Fair and the whole issue ignites again to be used as an ideological football by all and sundry like a big, burning, kickable mixed metaphor of tits.

...

 For the record, I think everything has been somewhat blown out of proportion - and not just by my Xerox machine! HIYOOO!

 ...Sorry. Look, stealing someone's stuff and spreading it all over the internet is a shitty thing to do. It's illegal. Rightly so. Someone, somewhere is guilty of a crime and should be punished. There should probably be an extra layer of punishment added for the sexual nature of the crime. Anything that happened after the initial hacking, however, has apparently descended into a witch hunt. We're all guilty of being the worst kinds of people if we even consider having a look at leaked pictures of celebrities. The deepest pits of hell are reserved for those of us who thought "hmm, cool, attractive naked women that I wouldn't normally get to see," because of course nobody thought that - the only possible motivation for wanting to see arousing pictures of attractive young ladies is that we're all hateful, misogynist scum who wish nothing but ill for the entire female race, especially those of them we had a fiver on to win an Oscar last year.

 The reality from where I sit is that a lot of people just wanted to see someone attractive without any clothes on, which is pretty normal. Not necessarily squeaky clean, morally speaking, but there was certainly never any malice in it on my part, and I'm guessing the same is true for a lot of people.

 I like Jennifer Lawrence. I think she's very, very talented. And very pretty. I also think she's over-reacting quite badly to the whole thing, if the Vanity Fair interview is anything to go by. This might be easy for me to say, as thousands of strangers have never looked at intimate pictures of me, but they theoretically could. I've taken naked pictures of myself in the past to send to various people - girlfriends, hook-ups, Grammy winning country musicians...

Weirdly, that was her exact response...

 ...and if those pictures were leaked and spread all over the place I'd be embarrassed, sure. Angry, too, probably. But I think I'd have to ultimately just shrug and say "Yeah, that's me with my cock out." It's worth bearing in mind that I say this as a non-celebrity. I'm guessing someone who picks a career being stared at by strangers probably has a lot more of the "look at me!" gene than I do, and as such would be even less flustered.

How dare we look at her naked?! Unless she's painted blue and on a 20ft screen...

 Naked pictures and videos are a fairly normal part of modern sexuality, and (again) it's totally wrong to steal those pictures and videos from people. Unfortunately, the pendulum of outrage has now swung far enough that we're being told that looking at naked strangers is always wrong.

 First there are Ms. Lawrence's comments in Vanity Fair (and let's all just take a moment to appreciate the irony of someone talking about their own naked photos and privacy in a publication whose title means "Beautiful Self Love"), in which she says that she took the photos to send to her boyfriend at the time, because he was "either going to look at porn, or look at [me.]"

 I hate to break it to you, Jen, but he did both. I abso-fucking-lutely stone cold guarantee he did. Why? Because people (male, female, young, old, gay, straight) like looking at porn. It's hard-wired into us. The idea that if you're in a relationship you should never look at porn is as silly as the idea that if I have fruit in the house I'll never need to eat donuts. I'm fully aware of which one is healthier and more wholesome, but sometimes you just want a donut. Sometimes you don't want to light incense, drink wine and seduce your partner. Sometimes you just need to jerk off and then get on with your day. I'm sure a lot of women do exactly the same thing, whether they'd admit it or not.

 Sadly, the Vanity Fair interview was seized on by a group called Fight The New Drug, an anti-porn group who believe that all forms of pornography are damaging to society and evil and probably giving you hairy palms. In an open letter to Ms. Lawrence that has, in the words of Lisa Simpson "a creepy, Pat Boone-ish quality to it," they try to argue that all porn is exactly as morally wrong as stealing someone's private images; you can tell they're down with the kids because they're super keen on using words like "super" a lot.

 The truth is that people like watching other people fuck. We always have. Porn is largely just an extension of sexual fantasy - we just have the technology to put our imagined sexual scenarios on film these days. Saying that all porn is evil and degrading is like saying the early work of the Lumiere brothers was degrading and exploitative to trains.

 Are there types of pornography that are degrading and dangerous? Yes. In news that should shock nobody except the Puritans at Fight The New Drug, however, most people don't like porn that is violent or harmful.

 Personally, I watch porn. Not because I'm a single man who works six nights a week and therefore has a presence on the dating scene about on a par with the Pope; just because I'm normal and ALL NORMAL PEOPLE WATCH PORN. I don't want to see women getting mistreated. I don't even find it sexy when it's a barbie-looking woman with ill-fitting concrete tits and a borderline eating disorder staring dead-eyed into a camera and grunting too much, which seems to be the image most anti-porn lobbyists have in their heads. What I tend to look for is clips where the woman actually looks like she's enjoying herself, because that's also what I aim for in real-life sex.*

 So, Jennifer Lawrence is wrong to think that there's anything to worry about if her boyfriend watches porn. There's nothing wrong with watching it, everyone does it, everyone masturbates (including several of the more intelligent animal species) and she needs to chill out about that. That being said, she's a fantastic actress and doesn't deserve to be robbed and have her pictures strewn around cyberspace.

 Whoever hacked Jennifer Lawrence's pictures is the real bad guy here. It was a shitty thing to do, it should be punished, they shouldn't have anything to feel good about. Anyone who looked at the pictures doesn't have much of a moral high ground, but it's human nature and I totally get why people looked.

 The people at Fight The New Drug are the sort of creepy, narrow-minded, sexually repressed types that love to proselytize to the rest of us about how we should think, feel and fuck each other. I'm not legally allowed to say that I think they're all into some weird shit, bedroom-wise, but I'll just mention that anyone who takes up a moral crusade about what other people do with their genitals usually gets caught six months later in a public toilet doing something untoward. 

 All of this furore has ultimately been created over pictures of tits and asses - apparatus owned by 51 and 100% of the population, respectively. Can we please move on now?






