CAT | Open Letters
A couple of years ago I got a short-lived, but reasonably lucrative gig writing jokes for a mobile phone company. I know this sounds amazingly glamorous, but in reality meant a lot of staring out of windows, eating biscuits and creating puns so bad they physically hurt to put into words on the screen.
The constraints were simple, the joke had to be of twitter-esque length in characters (a bit less, actually), and not be too rude. Sounds easy eh? It wasn’t. Mostly it was making up horrible puns, or tweaking old jokes into a usable format. I soon realised however that they weren’t interested in quality, they wanted groaners.
Well, I was clearing out an old email box the other day and found many of my submissions. It made me wince. Did people really pay for this? Yes, yes they did. I can only imagine the disappointment of the customer who had paid 50p or a pound only to have one of my one-liners sent to them by return. Consider this an open apology to everyone who ever paid for one.
So, for reasons of catharsis, and because so much time has gone by that I think it’s OK to put them here now, please find some of the worst jokes I have ever written. Do not judge me. Please.
- My Grandma suffered a massive seizure yesterday. I didn’t know she could even LIFT that much Heroin.
- A puppy born without an anus is taken to the vet. “Can you help?” The Vet replies, “I’ll give it a crack.”
- I like to win at cards, which is why I only play Snap with stutterers.
- Which Sith Lord always crosses rivers at their shallowest point? Darth Wader.
- My girlfriend wants to retrain as a steamroller driver. I’m not going to stand in her way.
- When I was younger I used to collect Panini stickers. I had them all except the ham and cheese melt.
- Gary Lineker described England’s last match as a game of two halves. Personally, I found it a game of eight pints
- I’ve got this mate who keep putting laxatives in my drinks. With friends like that, who needs enemas.
- A necrophiliac was caught trying to dispose of the evidence to passing strangers. It was a dead giveaway.
- People who say “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”, have clearly never arm-wrestled a stroke victim.
- My Dad is an Imperialist. He hates people who still use feet and inches.
- My girlfriend suggested using toys in the bedroom, the sex is still rubbish, but now I’m much better at Scalextric.
- When it says test your smoke alarm regularly, they don’t mean with a series of small domestic fires. Firemen don’t like that.
- My nephew wants a pirate outfit for Xmas. He can dress up all he likes, he’s never going to look Somalian.
- A man in a big car is said to be making up for a tiny penis, so what should we make of a woman driving a Mini?
- A guy was interested in my car. I told him it did 100 mpg and never broke down. He didn’t buy it.
- Being fat sounds so negative. I prefer to look at it positively, being immune to Anorexia.
- Why say “turn a blind eye”? Surely it’s the GOOD eye you should turn. The blind one can look wherever it wants.
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The human body is a wonderful device. It has all sorts of clever ways of telling you when something is wrong with it. It can make you sick, it can make you pass out, it can even make it feel like your heart is about to leap from your chest in the search of a few fleeting moments of rest. Which is how I felt as her words were shouted at me.
“Okay, that’s it for the warm-up, now we can get started!”
This was my third circuit training class since a friend convinced me it would be a good way to keep fit during the summer with little or no football available. You know, when you write it down like that, it seems like a perfectly sensible, even logical argument, doesn’t it?
Unfortunately, ten minutes in, unable to breathe and with the early signs of a cramp developing in my left buttock, it seemed so completely illogical a statement that it would probably drive Dr Spock to self-harm.
From this point on, my thoughts turn merely to damage limitation. You simply can not leave a circuit training class without looking like a wimp, and although my puce-faced appearance probably already classified me as such, I was going to try and retain what little dignity I had remaining.
I worked my way to the back-left corner of the room in the hope of being out of sight of the female instructor, as she began detailing the next thirty minutes of “military style fitness training.” However, it is difficult to ‘hide’ when the walls on three sides are covered by floor-to-ceiling mirrors.
Being shouted at by a woman to ‘work harder’ and ‘put some effort in’ is deeply unpleasant if you’re not sporting an erection. It’s not all that pleasant if you do have one, but at least it’s probably being made up for with other things.
Fifteen minutes in and I genuinely thought there was a danger I might die. Twenty-five minutes in and I began to fear I might not.
The final fifteen minutes or so are something of a haze. I have read that the mind can sometimes block memories of particularly traumatic experiences, and I am pretty sure that this is what happened here. Though I am quite sure that I am the first person to ever suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder from a circuit training class.
“Good work, did you enjoy that?” asked the instructor as I staggered from the studio.
“Yes, see you next week,” I lied.
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Scars are cool. I heard that somewhere once. I’m pretty sure the words I heard next were, “Chicks dig guys with scars”.
