I am livid

People often ask me what sort of person I am, whether I am a ‘glass half full’, or ‘glass half empty’ sort of person. I inevitably respond by making it clear I am the sort of person who would never serve anyone half a glass of anything, and I expect to be treated the same.

Who gives out half a glass of drink anyway? The tight bastards. I can imagine the first person to ever to ask this utterly shit philosophical question was merely short of booze and looking for a way to justify short changing their guests.

“Hang on, this glass of beer seems to be missing a quantity of liquid.”

“Ah yes!” responds the completely inadequate host “But the question is, do you think the glass is half empty, or half full?”

“Are you taking the piss? You’ve run out of booze again haven’t you?”

“No, I am merely interested in determining your philosophical outlook on life.” 

“Get fucked! I knew we should’ve had gone to Dave’s for poker night. This is fucking shit.”

Don’t be a tight arse, fill up everyone’s glass.

I have often considered it strange that discussing someone’s potentially violent death is often seen as a form encouragement.

“Oh go on, you could get hit by a bus tomorrow!”

This phrase has always struck me as slightly threatening, especially from my mate Dave, what with him being a bus driver.

But why does the phrase have to focus on such a painful demise anyway? Perhaps we should all try and soften it a bit, “Oh go on, you could die peacefully in your sleep tomorrow!”

See? That’s a bit more pleasant, isn’t it?

It’s not as if alluding to being hit by a bus is particularly accurate either, statistically speaking. You are much more likely to die of some sort of hereditary condition, heart disease or cancer than being hit by a bus.

If someone wanted to encourage me to do something I wasn’t planning on doing, then they would be much better off referring to one of the more believable terminal illnesses, as then I might at least consider the merits of what they are proposing. If they were to start off with the bus thing I could not help but point out the slim possibility of such an outcome (unless it is Dave in which case I just look to clarify his shift times).

I don’t do politics.

This is a deliberate move to prevent people from realising how ill-informed I actually am about world and state affairs.

That said, a few months ago a couple of friends of mine sent me a link to one of those e-petitions on the Internet. Although they had a slightly vested interest in the subject, as they work for Innocent Drinks, I thought it was a very good point they were making, and so I signed it.

This is what the petition said:

“At the moment, all food (including things like hotdogs and crisps) is subject to a zero rate of tax. But people who want to make a healthy choice and buy smoothies and juices get taxed 17.5% VAT. It’s a simple step, and, as more and more people get their fruit in liquid form, it could make a big difference. Our research shows that at least 500 million more portions of fruit would be consumed each year if this happened. Since we all know that eating more fruit and veg is essential to being healthier, it makes sense to help people make positive choices.”

Makes perfect sense, right? You could even swap the VAT over to the junk food if you wanted to avoid a loss in revenue. Just imagine how much a hot dog at the cinema would cost if the DID add VAT.

Finally this week the official response came out on the website. You can read the whole thing here.

“Dietary based taxes were considered by Derek Wanless in ‘Securing Good Health for the Whole Population’ -published in 2004. The report highlights a number of difficulties of principle and practice in any attempt to use the tax system to influence diet.”

It’s a bit difficult? Really? That’s the excuse you are going with? “It’s a bit harder to do than we’d like, if we’re honest”.  Difficulties of principle? The principle I struggle with most of all is that good food is taxed, and the shit food is not.

“Furthermore, European VAT rules require that in most cases, the same VAT rate is applied to all competing products. This limits the extent to which any new reduced rate could be targeted on the most healthy fruit drinks.”

Fucking hellski. So, not only do you consider it ‘difficult’, but it is European basically telling you what to do anyway. And yet again with the ‘difficulty’ in targetting only the most healthy fruit drinks. Well, here’s a suggestion. Why not reduce VAT on a any drink that is made from 100% fruit or vegetables? How’s that for a clear division on what does and does not merit a VAT reduction?

It seems that if you want to use the ePetition site you have to ask for a change that is both easy for them to implement, and requires little change. Perhaps someone should start a petition for them to carry on exactly as they?

Dear [manager at a charity to which I contribute on a monthly basis, but do not like to talk about],

Hello.

I am sure from your records that you have already identified me as a monthly contributor to your worthwhile charity. Yes, it is a modest amount. But I am a modest man, the sort of man who would never publicise my chartitable donations on a popular Internet weblog.

I am writing in connection with a number of communications I have had from yourselves in the last few months. Firstly by post, where you politely asked if I would be willing to increase my direct debit to offer further help with the great work that you do.  I already give you the money that could be spent in the pub on a pint and some delicious corn-based snacks each week.  So, as I am a man of modest means, I politely declined by disposing of your request in an ecologically sound manner.

You wrote again a month later, asking much the same. Again I politely declined, and recycled.