*Results may vary.

Icelandic Saga

 When I’m not working in a bar, I maintain a steady sideline as an investigative journalist. Or at least that’s what I tell women at parties.

 Mostly, I just make stuff up. This is one of those times.

 I had a tip that there was an entertainment industry whistle-blower with a huge story that was looking to talk to someone trustworthy. Luckily, everyone trustworthy was too slow, so I went to meet with him instead. In a darkened back room of a shady pub, I met my contact.

 He was a grey-haired, doughy man who could have been anywhere between thirty five and fifty – whatever weighed on his mind had taken its toll on his body, and he had the fleshy, jowly look of a man gone to seed. In spite of his bulk, his eyes were furtive; the kind of eyes I’d seen most often in skinny, strung out guys. He looked like a thin, nervous man, the weight of whose secrets had been made flesh and trapped him physically as well as psychologically. He lit another cigarette as I switched on my tape recorder.

 “You promise me you won’t use my name?” he asked, quietly.

 “I’ll keep your identity an absolute secret, Dr. Williams,” I said, making a mental note to edit that part out before I publish this. I had a feeling I’d probably forget.

 “What did you want to talk to me about?” I asked.

 He took a breath, looked down at the table, the eyes still darting as he tried to find a way to begin. “…I know what’s happening to Peter Andre,” he said, finally.

 This wasn’t exactly what I’d been expecting. “Go on…” I prodded. He jumped a little, because I actually prodded him. I’m not very good with metaphor.

 “What you need to understand is that this information is sensitive,” he said. “I worked for three years as head of shipping for Iceland. I was one of them.”

 “One of them as in a supermarket employee?” I asked.

 He shook his head, dismissively. “No. No. See, Iceland isn’t really a supermarket. That’s the first part of all this. Sure, they maintain the odd store for appearances sake, but they’re actually much bigger. Much more powerful.”

 “So what are they really?”

 “Iceland is the world’s first anti-fame bureau. They specialise in making peoples’ careers in showbusiness disappear.

 See, to the common man, being famous looks great. You get money and adulation and groupies, but in actual fact, it’s a business like anything else. You know those earnest, creative types you meet who say they just do what they love and aren’t interested in material gain? That’s why they’re never famous. Maybe thirty years ago it worked that way, but now, Big Fame hold all the strings. If you want to be well known, you have to do it through them. Iceland is a subsidiary department.

 See, some celebrities get tired of it. They get over-worked, they burn out. There’s only so many times you can fall out of a limo with your clunge on display before it gets tiring.”

 “Was 'clunge' really the word you wanted to use there?” I said.

“It DID seem out of character for me, I agree, but then I’m not very well drawn-out to begin with,” he said. “Anyway, Big Fame expects a lot from its employees. You’re required to put in an insane number of hours, marry a lot of awful people in succession, and constantly make up outlandish stories to sell to supermarket tabloids. It’s exhausting. A lot of people want out. Some try to do it gracefully, by just slipping quietly away, never working again, but that doesn’t stick. They still can’t walk down the street without being noticed. That’s why the Iceland Protocols were developed.”

 “And this is what’s happening to Peter Andre? He’s tired of being famous?”

 He took another drag on his cigarette. “Look, I haven’t been working for Iceland for a long time. Years, now. But I can see all the signs. What would typically happen is this: Peter Andre doesn’t want to be famous anymore, and he wants everyone to know that. So what does he do? He could release a video on YouTube saying he wants everyone to just ignore him, but that might not work. Shia LaBeouf tried announcing he wasn’t famous anymore and now he’s in the new Brad Pitt movie. It’s not enough. So Peter Andre goes to the people at Iceland and they say ‘Sure, Peter. We’ll put you in a string of adverts for our dummy supermarket that basically announce to everyone that your career is over. They’ll be painful and embarrassing, but it’s two days shooting, max, and then everyone who sees them plastered all over national TV will sit at home and think “Hmm, Peter Andre’s career must be over.” Problem solved.’”

 “That’s exactly what I thought when I saw them,” I nodded.

 “Right. And maybe Peter would have been happy with that. But showbusiness is a cut-throat industry, and Iceland wanted to be the best. They couldn’t have other businesses saying they’d make you even less famous than them. They had to stifle competition. That’s when they came up with the gulags.”

 “Gulags?”

“Yes. You see, famous people aren’t usually very bright. Dolph Lundgren has a masters degree in chemical engineering and tried to work out a way to de-famous himself, and it nearly worked, but then he slipped up in his calculations and ended up in three Expendables movies. And the average celebrity isn’t anywhere near as smart as him. In fact, most of them don’t even have the sense to read what they sign, which is what Iceland banks on. As soon as the shooting is finished on their cringeworthy, career-wrecking ads, they grab the celebrity and ship them to a prison camp in Iceland. It spawned its own phrase. When people asked what ever happened to certain actors or pop stars, they were told ‘Keep mum; he’s gone to Iceland.’ People in the fame game knew what this meant, but they even made a version of it into their corporate slogan as a coded warning to others.”

 “Are you telling me that right now Peter Andre is being transported to a prison camp in Iceland,” I asked. It was a little much to take in.

“He’s not being transported, no. He’s probably been there for months. As soon as they finished shooting the ads he’d have been tranquilised and packed into a crate.”

 “Jesus. Is there any way back?!”

 He sighed. “It’s possible, but difficult. You have to fight your way out and most people don’t make it. You remember mid-nineties TV actors and occasional pop duo Robson & Jerome? They managed to break out a few years ago, working as a team. Jerome improvised some melee weapons and fought his way past the guards, in the process learning the sword skills that would give him a comeback role on Game of Thrones. Once they were free of the camp, they had to hike two hundred miles to civilisation, sustained only by eating whatever fish Robson could catch in the local rivers. It’s why he still gets so excited whenever he catches a fish.”

