I am livid

Due to a prolonged period of injury, which has prevented me playing football, I have developed what I guess you could call a ‘Christmas Tum’. It is just a few extra pounds normally associated with a couple of weeks of partying, excess food, and little or no exercise.

As it is not Christmas yet, despite what the windows at Woolworths tell you, I have decided to try and get rid of this ‘tum’, and so have started going for a run in the mornings before work. Nothing too strenuous, two or three miles tops. So far, this hasn’t been too bad, and getting up 30 minutes earlier hasn’t killed me yet.

However, Sunday was my flatmates birthday so we went to the pub for a few beers and some food in the evening. This meant that my head was still a little fuzzy when I awoke early on Monday morning and clambered into my running gear. Still, I got dressed, switched on my iPod, and off I trotted on my familiar route.

Fast forward about ten minutes, and we get to the point where my plan began to fail. Badly.

Guinness is a wonderful beverage, and I won’t have a bad word said against it. However, it does have some rather unsavoury effects on the digestive system. These effects came to the fore at precisely 7:13am, whilst I was 1.5 miles from my flat.

These effects did not gradually catch-up up on me though, oh no, they just appeared from absolutely nowhere (like Fat Jim when I’m at the Bar) and instantly began chuckling at my misfortune.  Had there have been some kind of warning I could’ve taken some preventative measures before leaving the flat, or even decided against a run (any excuse to avoid running is readily accepted).

Unfortunately there was no forewarning.

So here I am, in a big park, a little way from home, with no-one around, with The Prodigy telling me to Smack My Bitch Up, and with an urgent call of nature beckoning me more loudly by the second.

Tell me, what would you have done?

I go to visit my parents.

I haven’t lived at home since 1993, but I still enjoy going home every now and again. For the food and the relaxation. They often ask me how it’s going in the “City”, and I tell them I don’t live in the City. They’ll ask me how the world of Computers is, and I’ll explain I don’t work with Computers. It is fun being home.

During one of my recent visits my Mum was in the kitchen and there was a knock at the front door.

“Would you get that Angry dear?”

“Sure.”

I went to open the door and was greeted by a young man of about 25 with a clipboard and large bag of paper.

“Hi, I’m here from Kleeneze, I’ve come to pick up the catalogue and take any orders?”

“Mum, some guy is here from Kleeneze about some catalogue they gave you?” I shouted back towards the kitchen.

“Oh, I threw it out” replied my mother.

“She threw it out, sorry.”

“Oh, you’re not supposed to do that. They’re £1.25 to replace.”

I was considering paying the man myself, but decided that you are never to old to learn a bit of financial discipline, so I made my way to the kitchen rifle through my mothers purse.

“You should be more careful Mum, £1.25’s don’t grown on trees you know.” I said whilst opening her purse.

“I didn’t ask for the catalogue, they just post them through the door, it seems a little unfair I have to pay for it?”

And suddenly the realisation dawned on me. He was trying to rip off my Mum. This was very very bad for him.

“Hi, I have here your £1.25, but first I’m going to see the evidence of my Mum requesting your catalogue.”

“Well, it says on the back here that you should leave it out for us if you’re not going to be in. We need to collect them back.”

“I can read. I want to know where the evidence of my Mothers request for a £1.25 catalogue is”.

“It’s only £1.25 if you don’t return it.”

“She didn’t ask for it. You posted it through her door, and now you want to charge her for this unrequested junk mail. I believe the legal term for what you are doing is ‘extortion’. It carries a prison sentence you know.”

“So you’re not going to pay for it then?”

“No. I am not. And I would like to make clear that if you ‘deliver’ a catalogue here ever again I will personally shove it up into your anus. And I might even take it out of the cellophane first so that it chafes a bit.”

“Err, OK.”

And off into the night he went, probably to demand money with menaces from some other elder lady, the cheeky twat.

I went back into the kitchen to tell me Mum that I had defended her honour, and that the thieves from Kleeneze won’t be back, nosiree.