Then you phoned me. Or rather, an operative from a call centre phoned me, to ask if I would be willing to increase my direct debit. I made it perfectly clear that I would NOT be increasing my monthly donation, due to reduced circumstances, at which point your employee said, “What, not even by a pound?”.

I ask you, as a philanthropist, would you consider increasing your donation to a charity that appears to be spending more and more  of its donated money targeting existing contributors for further funds, rather than on the cause for which it was established?

Let me be more explicit. I am happy to donate, as I currently do, to your charity.  I think [it] is a good cause. But I am concerned that my money is merely funding unsolicited mailshots and call centre begging programmes.

This is not why I give you my quite-easily-earned-actually money.

I have made my position clear. I will not be increasing my monthly donation. As such, I am informing you that if I receive a single further request to increase my monthly donation, I will consider it waste on your part and I will immediately cancel my direct debit and move it to a charity which spends a greater proportion of its funds on its stated cause.

I do hope that this does not happen, but you have been given fair warning.

Regards,

Mr. Angry.

I am a big fan of evolution. If there was a Facebook fan page for it (like there is for this here website, ahem), then I would definitely join it. I am such a big fan of evolution that I am sometimes disappointed when I find out that animals have evolved certain abilities that I would like to have, like seeing in the dark as well as cats, or swimming really fast like sharks. Licking your own genitals might seem like a nice evolutionary benefit at first, but I imagine that if we had evolved that particular ability, then the path of human evolution might have taken a slightly different route. We would probably still be living in caves, but we would be blissfully happy.

“Invent fire? Maybe later on, when I’m properly clean. Cleanliness is next to Godliness you know.”

Overall we have been dealt the better hand though, and it is going to be really amazing when we evolve the ability to blow things up with our brains like in Scanners.

One well-evolved ability I am quite pleased to have missed out on is a dog’s sense of smell. I can think of nothing worse than knowing when Fat Jim, a quarter of a mile away, has farted. It would be truly disgusting. Even more disgusting than the text updates he usually sends me, “Oh God that one could strip paint!”.

Which is why I do not understand how animals, and in particular dogs, are so enamoured with the smell of ass. It really does seem like the first thing they check. A shiny coat, bright eyes and clipped paws are all well and good, but it is the whiff of anus that really seems to close the deal. I simply do not get it.

There must be an evolutionary imperative for this, surely? Perhaps it is a way of weaning out the dogs that enjoy Indian food, or those that scrunch instead of wipe. I don’t know.

So why has our sense of smell not evolved in the same way? If it had, then a trip to Selfridges would be fraught with the danger of being sprayed with essence of ass by passing perfume dispensers. We would be more turned on by a trip to the public toilets than the cosmetic counter at Boots. And this is absolutely positively definitely not the case with me. I get horny as hell in Boots.

Arses generally do not smell that great, and though I am no scientist, I would put good money on the fact that any dog sprayed liberally with Paco Rabanne would find it hard to score with the bitches. He would be mercilessly ridiculed by the other dogs.

“Jesus Christ Fido, you smell like shit, well not shit, that smells like ass, which I luuurve. You smell like those tall hairless freaks that feed us. And are you wearing eye-liner?”

In most cases evolution is pretty difficult to beat, as proven by the fact there is very little in this world as beautiful as a female boob. Except maybe two of them (but one is fine if you want to send in pictures, I am not fussy). So if the animal with the most heightened sense of smell is so obsessed with the smell of ass, why aren’t we?

Drunk people are funny. There is no escaping this fact. I realise that much of the humour they bring to the world is unintentional, but that does not make it any less valuable.

As the weather has been improving a little bit of late, and with the lighter evenings, it seems that midweek drinking is again on the rise. And with it incidences of alcohol-induced hilarity.

Just last week I saw three ‘youths’ being ejected from a pub on the High Street in town. Nothing unusual in that you might think, except it was about 8:30pm and they were all utterly arseholed.

The really amusing part was when the ring leader then turned to face the quite-enormous-actually bouncer and took what could best be described as the Karate Kid stance.

“Come on then!” shouted inebriate number one.

I had to stop and watch. My friends could wait. The prospect of seeing a chav-on-the-town torn limb from limb was far too much to pass up.

“Go home, before someone gives you a beating.” replied the bouncer, perfectly calmly.

The lead chav then did what I suspect in his head resembled the finest moves of a particularly intimidating Fourth Dan Karate Black belt. In reality, to those of us fortunate enough to witness the act, it was more like watching a desperate man fighting with a wasp caught inside his jumper.

Now out of breath, and unbalanced, he finally relented, and with a parting shot of, “You’re lucky you’re a chicken mate!” at the bouncer, he was gone.

I live by the rule that if you are going to start a fight when you are drunk, you must ensure it is with someone at least as drunk, if not more so, than you. It is a very simple rule, and has prevented me from having my arse handed to me on a plate on several occasions.