“Now that you mention it, I did wonder where they’d been for twenty years or so,” I mused.

 He bit his lip. “Others aren’t so lucky. And the penalty for a failed escape attempt is severe. They don’t just punish you. They don’t even make you famous again. They make you infamous. A few years ago, Rolf Harris decided that he wanted out and clobbered a guard with his didgereedoo. He didn’t make it past the fence, and we all know what became of him after he was caught…”

“If all of this is true, why tell me?” I asked. “Why now?”

 He shrugged, sighed. “As you get older, you start to value life a lot more,” he said. “I thought I could live with all the people I shipped to the gulags, but the truth is that it’s not right. I don’t mind exploiting celebrities until they’re bitter, botoxed shells of human beings, all light gone from their eyes and their smiles surgically grafted on because they can no longer experience true joy – I mean, we all do that! But actually knocking them over the head and shipping them to a frozen wasteland? I figure I might finally sleep better if I can give a voice to the people who I deprived of the ability to speak for themselves.” He met my eyes for the first time as he said that, and I believed him.

 “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m going to write this story up and give it every bit of exposure I’m capable of.”

 And I did. I put it on my Facebook AND my Twitter.

 In a lot of ways, I’m a real hero.

No Such Thing As Bad Publicity...

Like a lot of people, I've been following the Oscar Pistorius farce - er, trial - in a loose way. It's hard to avoid the coverage and it's certainly a diverting story, but I haven't read up on it enough to be familiar with all the details of the case.

 This is why I was surprised to learn today that, immediately after "accidentally" putting five bullets in his girlfriend while she was carelessly peeing in the style of a burglar, Pistorius rang a friend who owned a super-car dealership and lived forty miles away. According to the police timeline, his friend was on the scene in fifteen minutes.

 Some cynical types are suggesting that this is evidence that something was fishy, but it could just be coincidence. Maybe his friend was in the area. Or maybe, through sheer random chance, he became the best advert for his own business in the history of the world.

 I'm not saying anyone should ever exploit a tragedy, but if this guy doesn't start running the following ad in Pretorian TV then quite honestly he's missing a trick:

 "Hi, I'm Dave Van der Watt from Crazy Dave's Motor Emporium! Has your friend just shot his missus?! Do you need to be here in a mathematically impossible time frame?! You could be on the scene and lying in mere minutes with the new Bugatti Alibi!"

 I'm not even convinced that the fastest cars in the world could cover that distance, but I could be wrong. Maybe there needs to be some thorough testing of this by the relevant automotive experts...

"TONIGHT!! Richard Hammond shoots his wife..."

"Can I get there to lend a hand ahead of the boys in blue?!"

"Can James May hide all the evidence when the clock is ticking?!"

"...With the help of Dave from South Africa, we'll find out as we test drive the new Ferrari Perjury!"

Or, y'know. Maybe Pistorius is just full of shit.

Is This Sick Sport Proof Of A Sinister Conspiracy?

 Whilst going un-noticed by the general populace, a sick and immoral spectacle masquerading as a sport is being broadcast on British TVs.

 Cunningly hidden on the channel "Dave", after Top Gear but before Top Gear, Motocross X may at first come off as the latest in a long line of "x-treme" sports. In my unending quest to bring you the drunkest, most paranoid and libelous news, however, I can exclusively reveal that Motocross X is in fact a sham, and less a sport than a twisted eugenic conspiracy.

 On the surface, X-Cross is simple. Riders take turns performing stunts on motorbikes, riding over ramps and completing various feats of acrobatics. The horrifying truth, however, is that nothing that happens between the launchpad and the landing ramp is even remotely intentional on the part of the rider.

"FUUUUUUUUUCK!!"

 What's more, despite the implications of the commentators, none of the riders are volunteers or even professionals. 

 Whilst the nature of the participants varies from country to country - China tends to use Motocross X as a form of punishment for under-performing students at acrobatics schools, whilst the UK tends to send the more nimble looking chavs convicted of motorbike theft - all of them are unwilling participants, sealed into their bike helmets and launched down the tunnel on remote controlled bikes.

 Obviously, there is a huge death toll in the early rounds of competitions, and only the most quick thinking and athletic can survive until the televised stages. How do I know all of this to be true? Simple, logical deduction: There is nowhere in the world where people would be able to train for this sport. When was the last time you saw a public space filled with enormous dirt hillocks and ramps? 

 Clearly, the only people with the money to build such facilities are the shadowy cabals of people who control the sport, who have also hired actors to give the illusion of professional athletes. After competing a trick, one of these "athletes" will ride into a tunnel and then an identically-dressed actor will ride back out and remove his helmet to create continuity. 

 As time has worn on, these puppet-masters have grown bored and introduced more and more elaborate tricks to play on their bike-bound victims, from greasing the saddle and gluing the victim's hands to the handlebars:

 "YOU ASSHOLES!!"

 To running ten thousand volts through the bike mid-flight, forcing the competitor to only touch the plastic parts:

"Shitfuckshitshitfuckshitshit-!!"

 To simply telling an athlete before launch that there's a bomb in his shoe that can only be turned off by the magnet in his wrist:

"I don't deserve thiiiiiis!"

 As if this travesty of a sport wasn't inhumane enough - and make no mistake, we are all MONSTERS for watching - the truth of the competitions is even more shocking than one might first imagine.

 Even a casual viewer will note that the stunts performed are only visible in detail during the slow-motion replay - in real time, things happen far too fast for the human brain to process, unless you're one of the unlucky people who is nailed to a motorbike and so high on terror-adrenaline that you've essentially become Spider-Man.

 This would imply, logically, that the true architects and primary viewers of this so-called sport are beings with far faster visual reflexes than our own. I'm not saying this is proof that the world is in fact controlled by alien lizard-people, but I am saying exactly that in those words. These space lizards are forcing the nations of the earth to pit various teams of Motocross X riders against each other.