“Did you order some of that CarShine stuff? Your Dad says it brings the car up lovely.”

Honest to God, as each day passes I realise why homes for the elderly are so popular. Does anyone know if they will they take women in their late fifties?

Number 2 in a series two (and possibly only two) of posts about people who’ve come to this site looking for things that aren’t actually available. At least at first glance.

So this weeks winner is the gentleman (and I’m going to assume it’s a gentleman) from Norfolk who came here from Google after searching for “Wanking makes you smell”.*

Firstly, were you looking for some sort of confirmation of a pre-existing condition, or was it just in the name of research? I am curious.

Second of all, and perhaps more disturbing, was that this site was on page 35, so before getting here, you waded through 34 pages of smelly wankers.

I applaud your tenacity.

* I recommend regular showers (not cold). Do not let it be said I do not try to help people.

All the recent furore about the wearing (or not, as the case may be) of veils by Muslim women has left me chucking like retarded Minister at a Cabinet meeting. I can’t claim to fully understand the issues, but it has made me giggle nonetheless.

Do I think Muslim women should be allowed to wear veils? Well, yes. But only the ugly ones. No-one wants to be forced to look at the rancid mug of some hairy faced Muslim woman. The pretty ones should be forced to wear bikini’s.

It doesn’t say an awful lot for Muslim men if the women have to dress like that so as not be considered a sex object. Do they have no taste? Do they not notice any discernible difference between the lookers and the munters? I see a fat woman in a veil and I really can’t help thinking she’s wasting her time covering herself up. I wouldn’t look twice at her if she was prancing down the street in open-crotch laderhosen, so the veil is a little over the top to be honest.

I am also surprised no-one has mentioned the difficulty in understanding someone wearing a veil. What happens if you’re in a room with more than one of them? How do you know which one is talking to you and which one you should respond to? Eye contact is very important, more so when it’s the only thing you can see. This is situation fraught with potential political incorrectness, but I don’t think they would be happy put their hand up to speak. Even if they did put their hands up, surely it all sounds a bit muffled?

“I’m sorry I can’t hear what you’re saying”

If this was repeated often enough, how long would it be before the veils came down?

“Oh for fucks sake you deaf cunt, what I said was….”

Actually, are Muslim women allowed to swear? Perhaps they do it already from behind the veil, and then pretend it wasn’t them? Next time you see a veiled woman pointing at the woman next to her, it might be because of a swear word and not a fart as you would have first thought. We should be careful when making such sweeping assumptions and not be so intolerant of other peoples cultures.

I also think that if the veils are to continue, and it appears they are going to, that they should include some sort of name-tag so that I can tell them apart. They can use nicknames if they like, I don’t mind. It would just be for distinguishing between the ones I know and the ones I don’t.

Or maybe they could use coloured veils like Power Rangers?

I told you recently about how I have become a technical “go to” guy for my friends. Well, I wouldn’t want you to get the wrong impression about me, as I also have quite a bit of brawn to go with these brains.

Which is why Amy, she of the not-very-online online account opening experience asked a favour of me by MSN messenger.

“Are you free to lend me some muscle tonight?”

Of course, I was wise to this shameless ploy to massage my male ego, but I decided to help her anyway because I am a nice person. With lots of manly muscles.

“Sure, what do you need?”

“I’ve bought a running machine and need some help getting it upstairs.”

Ha! The feeble girl cannot lift a little bit of exercise equipment! Oh the irony! I did not point this out though, as that would be cruel and uncaring, plus she has an extremely violent temper and access to lots of knives.

“Sure, no problem, I’ll pop round after work.”

I made my way round expecting to leave the engine running for what could obviously be no more than a two minute job. Upon entering her front room however, I changed my opinion, as I was confronted by a box big enough to house a Somalian family of ten. At first I thought it was a cardboard garage. Alas, no, it was the running machine.

“It’s really quite heavy, I told you.” she said whilst watching me try and move the box just an inch in any direction.