I’m also pretty confident that what they meant to say was, “Chicks dig guys with scars – as long as they weren’t earned in a ridiculously embarrassing manner.” And let us be clear, I got my new scar in a ridiculously embarrassing manner. I told the story on the podcast, but as I’m not putting them up here any more, I thought I’d tell the story the old fashioned way in the style of our forefathers, with my fingers via a keyboard into a computer and onto the Internet.
It started with a morning visit to the bathroom, nothing unusual in that – we all do it. This was how I noticed I was about to run out of toiler roll – which would have created an entirely different blog post. So, I went onto the landing and to the airing cupboard where I keep spare loo rolls. To help paint the picture you are no doubt mentally building, I keep the loo rolls on the shelf directly below where I keep the iron. The iron which I had no put away properly the day before.
As I reached in for a new roll I accidentally brushed against the power lead for the iron, which knocked it from it’s precarious position and sent it tumbling down onto the top of my head. Such was the rotation of the iron that it was pointing direction downwards by the time it reached my head, ensuring that the only part that made contact with my skull was the pointy bit at the front. It would probably have hurt a lot more if more surface area had made contact, right?
I shot backwards with my hand at my head and let out a yelp. And some swears. Then some louder swears. I took my hand away to notice it was already covered in blood. This was not good.
I went back into the bathroom and began mopping blood from my head, but still it continued to seep out of the top of my head. By dabbing the site of the wound with my new toilet roll, I noticed what appeared to be a puncture mark of about 1cm in diameter. I did not know what to do, so I did what any sane person does in the midst of a medical emergency. I asked Twitter.
“How big should a cut on your head be, before you consider going to the hospital to get a stitch – serious question…?”
Twitter was not much help. Mostly people just wanted to know how I had done it for their own idle entertainment. The Internet can be a cruel place at times.
I was pretty sure that all the blood was quite misleading in terms of judging the severity of the injury, plus I could not think straight due to the blinding headache and I was feeling quite nauseous and really quite faint. So I decided that instead of wasting valuable NHS resources I would just to hold a sheet of kitchen roll to my head and have a little nap.
Eventually, the bleeding stopped. The following evening Cliff and Ben came round to record the podcast, and continued the theme of people off of the Internet giving me little or no sympathy – you can here their reactions in this podcast episode.
So what I would like a new excuse, please. I am going have this mark for quite some considerable time I imagine, and when questioned I would like to have something really cool to explain it away. Preferably something that doesn’t involve the use of the words ‘loo roll’ or ‘Morphy Richard Turbosteam’.
Suggestions welcomed…
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I realise that hardly anyone visits these pages these days, seeing as I never write anything any more. But the truth is, I have been writing, just not here. My other pet project, NewsArse, has been keeping me very busy indeed, and we’ve now released a book of the top stories from the year – Amused By The World.
Headlines you will find inside include:
“Successful Earth Hour delays inevitable global catastrophe, by an hour”
“World pig population shows signs of man-flu pandemic”
“New MPs Code of Conduct to include every possible definition of the word ‘thievery’”
“Ryanair to charge customers for breathable air”
“Americans protest for the right to make insurance companies richer”
“Cockney violence marred by footballing outbreak”
It has even been described by Stephen Fry on Twitter as “Good” (this is genuinely the highest accolade you can get on the Internet these days, honest).
If you are the sort of person who gives people books for Christmas, maybe you’d like to give them this one? You know, if you want to, like. No pressure. Honest. You can buy NewsArse the book – Amused By The World or click the image below to go to the book’s page.
It is finally here!
Today, you can log in to Twitter and post your bad jokes adding the phrase ‘#badgag’ at the end. This hashtag will let other people, including non-twitterers, follow the day’s gags as they appear.
If you don’t use Twitter, you can use the search function to read any joke posted that adds the #badgag hashtag. Click here to see what I mean.
It will refresh automatically giving you a stream of bad gags throughout the day. If this goes badly, that link will take you to about 20 of my jokes, and nothing else. If it goes well, then you can expect to see bad jokes from the finest minds of the world’s Internet users.
In the unlikely event that you see any good jokes, feel free to re-tweet them.
Table below should show a rolling feed of the day’s gags
I have discovered this brilliant thing on the Internet called Twitter. It is a bit like text messaging, but to everyone on the Internet. You should really go and have a look, it is going to be massive when everyone else finds out about it. I am on it here. I have got over 160 followers now, which makes me probably the most popular person on there.
I was chatting to the excellent Scaryduck on it yesterday about a magnificent penguin joke he had told, when he came up with a most excellent idea.
Bad Gag Monday.
So, this Monday, 23rd March 2009, Twitter will be the official home of the Bad Gag. The good news is that all the jokes will have to be mercifully short, so it won’t take much effort to read them, or in fact write them.
Which is where you come in.
We’ve all written or told jokes worthy of a loud groan. As hard as it is to believe, I have too. But now we have somewhere to put them.