 Our reptile overlords will then use X-Treme sports as a eugenics program to breed a new form of supermen who will serve as their slaves. Eventually, these lightning-fast, impossibly athletic ubermensches will rise up in rebellion against their lizard masters like Spartacus of old, and the war between the two will spill out into the lives of the common, oblivious human.

 These "X-Treme Wars" between ninja motorcycle stuntment and reptile emperors from beyond the stars will almost certainly spell doom for our entire planet, but one thing is for certain: They'll be fucking AWESOME.

Scots Independence: A (Very) Late Realisation.

 There's an odd time-travel quality in play as I write this.

 It's one a.m. and as such, I have no idea what the outcome of the Scottish Independence Referendum will be. By the time most people read this, they will already know, so whatever I say will already be out of date.

 Nonetheless, in the wee wee hours, I had a minor epiphany about my thoughts on Scottish independence.

 I've written before that as an Englishman I don't actually get to have an opinion, although as Eric Idle pointed out, I perhaps should. Dissolving a union involves more than one party, and if Scotland just fucks off of its own accord it'll be the political and constitutional equivalent of a deadbeat husband absconding in the middle of the night.

"Got a wife and kids and Union Jack, I went out for a ride and I never went back..."

 My opinion, as I've said before, is that I'd like to see Scotland stay part of the United Kingdom. Indeed, I, like everyone else, sort of assumed that they would.

 This is largely down to media coverage that's been pitched somewhere between Michael Fish's "There will be no hurricane tonight" and the Iraqi defense minister's insistence that his side was winning. The news, until the eleventh hour, treated this as a trifling matter that none of us should be worried about. 

 Now, of course, everyone is panicking because (at time of writing) there are reports of record turnouts. Eighty-four percent of Orkney turned out to vote, for example. Granted, eighty-four percent of Orkney is six people and a goat, but such huge percentages seem to have been repeated across the board, and have effectively rendered any opinion polls taken so far as useless. Said polls had a narrow margin in favour of "no," but with five hours left until the count is finished and a result declared, this is anyone's game.

 At this, the final moment, I realised that I should morally probably favour a "Yes." 

 The reason for this is that all my thinking so far has been largely selfish. I don't want Scotland to go because of a sense of familiarity, sure, but also because of a creeping fear that, without Scotland, England will be permanently under Tory rule. However, when I stop and think about it, I realise this isn't Scotland's problem, and that if I lived in an area of the country that had a chance to break away from the current political system, I'd most likely be in favour of it. I'd love to be free of David Cameron and his brigade of detached, monied arseholes who are slowly ruining the country. The only reasons I want Scotland to stick around are to lend electoral weight to the left, and also because I'd be jealous if they didn't have to suffer along with the rest of us. It's only potential bitterness that's making me want a "No" outcome. "When the breakdown hit at midnight there was nothing left to say, but I hated him. And I hated you when you went away." *

 Clearly, this is not the correct attitude. This isn't about Scotland leaving England and Wales and Northern Ireland holding the bag. This is about Scotland, full stop. It's Scotland's decision.

 So, by the time I get up tomorrow, they'll either be gone or they won't. But I don't have any right to bitch - if they leave, I've realised that I actually want them to do well for themselves. It's only jealousy that would make me feel otherwise.

 Although I'll still be glad if they stay.

*I'm frankly amazed at how well Bruce "Mc"Springsteen's work is playing into this...

Saucy Jack Redux.

 In the process of writing last night's piece about the new DNA evidence in the Jack the Ripper case, I made a minor mistake that I need to rectify.

 Unfortunately, it's the kind of minor mistake that is extremely hard to explain clearly without going into massive amounts of detail. Still, in the interests of fairness, I'm going to clarify it and go into massive amounts of detail.

 I said yesterday that author Martin Fido named Aaron Kosminski as Jack the Ripper. Aaron Kosminski is the man who has allegedly come up as a DNA match in the new evidence.

 What Martin Fido actually said was that the police at the time made the same mistake I did, and confused Aaron Kosminski with a man named Kaminski.

 Later memoirs by three police officers active at the time of the Ripper murders - Sir Melville McNaughten, Sir Robert Anderson and Superintendent Donald Swanson - mentioned a Polish Jew with "great hatred of women and strong homicidal tendencies," (McNaughten) whilst Anderson also mentioned in his memoir a "low class Polish Jew" and considered unmasking this suspect, but refrained. Donald Swanson, who was helping Anderson, wrote in the margin of Anderson's manuscript that this same suspect was apprehended by police and eventually sent to Colney Hatch mental institution where he died. His final notation says that the man's name was Kosminski.

 As mentioned before, this is often seen as odd as Aaron Kosminski was noted to be harmless once confined to an institution, rather than being the frothing maniac remembered by Melville McNaughten. Kosminski was also not incarcerated until two years after the final proven Ripper murder.

 Martin Fido, then, suggested that the police were confusing two suspects of a similar name.

 In December of 1888, a month after the last Ripper killing, a man was found wandering the streets of Whitechapel, dazed and mumbling to himself, mostly in Yiddish. He was detained by police and became extremely violent, and was eventually taken to an asylum where he was sectioned under the name David Cohen - a sort of catch-all Jewish name for when no identification was possible, like John Doe.

 Martin Fido contends that this unknown, violent mental patient was in fact a man named Nathan Kaminski, who had previously been treated for syphilis brought about by contact with prostitutes. In naming Kosminski in his memoirs, Fido believes Sir Robert Anderson (or his assistant Donald Swanson) was mis-remembering the name Kaminski.

 Which is exactly what I did last night. So, to recap: Martin Fido did not, as I stated, name Aaron Kosminski as the Ripper.