“Would you like a cold drink?” she continued whilst I got redder and redder in the face.

I began to suspect that perhaps the box did in fact contain a Somalian family of ten and so looked at the packaging for clarification, where it read, “Team lift only” right next to the sign that said 129kg.

I am not very good at converting weights, but I think 129kg equals one very fat fucking bastard.

It took me and my flatmate 30 minutes of extensive “To me, to you, to you, to me” Chuckle Brother type hilarity (for Amy), lots of sweating, heaving and red faces (for me and flatmate) before finally getting it into the spare bedroom.

If she ever moves house she’s going to have to leave it where it is.

As part of a recent rock’n'roll weekend, I had Saturday night ‘in’ with some beers and a DVD. I wandered to my local DVD outlet (not a Blockbuster, as other DVD retail outlets are available), to browse the current selection.

I like films, I always have done. When I was student I worked as a projectionist in my local cinema, so have always had a natural affinity to the film industry, I’m sure that it is just bad luck that has prevented me becoming a global megastar. As a result I eagerly anticipate new films, and very much like to see what is available.

The store has an area titled, “New Releases”. Which I think is pretty self explanatory. If it’s been released in the near past, it will be here. Or so I thought.

“Hi, I wondered if you could tell me where the new releases are please?” I asked the young lady behind the counter.

“They’re over there on that wall,” she replied not looking up from her Hello magazine.

“Err, no, actually, that’s just about every film you have, what I’m specifically looking for are the new releases.”

“They’re all over there”

“Mixed in with everything?”

“Yes”

“You do realise that you’ve got copies of Mr & Mrs Smith, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and Scary Movie 3. All of which have been out for over 18 months. This is not Newly released.”

“Well it’s all relative isn’t it?”

“Relative in what timeframe? Compared to human evolution? The age of the Bible? The time it’ll take you to read that magazine?”

“No need to get Sarky, if you want something just ask.”

“That’s the point, I don’t know what I want, I just want to browse what new films are out now without having to look at every single DVD you have.”

“Well, they’re all over there on that wall.”

“OK, I want to look at the classics section, you know, films that aren’t Newly Released. Where might I find those, or would they also be ‘over there on that wall’?”

“They’re over there on that wall.”

Needless to say I watched Sky that night and drank myself into a stupor.

I have never been particularly good with distances.

“It’s only a couple of hundred yards away” generally means it’s more likely to be half a mile or so. “A couple of miles” will invariably mean at least ten, and “I’ve really no idea” equates to a really really long way.

This is why clear road signage has always been extremely helpful to me, as I can normally perform some rudimentary calculation to figure out how far away I am from my ultimate destination.

“The last sign said 72 miles. I’ve been driving for about 15 minutes so I guess I’m only a couple of hundred yards away now.”

Nowadays you can get these helpful distance markers from other numerous sources. For example, did you know that British Airways helpfully categorises it’s destinations based on how many airmiles away they are.

Of course, I have now learned that an airmile is actually pretty similar to an Angrymile, in that it is a fairly fluid concept and bears no relation to the actual distance to be traveled.

I have tried to get a flight to New York using my airmiles, of which I have 27,072. Unfortunately I was told by the online computer that this is an insufficient number to get me to the US. Now, as we have already shown, my estimation of distances isn’t great at the best of times, but surely 27,072 miles is enough to get me to the Sun and back? In Business Class? Well no, it isn’t. New York is actually 50,000 airmiles from Heathrow, and for some bizarre reason it is 100,000 if you want to fly in Business Class (I guess they follow the scenic route).

No wonder we are so rubbish at Geography and GPS systems are so popular.  Someone needs to buy British Airways a Tom Tom navigator.

I did not realise that this was happening last week, until Murphy mentioned it in the comments box (good dog). I find it a bit strange to think that someone from 1000 years away will be reading this, and thinking of me like some sort of caveman.

So I have decided to retrospectively write about my day last Tuesday for the kids of 3006.