I would love to know if a drunk ever won such a fight? One where he is both drunker, and weaker than his opponent? I picture a scene where he is all flailing arms and wild kicks as he luckily takes down the nineteen stone judo instructor. I can imagine his reaction, “I fucking KNEW it, I AM invincible!” shortly before being mown down by a passing bus.

Drunk people are hilarious.

When I was at school, we had plenty of thick kids around. I know this because I was considered to be of ‘well above average’ intelligence. When I was ten a teacher told my parents that I should start bringing in a newspaper as there was little more they could teach me.  For that to be the case there must have been some really fucking stupid children around me.

However, it is extremely rare that we hear parents describing their children in such terms. Yes, I am sure you all have high hopes for little James and Felicity, but let us be honest here, the world needs the trolley collectors and shop assistants. Otherwise I would have to carry two baskets around with me and would spend ages looking to find where the bread has been moved to this week. It is a fact that simpletons make our lives easier.

So why not admit the truth. Your child is a bit of a half-wit. We are not necessarily talking about them being eat-their-own-elbow stupid, but we both know they are are never going to medical school.  There are far too many excuses for vacuous behaviour in my opinion, such that a simple explanation of blatant stupidity is regularly ignored in favour of Attention Deficit Disorder, Learning Difficulties, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia etc. There are a million conditions that the modern parent can cling to as the reason their child is not excelling at school.

But why can’t it be that they are simply ‘a bit stupid’? It happens. There are many, many stupid people out there. The fact that Big Brother is in its ninth year is testament to this fact.

Each year when the exam results are published, and the relative performances of local schools are compared, why can’t we have an honest Head Teacher come out and say, “You know what, we have an excellent staff, we work hard, and we did everything we could, it’s just that we had a particularly stupid bunch this year. Lightening doesn’t strike twice, so come back next year when I am confident we will score more highly.”

So come on, who is honest enough to admit they have a relative who is just plain stupid?

I really hate it when people put ‘lol’, or some simpleton derivation thereof, at the end of their sentences.

It tends to read a bit like an instruction telling me to do ‘a little lol’ after reading what they have written. Unfortunately, much like my younger days when a meal would be put in front of me with the warning that, “You’ll eat it, and you’ll like it” my actual reaction tends to be the exact opposite. I am a bit of a rebel like that.

I tend to find that the longer and greater the emphasis of the lol, the less lol-worthy the actual comment. In fact, I can not remember a single funny thing I have ever read that had a lol at the end, unless it was done in an ironic or sarcastic style, ala Scaryduck. He can keep on lol’ing all he damn well likes.

I would be much more likely to respond appropriately if the culprit added a picture of themselves doing the actual lol at the end of the sentence, rather than leaving a simple verbal instruction. I say this as I have a sneaking suspicion that despite writing lol, they are not actually lol-ing themselves at the time of writing. They are more likely to be crying themselves into jabbering wreck at the pathetic state of their miserable existence. Well, we can hope.

Humans are quite complicated creatures, and sometimes we need more than an explicit instruction in order to solicit a particular response. Otherwise my love life would be improved overnight simply by adding at the end of the act, “Now you do orgasms!”

The first lol in the comments goes on The List.

So here, after a little while longer than I had planned, is the second I Am Livid podcast.

Featuring special guest Fat Jim.

It is 35 minutes of idle chat about Heath Ledger, Princess Diana, The Pet Shop Boys, having sex with fruit and animals and other equally high brow topics.

As it is quite a lot longer than my first effort, it would help if you would get the podcast from iTunes (if you use it) either through the buttons on the top right of the sidebar, or by searching iTunes for I Am Livid.

I am off snowboarding for a week, so feel free to ration yourself to five minutes a day for the next week and I will see you all in seven days.

 

 I am livid - Podcast 2 [37:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (510)

I am ill, so rather than a proper post I am going to share some pub chat with you.  The following are a few things recently claimed in the pub as being 100% verifiable fact. I do not have time to look them up, so I am just going to assume they are all true.

Gianfanco Zola has three testicles and only nine toes.

The Alan key was invented by Alan Titchmarsh.

If you tip out the plasma from inside a TV into a bowl you can build a weapon more powerful than military issue hand grenades.

Snorting pepper has hallucinogenic properties.

Scandinavians have hollower bones than most other Europeans.

Lenny Henry is a closet Nazi sympathiser, and his marriage to well known racist Dawn French is merely a an elaborate cover.

The pilot episode of Inspector Gadget was written by Professor Stephen Hawking.

Kerry Katona is allergic to all frozen foods. Except Yorkshire puddings and cake.
Jeremy Kyle is the illegitimate child of Bob Holness.

I have a hangover.

A really bad one.  I am also lacking both the inspiration and inclination to write anything at all.

Normal service will resume tomorrow, Alka Seltza permitting.