 Fido's is a plausible theory and easy to see why people get confused. Aside from the similar names, both men were confined to asylums within a few years of each other - Nathan "David Cohen" Kasminski in 1889 and Aaron Kosminski in 1891. Both died in their respective institutions. Both were Polish Jews who lived in the Whitechapel area.

 For the record, however, I don't necessarily buy Nathan "David Cohen" Kasminsky as the Ripper, either. Kasminsky was clearly, dangerously insane. Whilst it's possible that in the month between Mary Jane Kelly's mutilation and being found wandering the streets his last lingering threads of sanity had snapped, I find it hard to reconcile this gibbering lunatic (he was straight-jacketed in the institution as he was too violent to be left unrestrained) with someone who could fool a nervous hooker into taking his custom.

 I appreciate that almost all hookers are forced into their line of work by desperate poverty, and as such they can't afford to be overly choosy of their clientele. I also appreciate that in a Victorian slum poverty and desperation existed on a level I can't really imagine. Nonetheless, after word got out that a murderer was cutting up prostitutes in horrific ways, I think most prostitutes would have been on high alert. They would be extremely wary of customers who seemed in any way strange, and I can't help but feel that Nathan Kaminsky, a man who was only a month away from being found incoherently wandering the streets, would have had a hard time maintaining enough of a veneer of normality to fool a suspicious prostitute.

 As I've said before, my preferred suspect remains "we don't know."

 But hopefully I've cleared up my mistake regarding Martin Fido's theories.

New Ending To Saucy Jack?

[IMPORTANT: I know I don't normally take anything seriously, but in the interests of fairness I should point out that this post contains one very, very unpleasant image of an actual murder victim. It's in context, I promise, but it's not fun.]

 Many people have accused me of being outdated, and they probably have a point. It's not really helping my case, then, that I noticed an important headline today from a hundred and thirty years ago.

 Let me back up a little. According to reports, new evidence has come to light that may prove the identity of Jack the Ripper. I've read a few books on the subject, and had basically chalked the answer of who the killer really was up to "fucked if I know." Many authors have gone to great lengths to prove that their suspect was the correct one, and many of them have been convincing.

 Then again, a few have been amusingly, calamitously wrong. Crime writer Patricia Cornwell fingered artist Walter Sickert as the Ripper, writing a book and making a TV documentary on her findings. Nowhere in the production of either did someone pull Cornwell to one side and point out that Sickert had pretty good alibis for two of the murders, one of which was "being in France at the time." It's a great lesson in why "actual detective" and "writer of detective fiction" are different jobs.

 In 1992, an alleged "Diary of Jack The Ripper" surfaced in the hands of a Liverpuddlian scrap dealer, who said he'd been given it by "a bloke down the pub." In a development that shocked nobody who had ever been in a Scouse pub, this diary turned out to be a fake, but not before Shirley Harrison had written a book about how it was clearly real and identified the true killer.

 The less said about the insanely convoluted conspiracy theories involving Freemasonry and the Royal Family the better.

 Indeed, even at the time, the papers received hundreds of hoax letters from people claiming to be Jack the Ripper, only two of which have are considered to possibly be genuine.

 With all this in mind, it's clear that solutions to the Ripper mystery crop up every so often, and that they should be taken with a grain of salt. Or a big fuck-off gritting lorry full of salt, depending on the claim.

 Where does that leave the current evidence?

 The evidence in question is a bloodied shawl worn by one of the Canonical Five victims - the five prostitutes that experts agree were all killed by the same person in Autumn of 1888 in the Whitechapel district of London.

 The shawl itself is a baffling story. It was taken from Catherine Eddowes, the fourth victim, by a policeman and given to his wife as a present.

"Here's the housekeeping money, love. Oh, and I got you this shawl covered in the blood of a mutilated hooker."

"Thanks, I've been looking for one of those!"

"I've not washed it as I don't know how, so there might be some semen around the edges..."

 For whatever picky reason, his wife didn't want the shawl, but still buried it away in a cupboard where it became a kind of family heirloom until it was auctioned in 2007 and bought by Russell Edwards, who has spent the interim having the shawl DNA tested and writing a book on his findings. 

 Edwards claims that the blood on the shawl proveably belongs to Catherine Eddowes, and that there is also trace evidence of semen that can be matched with the descendants of Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew living and working in Whitechapel at the time of the murders, who was later incarcerated in a mental institution.

 Much of this is significant. One of the few witnesses to the man believed to be the Ripper described a man with a "foreign accent" talking to a victim shortly before her death. Similarly, a piece of graffiti found near the scene of a Ripper murder read "The Juwes [sic] Are The Men Who Will Not Be Blamed For Nothing."

 The phrasing of this piece of graffiti is maddeningly ambiguous, and the writing itself was swiftly erased for fear of civil unrest. It speaks volumes of old-world misogyny that people were more worried about a riot caused by offensive graffiti than a riot over the number of women being disemboweled, but I digress. The message played into a larger web of heresay that the Ripper was a Jew. Indeed, a police report of the time claimed that a a local Jewish man had seen and could positively identify the Ripper, but refused to speak out against a fellow Jew.

 Whilst this may seem odd (and indeed, may not be true at all) it's worth bearing in mind the casual anti-semitism of the time, as well as the fact that many Jews, Aaron Kosminski included, he fled Russian pogroms and as such had a very strong community bond. 

 Aaron Kosminski himself was named as the Ripper by author Martin Fido, and has long been one of the more favoured suspects of scholars.

 In spite of all this, I have some doubts about the recent evidence. At the risk of setting myself up for a fall, I'm not convinced by the DNA angle.

 Looking at the canonical five murders, there is a very clear progression of violence as the perpetrator loses his mind. The first victim, Mary Ann Nichols, was strangled until unconscious or dead by her attacker, and then lowered to the ground. Her throat was cut, twice for the sake of insuring death, and her abdomen stabbed repeatedly after that. 

 By Ripper standards, this was mild.