I started out at 8am on the train in London. A train was a big metal tube that rumbled along the floor packed full of people trying to get into London. You won’t know about London, it was a city that sank about 800 years ago. Ask your Great Aunty Tequila about it, she was probably around when it happened.

The train was late, which happened a lot back in our day, and no, we couldn’t just teleport to our destination, we had only just learned how to put porn on the Internet. Practical uses for technology were literally decades away.

Upon arrival at London Paddington (a bit like a space station on the ground where the metal tubes full of people emptied and refilled their cargo), I found the tube network was closed. The tube was a big network of underground tunnels that were populated by more metal tubes which we used to get us from A to B (yes, like the rats before they learned to read and took over France). Really, you have no idea what it was like before you could beam yourself all over the Universe.

This meant I had to walk all the way to Knightsbridge, in the outside, which took me about 45 minutes, about the same amount of time it takes to upload the National Curriculum into your brain. Walking is that thing we used to do with our legs, before they evolved away, that made your body move in a particular direction and left you a little warmer than usual.

I know what you’re thinking. “Why would you go outside you mad fucker?” But it is OK, because in my day the Sun was a bit smaller, and we had a thing called Ozone which meant going outside didn’t instantly vaporise you. It just gave you cancer and stuff.

I was quite out of breath by the time I got to Knightsbridge, and a little bit sweaty, so without auto-drying clothes like in Back to the Future II (it will be 10 more years before we get them), I had to use a hand dryer to make myself look respectable. I had to do this you see, because back in the day, we used wear clothes made of cloth, and we had to do them up ourselves. We didn’t get to our pet nanobots to construct a new outfit each hour. Truly, it was like the dark ages.

I then sat in a meeting, with other real live people, where I wrote things down with a pen, onto paper (do a search for “Trees”, we used to mash them up and write on them), so I could read the notes back to myself later. I know, I know, you are thinking I must be some sort of masochist creating all this work for myself, but we couldn’t mind-meld for a few more years so we had no choice. Honestly, this is what we used to do when business people still had real meetings.

Anyway, these are some of the mundane aspects of my day from Tuesday October 16th 2006. If you want to know more about me and what my life was like about a thousand years ago, then try Googling for “Britney Spears fifth husband” or “Who killed James Bunt”.

This is the first in a new series of posts dedicated to those freaks of the Interweb who’ve visited this site from referring search engines, whilst looking for the most bizarre, and sometimes disconcerting, topics.

The inaugural award goes to the fella/lady-fella from Taoyan in Taiwan, who was looking for a “Lady sexer”.

Well pal, I don’t like to blow my own trumpet (and can’t, well, not without losing a rib or two), but I wouldn’t really define myself in such terms.

So, my question to you is, did you find what you were looking for?

After my recent resounding success in the field of DIY, I have decided that now is the perfect time to take a few baby steps forward from hanging a mirror, so that I can stretch myself a little bit more. This is how we learn.

So, I have decided to convert my loft.

Now, I know that some of you may be thinking that this is akin to leaping from applying a band-aid to performing open-heart surgery, but that is just a silly metaphor, so you are wrong.

After a brief measuring session in the loft space, I went to B&Q to buy some loft insulation and floorboards to lay. I was able to avoid the seductive glare of the power-tools section, despite one very old man looking at me like he wanted to call me out on my drill-draw speed (he had a lucky escape as I’ve been practising and am very quick indeed now). I proceeded to select enough insulation and boards to fit one half of the loft, paid for it, and left to begin my second ever DIY job.

Upon my return to the flat, I again checked the measurements (they had not changed, so much for the Earths constantly changing crust). I then made plans on where to begin laying the boards, and where I would store them whilst working.

I carried the first set of boards up the ladder and into the loft, carefully stepping from one joist to the next, as I had been practising that morning. However, I had not calibrated my steps to take into account the extra weight of the boards (they are surprisingly heavy), and began to slightly lose my balance. My first ninja-like reaction was to support my balance by placing my left foot on the space between the joists. Unfortunately I don’t have a ninja brain to match my ninja instincts, and it wasn’t until my foot was through the ceiling that I was able to correct this minor miscalculation.