On Monday, you can log in to Twitter and post your bad jokes adding the phrase ‘#badgag’ at the end. This hashtag will let other people, including non-twitterers, follow the days gags as they appear. I must have at least 20 ready to go that I will release during the day.
If you don’t use Twitter, you can use the search function to read any joke that adds the #badgag hashtag. Click here to see what I mean. It will refresh automatically giving you a stream of bad gags throughout the day. If this goes badly, that link will take you to about 20 of my jokes, and nothing else. If it goes well, then you can expect to see bad jokes from the finest minds of the world’s Internet users.
If you are wondering what constitutes a bad gag, this is one I will be posting on Monday:
“I’ve got this mate who keep putting laxatives in my drinks. With friends like that, who needs enemas.”
B’dum tsh.
So get thinking. Monday is closer than you think…
This morning, struck by the sunshine and the bathroom scales’ most recent verdict, I decided to go for a run.
I used to go running at least once a week, which combined with playing football and reasonably regular visits to the gym, kept me in shape.
But the scales have been telling me something very different recently. I am currently just over a stone heavier than I was a year ago. I blame the event of my twenty-fourteenth year. And the fact I haven’t played ninety minutes since October. And I don’t go to the gym very often at all anymore. And Tesco giving me vouchers for my favourite biscuits all the time.
So this morning I decided to go for a run.
There is a short route from my flat which takes me a short way into Windsor Great Park and lets me run back towards the castle. It is scenic, and just over two miles. I would take this route when I was in a hurry, didn’t have time to exercise properly, or had eaten a big meal fairly recently. It is a 16/17 minute route, maybe 18 if I’m feeling sluggish.
When I’m fit.
This morning it took me 24 minutes. And I had to stop to catch my breath.
Twice.
You have no idea how unhappy this makes me.
I now sort of understand why fat people do not exercise. It is a fucking god-awful experience when you are not fit. It is actually painful. Almost half a hour after getting home I was still wheezing.
The new regime starts here.
And I’m sorry Tesco, you can send me all the clubcard vouchers you like, but no more chocolate cookies for me.
This week has been a little bit busy, I had a few posts in mind, one including a visit to the post office, which is always worthy of a few hundred words.
But now I’m thinking I might just talk about it on the podcast tonight as it’s a lot less effort, and I can then spend my lunch hour eating and reading the papers instead of typing it up on here.
I am officially a lazy bastard now, aren’t I?
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It’s been a bit quiet around here recently, hasn’t it? I know that, you know that, so we might as well come out and say it.
It’s not you, it’s me.
It’s because I’ve been playing away from home. Sorry about that. But like a kinky adulterer, I am now hoping to get you involved in the action.
I have been working a new website. There, I said it. And now I’d like you to come and have a look at it.
It’s a spoof news website, parodying UK Internet news reporting. I already have a small team of writers contributing ‘news’ articles for it, and who knows, maybe you will become one of writers too?
So without further ado, I present NewsArse.com. Where we never let the truth get in the way of a funny story.
Drug pushers are targetting ever younger people in order to generate demand for their products. It is a shameful practise, and one we should all be doing our level best to eliminate.
But how do you spot a drug pusher? And how do you know if a young person has been taking illegal mind-altering narcotics? First up you should watch out for people in authority trying to get you to take drugs just because of their role in society. I am talking of course about DENTISTS and their so-called MEDICINE!
And what about the effects to look out for? This helpful video should be a guide to all young parents looking to diagnose a junky child.
Do you remember last week, when I went through a bit of boring admin, and I told you all that once a year I tend to get a bit bored and like to play with things in the background?
Well, I decided to have a little play with things in the background.
And I fucked it up MASSIVELY.
Or rather, Feedburner fucked it up massively.
By using Feedburner’s swish new email subscription service (thank you to the eight of you who have subscribed so far) I invalidated the podcast feed, so those of you who have subscribed in iTunes, or one of the other podcast services, would no longer get any updates.
Long story short, I thought changing the feed name to something more memorable, like Iamlividpodcast would fix it. Which it did. Hooray for me!
Until someone pointed out that all of the subscribers to the old feed would now disappear and would no longer get any updates. Booo for Feedburner!
Any normal person with a long history of covering their tracks would simply change the feed name back to what it was, and disable the email notifications, thus ensuring you would never know about their fuck up. Alas, I tried that, but it wouldn’t let me (it says the old feed name it is already reassigned, which it clearly isn’t).
So this is the position in which I find myself. Cliff and I have a podcast, but no-one will be able to listen to it (unless you listen to it through this site). If you happen to be one of our few hundred listeners, we would much appreciate it if you could update your subscriptions to this feed http://feeds2.feedburner.com/iamlividpodcast.