 As the crimes progressed, always with the same modus operandi (the strangulation, the lowering of the unconscious body, the double throat cut) the Ripper began inflicting more and more damage on the corpses. This culminated in the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, the only victim who was killed in her room instead of on the street. Again, this is where I include a very unpleasant picture.

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 Aside from some pictures I saw of a guy who was mauled by a grizzly in Russia a few years back, that's probably the most damage I've ever seen inflicted on a human body. Her face (right hand side if you can't get your bearings) has been cut to ribbons. Her intestines are the messy clump removed and dumped on the bedside table in the foreground. 

 I bring this image up because it illustrates the dam-burst effect of the Ripper's killings. Once the killer snapped, he got worse, and worse, until we end up with the horror show pictured above. 

 And yet not one mention was ever made of semen.

 Whoever the killer was, he didn't appear to actually have sex with his victims, either pre-or-post mortem, and there was no evidence ever mentioned of seminal fluid elsewhere at the crime scenes. 

 I'll admit right now that I'm not an expert at spotting semen on a pavement at night - hell, maybe I should be more vigilant; maybe I've walked through lakes of the stuff unwittingly - but the forensics of the Ripper reports weren't as completely amateurish as we would expect from our post-CSI vantage point. Also, if someone was going to have sex with his victim, then surely there would have been semen at the Mary Jane Kelly scene? He'd gone completely to town on her in terms of everything else, if he was ever going to make it sexual I have absolutely no doubt that this would be where it would have happened.

 Maybe that whole scene was such a mess that something was missed, but I remain unconvinced. Also, Aaron Kosminski was not insitutionalised until 1891 - two years after the Ripper murders. Whoever butchered five women with rapid, marked increases in brutality didn't seem like someone who would suddenly give up and lay low for two whole years. 

 Whilst detained at an asylum, where he would die of an infection a few years later, Kosminski was noted to have no particularly violent traits and to be a compulsive masturbator. Again: If he wasn't concerned about playing with himself in front of hospital staff, then why wasn't there evidence of him doing it at every crime scene? The murders were clearly sexually motivated (victim Annie Chapman had part of her uterus cut out) but never before this new, shawl-stain evidence has there been any indication of the murderer doing anything actually sexual.

 I'm intrigued to see how things play out on this one. Aaron Kosminski could have been Jack the Ripper - he probably  was Jack the Ripper according to people who know more than me - but personally I'm going to wait and see before I buy into any of the "case closed" headlines.

 And now, because this post has gone into some quite harrowing territory, here's a puppy as a palate cleanser:

Improving The Job Market With Ebola.

 There's never really been a time when beer wasn't popular.

 The ancient Aztecs would use a regular beer ration to all citizens as an enticement to live in their newly-invented cities, for example. Nobody wants to live with other people - other people are awful. Beer is the only thing that can get you through a life surrounded by them. We've known this for millenia.

 When prohibition gripped America by the liver for 13 long years, it wasn't whiskey or wine that people marched in the streets for; it was beer.

 In spite of its longstanding place in the human heart, beer isn't just popular these days. It's fashionable, too. 

 This is bad news for a lot of reasons - it jacks up the price, for starters, as anything that's in vogue is bound to cost more. Even worse than the price inflation is the inherent pretentiousness that comes with fashion. 

 Until a few years ago, the only people who really cared about the minutiae of beer tasting were tedious old men with no teeth and cardigans, who sat in the corner of dark, local pubs. As popular tastes have shifted, however, a new breed of beer wanker has emerged. Young, condescending and somehow even less likeable.

 Because of these people - the sort of people who pretend to earnestly care what species of hops are used in the ale they're considering potentially buying the smallest available measurement of - beers now have tasting notes in the same way wines do.

 Much like with wine, these tasting notes are generally full of utter bollocks. I read a description the other day that claimed a beer had "notes of grass [...] and hay." 

 That's an awfully highfalutin' way of saying "This beer tastes of grass and slightly drier grass."

 Regardless of the patent ridiculousness of it all, someone out there is getting paid to write this shit, and that proves to me that there are clearly too many people in the world.

 The world has been suffering a population crisis for years now. Too many people for the planet, or, if we're being honest, not enough jobs for the number of people we have. 

 In the third world, there are too many people and not enough jobs to employ them, meaning these people can't earn a wage, can't provide for themselves or their families, and therefore end up starving. The fact that there's actually plenty of room on the planet to comfortably house and feed us all is irrelevant - the issue is an economic rather than a logistical one.

 Rather than let this happen in the first world, we've developed a thriving bullshit industry. We can't have everyone out of work and starving, so we create jobs that don't really do anything - like writing tasting notes for beers and explaining how they taste like a lawn both before and after it's been mowed.

 This is clearly an untenable situation. The population continues to grow, and we're running out of meaningless tasks to give people to keep them busy and thereby force the already-creaky wheels of capitalism to turn. How can we redress the balance?

 I think the answer is Ebola.

 In recent weeks there has been a severe outbreak of the deadly haemorrhagic fever in Africa. Although not all the numbers are in yet, it seems to be killing about half of all the people it comes into contact with.

 There's very little chance of it making its way to the UK - in news that shocked nobody, the only demographic that seems worried about that happening is UKIP voters:

Via YouGov.com

As I think UKIP are generally wrong about everything, not only do I think Ebola is unlikely, but I think it's not something to worry about. It's something we should be embracing.

 With half the population gone, not only will there be better job prospects for everyone - no more beer tasters - but traffic will be a thing of the past. Parking restrictions, too. Hell, would YOU take a job as a traffic warden if you didn't have to? Now nobody has to!

 Think of it. A world without beer wankers, traffic jams, parking tickets, queues at the post office, and a world that statistically won't contain at least one of Miley Cyrus or Justin Bieber.