Luckily, I had almost fallen into my flatmate’s bedroom, so there is no hole in my ceiling. I texted him to tell him the good news, but as he is well aware of my DIY skills, he simply replied “You’re still stuck there, right?”

He thinks he is funny.

Anyway, the plasterer is coming at the weekend to rectify this minor blip, but I will not let this slight delay deter me. Next weekend I’m planning on installing the powerpoints and lighting.

What could possibly go wrong?

I went to see Lucy Porter at the local arts centre last Friday, she is funny and tells good jokes. Plus she was wearing a basque in one of her publicity shots so I thought it would be good for us to go see her in the flesh. You know to listen to her tell her jokes and stuff.

I was a little late to the pub beforehand, so had to snaffle down a couple of quick pints before the announced 8:15 showtime. At 8:40 I was still sat waiting for it to start, with a bulging bladder.

The compare was quite good, and told me about the race riots a few hundred yards from where I live that I’d not actually heard about. He then introduced an unexpected support act, a nice Aussie girl whose name escapes me.

She told a few jokes and rubbed her boobs a lot. She was quite good.

As her set came towards it’s conclusion, my desperation for the loo got worse. I decided I would rather miss a couple seconds of boob rubbing, than the main basque wearing comedienne, so got up and went to the loo and to get a round in.

My wee was more ferocious than normal, as I was forcing it out so as not to miss any more of the boob rubbing comedy than I absolutely had to.

I struggled back to the seats with two pints of Grolsh, a bottle of wine, and a bottle of Bud and sat down, relieved, to hear the last joke from the compare, and then he concluded,

“So, be back here in twenty minutes for tonights star attraction, Lucy Porter!”

The lights came up, and people looked to make the most of the unannounced and unexpected intermission.

“We should all go to the bar now, oh, and Angry, you missed a lot of booby feely”, said Fat Jim.

‘Nice one’ I thought.

If there’s going to be a support act, and an intermission, please say so before I guzzle numerous beers and have to sneak to the loo missing some potential booby feely.

Oh, and after all that she didn’t even wear a basque. Disappointing.

The law of averages suggests that someone reading this is going to able to explain something to me. Why, are DJ’s so revered in the clubbing scene?

I am utterly blind to the reasons for the adulation of people who can work an old-fashioned record player. Oh, I’m sorry, my mistake, I meant people who can work two old-fashioned record players. At the same time.

Will we now have to applaud people who can use a Betamax or ride a Penny farthing?

I’ve been in clubs when it’s “gone off” as I believe the kids say, (and no, it has nothing to do with a fire alarm, so I speak with confidence when I say that if someone shouts in your ear, “It’s going off!”, then running like a girl to the nearest Fire Exit is not the right thing to do). It was all because a DJ has put on an appropriate song, or ‘track’ as the cool kids call it.

The track is then met with whistles and smiles all round and comments like, “He’s da bomb man”, and “this is all going off!”, with the crowd on the dancefloor practically fellating the DJ like coked up porn actresses, and the women are not much better.

My attempts to point out that he has simply put on someone else’s record always seems to fall on deaf ears, though with the volume in those places that’s hardly surprising (I am not old by the way, because I know that’s what you are thinking. I am twenty eleven, which is very young in this day and age).

I can understand people blindly following a band, which is a group of people who have written their own songs and play proper musical instruments. I can almost understand the adulation afforded the people who write songs by pressing buttons on computers. What I simply cannot stand is why we worship someone who puts those records on to play.

As Robin said a few days ago, if you’re going to the cinema, you don’t make the decision on what film to see based on who the projectionist is, do you?

Apparently, a top DJ gets paid thousands of pounds for a couple of hours playing someone else’s records. Surely this at worst a theft, and at best plagiarism? Though, for a couple of grand I’d give it a go, I mean, how hard can it be?