If you know anyone else who listens, but doesn’t read here, perhaps you could pass on the message? Feel free to miss out the whole EPIC FAIL bit, perhaps you could say it is a new and improved service or something. Big me up a bit. Lie. I don’t care.
You might get this message more than once in the coming week as I will be updating the feed details all over the place, so I apologise in advance if you keep hearing what a fucktard I’ve been.
Just when we were starting to get the hang of actually making the podcasts as well…
“Why is he still outside?” I asked. “He’s been out there ages.”
“He’s scarifying the lawn.”
I had never heard the term scarifying before, and it sounded absolutely terrifying. I had images of my friend jumping out on the lawn shouting “Boo!” or running around with a sheet over his hard pretending to be a ghost or member of the Ku Klux Klan. I wasn’t sure of the botanical benefits of such an activity, but I am about as far from green-fingered as it is possible to be (brown fingered?), so how would I know?
As it turns out, my assumptions were completely wrong. Scarifying is merely the process of getting dead stuff off the the grass by poking it repeatedly. In fact, it would be fair to say that it is possibly the least scary activity on the planet. Unless someone has hidden land mines in your garden, which would admittedly up the adrenaline levels a notch or two. Thinking about it, I would actually pay good money to watch someone scarify a minefield.
It got me thinking about the person that came up with this name for the activity of “clearing up dead shit off the grass”. They were obviously trying to sex it up a bit. Or possibly even trying to impress a woman. Women are well-known for reacting positively to men who thrive in dangerous situations; firemen, secret agents, inner-city schoolteachers etc. so what better way of making your potentially dull vocation sound more exciting than by giving one of it’s more boring activities a dangerous sounding name?
The more I think about it, the more I think these professional gardeners might just be geniuses.
Once a year I look at this website and think, “Jesus it’s looking tired, perhaps I can jazz it up a bit?”
I then spend a few hours teaching myself basic CSS code, testing a few things, fucking it up royally, before finally admitting that I am never going to be a website designer. So I look at other ways to spice things up in my relationship with I Am Livid dot com. I could try role playing, I could do that thing it only let’s me do on my birthday, or even have a bit of an open relationship for a while, but that doesn’t appeal, as I am the jealous type.
So instead I tinker with a few things in the background to give myself the impression that I am a proper “hands-on” kind of web publisher.
So tinker I have. This really doesn’t make much difference to you if you are reading this post through a browser with the website up in front of you. Little will change for you, until I can find a decent widget-friendly Wordpress theme I can steal borrow.
However, if you are one of the majority of people who now reads this through the RSS feed (the number of you varies around 350-400 depending on how boring I have been recently) then there are going to be a few minor changes. Firstly, all of my feeds (posts, podcasts, and comments) are all now burned through Google. Everything has been redirected so you don’t need to change ANYTHING, the posts will still be there in your RSS reader of choice until the day you unsubscribe because, “he’s gone all shit”.
What you might notice is that every few days an RSS feed item from here will have some Google adverts at the bottom of it. This is not an attempt to extort money from you, but merely a way to try and make this website pay for itself. Last year the Google Ads I carry above the comments section paid for my hosting and about five pints at Christmas (thanks for that). However, with extra costs from hosting the podcast, I am now losing a few quid every month. It’s not a lot, but it would be nice if this little corner of cyberspace at least paid for itself. It is bad enough admitting to people that I am a blogger, without admitting I am a loss-making one at that.
I have never been one for those virtual tip jars, Paypal donations or Amazon wishlists, as I don’t expect you to fork out actual cash money for this drivel. You’re not stupid. Plus, it is slowly dawning on me that all publishers are blind and a book deal is pretty much out of the question.
So, should an advert catch your eye, and you are interested in looking at it a bit further, I would certainly be grateful if you did so.
And finally, everything I write on here is now available via email! You no longer even need to go on the Internet to read my generally pointless witterings. There will be an email subscription box on the homepage, or if you are interested, you could just fill it in here:
So that’s about it. All will be back to normal tomorrow, or maybe the next day, as I am in London all day today until late this evening (unless some arsey cockney has annoyed me enough to give me sufficient motivation to find a web cafe).
That is all.
It is that time of year again where people give gifts and presents and hope against hope that the presents received this year are not total shite. I am beyond that of course, as I recognise that at twenty-thirteen it is unlikely I am going to be very excited by any present I receive. Unless I develop an overnight sock fetish.
Anyway, this is a quick seasonal greeting to all the loyal (I use the term loosely) readers of I Am Livid. I hope you are having a better time than I am, as the last hour has been spent discussing with relatives why a satsuma should be considered a Christmassy fruit. I will be back in the New Year, or maybe sooner, as I have just remembered an interesting Fat Jim story from a few weeks ago that I had somehow completely forgotten.
So, Merry Christmas and that.