 In fact, if half the human race is arbitrarily wiped out, it'll solve even some of our more esoteric problems. Oasis vs. Blur? X-Box vs. Playstation? Apple vs. Samsung? An arbitrary 50% reduction of the world would settle all of these kind of A vs. B debates.

 All we need is a decent pandemic. We have the technology.

Book Review: "Personal."

 Jack Reacher is back.

 Which isn't that noteworthy, in all honesty, as author Lee Child releases a new Reacher novel every year at around this time. "Jack Reacher is back" must be the book advertising equivalent of "Winter Is Coming." Maybe they're the words of House Publishing.

 It's been a tough few years for Reacher fans. As the number of books have climbed into the high teens and our leading man has reached his early fifties, it's hard not to find the whole exercise a little stale. This is before we mention the recent movie (and its threatened sequels) in which the huge, blonde Reacher was played by the neither Tom Cruise.

 With all this in mind, "Personal," Child's nineteenth Reacher book, is actually a pleasant surprise. Where the previous four books have followed a loose narrative arc as ex-millitary cop Reacher - phoneless, carless, devoid of a fixed abode - made understandably slow progress across the USA to a pending appointment that ultimately came to nothing, the new book, "Personal", sees Reacher picked up by the government to help with an assassination attempt on the French president.

 Why Reacher? Well, because it's... "Personal."

 It can't be easy churning out a book every year, so it's understandable that Lee Child might end up spinning his wheels after all this time. "Personal," however, seems to find Child re-focused and re-energised. While recent books have suffered a lack of anything memorable, "Personal" has a number of set-pieces that are, in the best possible way, Child-like.

 Child has also done the reader a favour by creating an imposing villain. Reacher's quarry is a master sniper, able to hit a target from 1400 yards away. As we watch developments through Reacher's eyes, it's hard not to feel increasingly uneasy. A large chunk of Reacher's appeal has always been his formidable physical presence, but being a great street fighter does no good against an enemy who can take you out from three quarters of a mile.

 "Personal" also sees Reacher returning to the UK for the first time since 2006's "The Hard Way." That book, probably my least favourite of the series, saw Reacher storming around in what felt like an episode of The Archers, so it's nice to have Reacher turn up in London for "Personal," hemmed in by modernity and East End gangsters.

 There are flaws, of course. Some plot elements feel recycled (notably from "Persuader", probably the best Reacher novel) and Child's notorious tin ear for character names is in evidence - a female sidekick whose name is Nice and a British sniper named Carson are glaring examples. I've never known anyone in the UK with the name Carson except the late comic, Frankie. Maybe the sniper in question was a portly, grey haired fella with glasses.

"Heh-heh, it's the way I kill 'em!"

 Child has also said in interviews that he never does a second draft of anything, and it's fairly obvious that he should. The dialogue scenes, for one, are always terse back-and-forth exercises in smarter-than-thou snappiness that ends up making every character sound like a variation of Reacher himself. If Jack Reacher is meant to be the smartest man in the room, it would help if other characters didn't seem to think and speak exactly the way he does.

 Also, the final big reveal is obvious to any readers who have been paying attention, and the only attempt to obscure it is made through Reacher's trademark, annoying habit of keeping information to himself until the final scene, like a blonde, big fisted Columbo. In the case of "Personal", however, the reader can probably see the sting coming from, well, about fourteen hundred yards away.

 These flaws in the book are indicative of wider flaws in the series as a whole, and are fixable - second drafts, a little more nuance, and maybe the tried and tested road of making a recurring character ageless - but based on the evidence of "Personal," fixing may not be needed. Because there series isn't broke. 

A Coke and a Scowl.

 I bought a Coke the other day.

 No need to congratulate me.

 I've done it several times before, if I'm honest, and can only apologise for not informing you at the time. These days, however, buying a Coke has become its own special hell.

 It all started when the powers that be at Coca Cola decided to put names on every bottle at random. Personally, I don't need to search through a fridge to find the one bottle with my name on it - I'm not five. At the same time, my refusal to play along with their pointless exercise in narcissism means I'm frequently stuck walking around with the first bottle I came to, which will invariably identify me as Annabelle or Tiffany or something equally butch.

 Not that narcissism was the driving force behind the campaign. The original slogan was "share a coke with...", so that buyers could see a coke with someone else's name on it and buy it for them. Possibly as a wedding or birthday present, or else as a startlingly inconsiderate gift for the diabetic in your life.

 Either way, our increasingly flabby populace quickly decided "fuck that noise", as sharing is for pussies. We wanted our own names on our bottles - three hundred and thiry milliliter, red capped, non-biodegradable monuments to ourselves to cherish for all eternity, or at least take a Facebook profile shot with.

 What's more depressing is how well this all worked. People, by and large, didn't share my indifference to the labels on Coke bottles. They were elated to see their own names written down somewhere on a shitty drink, as if by magic. The campaign was first extended due to its success and now features brand new ads in which a fictional dog is trying to find a Coke with his name on it, in flagrant disregard of the fact that dogs a) can't fucking read and b) REALLY shouldn't be given Coke in the first place.

 The viewing public, meanwhile, have rallied behind this Frankenstein-like cross between rampant commercialism and The Littlest Hobo without ever once seeming to notice (or object to) the fact that Coke is now basically saying "If you care about having your name on your coke bottle, you're as stupid as an animal that's often surprised by its own farts."

 This is the reason - the exact, concrete, tangible reason - that big companies continue to treat people like shit and ignore our protests.

 Because they can.

 Next time someone complains that big business thinks we're all idiots, point to the nearest dullard, proudly clutching a "personalised" Coke bottle, and explain that companies treat us like idiots because we act like fucking idiots. We get legitimately excited, as a society, about someone stamping a facsimilie of our name on the disposable wrapper of a sugary drink and then wonder why the rich and powerful don't treat us with respect.

 Because we're idiots, babe. It's a wonder we can ever feed ourselves.