I read this over the weekend, and had to read it a couple of times before I fully understood what it was actually saying.

It appears a Pharmacist refused to give the morning after pill to a 37 year-old woman, on the grounds that it offended his religion. The fact that he was a strict Muslim is actually beside the point as far as I’m concerned. I’d feel the same if they had been a strict Catholic, Druid or Scientologist.

No-one, and I mean no-one, has the right to determine what you should, or should not do, provided what you’re doing isn’t illegal. And taking the morning after pill certainly isn’t.

My feelings on this matter weren’t helped by the fact that apparently the Pharmacist did nothing wrong.

“…he referred to a “conscience clause” in the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain’s ethics code, saying: “It states that if supplying the morning-after pill is contrary to a pharmacist’s personal, religious or moral beliefs they are entirely within their rights not to supply it.”"

Well fuck me backwards. If they don’t ‘feel like it’, they don’t have to dispense it?!

Is this true of all medicines? “I don’t want to give you this Ibuprofen because you’re fat and if you get rid of your headache you might spend more time in public offending my eyes.”

What about other service industries? What if you were refused an item of clothing because you weren’t deemed attractive enough? (This is directed at you lot, as it would never happen to me).

In truth, I’d have had much more sympathy for the Pharmacist if he’d rammed a handful of pills down her throat claiming she was likely to bring a hideous looking child into the world. Even though we do have the Royal family for that.
So Mr Pharmacist, do what you’re paid for. If you don’t like doing it, do something else.

I realise that not everyone can be blessed with Rain Man style total-recall like myself. There are people out there who forget things really very easily indeed. Your girlfriend forgets where she put her keys, your Dad forgets his glasses are actually on his head, and Bill Clinton forgot that he got noshed off in the Oval Office.

Everyone forgets things now and again.

I can only guess that this is the reason why many of todays TV drama’s have the short ‘catch-up’ at the start of each episode reminding everyone what has happened so far in the story. Generally speaking, this is just the salient points, the key plot lines and major incident milestones. It covers all the things that anyone without a major brain injury would have remembered anyway.

I can almost forgive this waste of air-time, as I know a few stupid and forgetful people, and I realise that their enjoyment of the programme would be compromised without reminding them every week of why they are watching it. A lot can happen in a week, and in some cases a week can be a very long time. Say, if you were in solitary confinement, hanging from a cliff or on holiday with Jade goody.

However, what I am having a great deal of trouble coming to terms with is when these reminders appear not after a week, but after a two minute commercial break. Which is precisely what happened when I was watching Best Mans Speech on ITV2 the other night. It was about a professional comedian, Sean Hughes, helping two best men prepare for their speech.

I noticed that after each and every commercial break they had a ‘quick’ recap of what had happened so far.

“Here’s Bruce, we met him 25 minutes ago, he’s going to be his brothers Best Man, which is what this programme is about, in case you’d forgotten. You remember when he went to look at that horse six minutes ago? Well, here he is again, looking at that same horse. Again. It’s not that he went back, we’re just showing you the same visit again, cos it wwas good, like. Nice Horsey. Also, we made him try and sell bottled water on the street, so here’s a clip of him doing that again. I know you saw it when it happened 20 minutes ago, and again after the fist break 10 minutes ago, but we thought it was good so lets see it again. Don’t worry if you’re going to make tea, we’ll show him selling the water again in about 8 minutes.”

Do they honestly imagine that viewers are sat there thinking, “What is this? Was I watching this? What is it about? Who am I? Where am I?”

Is there anyone out there who is genuinely capable of forgetting every aspect of a television programme in the time it takes to have a sit down wee? If so, I am more than a little concerned for them.

If this trend is going to continue then you’ll really only need to tune in for the last quarter of an hour to enjoy the programme of your choice.

Without the recaps that programme could easily have been aired in 20 minutes. Sean Hughes, you owe me half an hour.