Blog years are a bit like dog years. Except they are longer, much much longer. On average a blog year is like twenty real ones. Which puts me firmly in my forties, and in the midst of a mid-life crisis.

I could have tried a sabbatical. Or tried being nice for a change. But no. Instead I decided on something of a Living-TV-style makeover. A pretty fucking severe one, even if I say so myself.

There have been a couple of changes in the background, which you should not notice. My RSS feed is now burned through Feedburner, which should not affect anyone, but new subscribers can use the buttons to the right to get the feed through the RSS reader of their choice. This means I can do more with the feed in time (multimedia folks!), but I can also track you lot much better and therefore massage my ego in times of sorrow.

As well as being my friend on Facebook, there is now also a button to subscribe to the Podcasts in iTunes, for those of you that have iTunes. I am currently trying to convince Fat Jim to appear in the second one, but he thinks he sounds a bit nasally, so I will continue to work on him over the next week or so. Watch this space.

There are also some new buttons at the bottom of each post, which you can make disappear if they are annoying you, but they make it much easier for you to tell people how wonderful I am. I know how hard it can be trying to recite URL’s over the phone to all your friends. So this one is for you, loyal readers.

Unfortunately, due to cunting spammers getting hold of my email address (and my spam filter still letting through fifty spam emails a day, despite it also stopping over a hundred), I have had to create a new email address, which I have included on the right. Take note if you are one of my very infrequent correspondents.

And I know.

It is a bit..well..RED, isn’t it?

I am obviously new to ‘design’, and so, despite pinching bits and pieces of code from all over the interwebs, it is quite possible I have fucked this up massively. If something appears wrong to you, or doesn’t work as expected please let me know. Unless you use Internet Explorer, in which case, get a proper browser!

I like to think of myself as a man of the world. Someone who is willing to accept the individual tastes of people very different to himself.

However, there are a number of pastimes, hobbies and activities which leave me completely baffled as to their levels of popularity. I simply fail to see even the slightest attraction in them, and sometimes, normally in the wee small hours, I wonder if it is just me that does not get it?

Or maybe I am completely right, as usual, and what I am witnessing is really just a case of the Emperors new clothes?

Take the opera for example. I have been once. I went to watch Puccini’s Madam Butterfly in an open air amphitheatre in Verona (that is in Italy for the heathens among you). It was a beautiful summers evening, and I have been told by opera aficionados that this should have been a truly life changing experience, yet I was bored rigid. It was the night of a thousand years as far as I was concerned.

I will grant you that some of Puccini’s songs are good, but I’d rather listen to the CD to be honest. People will try and tell you that opera ‘is about the drama though’, but you only have to flick to the back of the programme to see how it ends. You don’t get that at the local multiplex when you go to see the new Will Smith film. Plus it was all in Italian.

Another pastime I fail to understand peoples affection for, is horse racing. The sport of Kings? Well no, in reality it is a sport based on running races for really big dogs ridden by men in tight-fitting brightly coloured silk outfits. It is all a little bit homo erotic for my tastes. So thanks, but I’m really not interested.

And finally, topiary. The ‘art’ (and I use the term extremely loosely) of fashioning farmyard animals out of hedges. Really. People spend actual real cash money on getting people to turn their bushes into a cocks. An utter waste of time and effort as far as I can see.

Is there anything you just don’t get?

They say you can learn a lot about yourself in a crisis. It is at times like this that the false bravado and fake exterior we routinely put on show are stripped away to leave the real you exposed for all the world to see.

I am not afraid to say, that as the coffee lurched its way directly towards my lovely new Macbook the real me sqealed a bit like a little girl on a particularly scary ghost train ride, who has inadvertently sat next to Gary Glitter.

In cases of liquid spillage, the first few seconds are vital (I have subsequently read on the Internet). The very helpful Wikihow website gave me some excellent advice. Albeit about 24 hours too late.

1. Turn the machine off immediately. Remove power cable and the battery.

I ran around my flat shouting, “Kitchen roll! Kitchen roll! Where the fuck is the fucking kitchen roll!?!”

2. Turn it upside down to prevent the liquid seeping any further into the machine.

I gave up on the kitchen roll and went upstairs to get a new toilet roll from the airing cupboard.

3. Clean up any part of the spill you can see.

After a couple of minutes cursing the extensive layers of impenetrable wrapping retailers put around the toilet rolls these days, I was finally doing the right thing, though there wasn’t much to wipe up any more.

4. Disconnect and remove any and all external devices.

I breathed a sigh of relief as the machine appeared to be still alive (having completely ignored points 1, 2 and 4). The one fairly significant problem was the watermark that appeared to be running down the screen, on the inside (see here for a picture of it).

I decided to Google ‘replacement screens for a macbook’, and as the prices in both dollars and pounds appeared before me, I became more and more nauseous with each site I visited.

I am now learning to live with a watermark.