Scottish Independence - One Man's Opinion.

 I don't live in Scotland. Never have. It's probably indicative of the sort of arrogance that the Scots accuse us of that I think as an Englishman I even get to have an opinion on Scottish independence.

 Still, in case anyone north of the border is on the fence about whether to vote yes or no in the upcoming referendum, and decides that the best person to listen to is a half-cut Bristolian barman, here are my thoughts.

 In general, I'm against Scottish independence. Not because of any English sense of possession, but more for nostalgic reasons. Scotland is a bit like a relative I don't see much of; sure, we never talk and seldom visit, but if they fell off a cliff I'd be a little sad about it.

 Some people have told me that there are also sound financial and economic reasons for the union to stay intact, but if you want sense and solid economic advice I'd suggest you're on the wrong blog.

 Despite my reluctance to see Scotland go, there is one reason I'd be quite happy with a "yes" result for Scots independence.

 That reason is Sean Connery's house.

 For years, now, Connery has banged on about Scotland and being Scottish and just how incredibly Scottish he is, and how much he loves the nation of his birth, and he's done it all from the comfort of his palatial estate in the tropics, where weather is sunny and pub fights are few. Or maybe they're plentiful, I've never been, but you have to imagine a pub fight in the Bahamas at least takes place to a lilting reggae beat.

 Connery even has a tattoo that reads "Scotland Forever," although I dare say it has faded some with age and the excellent tan he must have by now. Still, he maintains vociferously in favour of Scottish independence, and has a tailor made get-out clause if anyone accuses him of geographical hypocrisy - he will, he claims, never live in Scotland again until it is its own country.

 Well, I, for one, would like to see the look on the smug bastard's face if Scotland goes independent. I'd like to see the horrified, sinking realisation that he's painted himself into a corner and actually lived long enough to see Scottish devolution. I want to see the forced, rictus grin - really just an exposure of gritted teeth - as he picks up his bags at Edinburgh international and trudges out to meet the press in the pissing, grey drizzle, a floral shirt hanging limply around him as he stares down the barrel of his own hubris, faced with the dreary, windswept and steel-drum deficient prospect of living out the last of his years with his money where his mouth once was.

 In Scotland.

"Bollocks."

Gaza For Dummies.

 In spite of my busy schedule and social calendar chock-full of meaningless hookups with supermodels, I recently took the time to interview some major political leaders about the ongoing situation in Gaza.

 First up, Johnny Spokesman - American Ambassador.



 Thankyou for taking the time to speak with me, Mr. Ambassador. What are your personal feelings on Israel's actions of late?

 JS: Well, it's important to allow Israel the right to defend itself. For example, when the U.S. was attacked on 9/11, you'd better believe we retaliated.

Remind me, what nationality were the hijackers on 9/11 ?

JS: Mostly Saudi Arabian.

And how exactly did the U.S. retaliate?

JS: Well, we bombed the shit out of Afghanistan and Iraq, that's for damned sure! Even started a few ground wars for good measure.

How did that work out, overall?

JS: Well, Afghanistan turned out to be literally unconquerable, as every attempt in recent history has proven. Iraq became a long, dragged out bloodbath, but I'm pleased to report that after American and British forces left, it stabilised for a while before becoming an entirely different bloodbath. That's progress, if nothing else.

And what about Saudi-Arabia?

JS: Well, they still sell us a shitload of oil! 


So, to return to the subject of Israel: In your analogy, Israel has been attacked by a much smaller, weaker force, and you advocate an American-style reaction of "bomb the hell out of unrelated, innocent people."

JS: Well, "advocate" might be a little strong. But we're certainly not going to criticise anyone else for following our lead. Especially not people who pay us money.


Next up, I talked to Mohammed Al Arab, a spokesman for Hamas, the millitant Islamic party in charge of the Gaza Strip.


Mr. Al-Arab, thank you for talking to me. How would you say the current conflict is going, from your point of view?

MA-A: I think the Japanese Emperor Hirohito put it best after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when he said that "the war situation has developed not necessarily to [our] advantage."

I see. What are your plans for the immediate future?

MA-A: The plan remains much the same; to crush our enemies and eradicate the state of Israel.

And how do you plan to accomplish this, exactly?

MA-A: We're pursuing a vigorous policy of throwing stones and launching occasional rockets.

And how is that working out in practical terms?

MA-A: Our casualties in the current conflict number over a thousand. But at least we've killed an estimated 42 Israelis. It's a marathon, not a sprint! 


 Finally, I talked to the Israeli spokesman, David Goldstein.


Mr. Goldstein, thank you for your time. How do you respond to accusations that your actions against Gaza amount to the wholesale slaughter of innocent people?

DG: Well, I would object to the term "wholesale."


Do you agree that Israel's current response to the situation has been somewhat excessive, given the fact that as a state, it's much larger, richer, better equipped and better armed than Palestine, and is using these resources to attack an area not much bigger than a large city? An area Israel itself has already prevented people from leaving?

DG: Not at all. Israel has every right to defend itself against threats made against us.


True, but if you were six foot eight and a toddler threatened you with a NERF gun, and you punched his head in, would you not agree that this was excessive force given the situation?

DG: What ethnicity of toddler?

Never mind. Moving on, does it not bother you that your so-called "targeted" attacks have so far leveled schools and hospitals, and killed many innocents and children? 

DG: We were assured by the West that we had the exact same, pin-point accurate targeting systems they used against Saudi Arabia after 9/11.


That might explain a lot.


Having spoken to such prominent leaders, there was one question I wanted to ask that seemed pertinent:



How do you justify your actions?

Johnny Spokesman, U.S. Ambassador: We feel vindicated in knowing that God is on our side.

Mohammed Al-Arab: We know that God is with us.


David Goldstein: We are sure that we are God's chosen people.



 God was unavailable for comment.