What does TB stand for...?

In this case perhaps Total Bastard, although I would like to go further and state this for the record - Andrew Speaker, you are a cunt. After travelling on two transatlantic flights whilst diagnosed with a particularly bad strain of contagious, highly drug-resistant, tuberculosis you have the gall to express your dissatisfaction at the way the authorities have handled your situation. Well, I'm sorry but your dissatisfaction is nothing compared to what others could have felt if they had caught TB because of your selfish actions.

I understand the fact that you were geting married and going on honeymoon, and you didn't want to ruin the 'best day of your life'. But did you ever stop to consider how many other peoples entire lives you might have ruined? The fact that no-one appears to have contracted TB (yet) is irrelevant - they could have. In fact - and I am aware of how extreme this sounds, but it is true nonetheless - you could have started an epidemic.

I say it again. Andrew Speaker - you are a cunt!

Cheers m'dears!

Orange you glad I'm currant with the news...?

Stand back Erin Brockawhateveryournamewas, the proles have a new hero! Or two, to be precise. A couple of New Zealand schoolgirls have just exposed a globally recognised brandname as a bunch of shifty, devious truth-benders intent on peddling us rubbish in the guise of 'healthy drinks'... and all through their school science project!

It all began when they came up with a theory that cheapy juice drinks would contain less vitamin C than the more expensive recognised brands, such as Ribena. You know, the company that proudly states that their drinks are made from blackcurrants which contain 4 times more vitamin C than oranges. What they found, however, is that Ribena actually had around 4 times less than its cheap rivals... in fact, it contains only a negligible amount of the stuff! They were so convinced they had made a mistake that they did the same experiment again... and same results.

Technically, however, Ribena were not lying. You see, blackcurrants do contain a lot more vitamin C than oranges, pound for pound, but most of it is dispersed in the process of making the drink! At first the girls were fobbed off by the company, until the media took an interest. Now they are being 'thanked' for their assistance in rectifying an oversight... hah!

Incidentally, if you eat processed foods that claim to be high in vitamin C, be wary. As it has such a short life span itself companies need to use a hell of a lot of preservatives to keep the vitamin 'fresh'. Not exactly good for the health concious... no, you want your daily dose? Get some fruit down yer!

Cheers m'dears!

Suck on my Bah-Humbug!

Well, hells bells... Only one post this month? Fuck me, I am getting bad at this.

Sorry this is late but... no wait, I'm not sorry at all. I've been in hospital and not one of you cunts brought me any grapes or magazines with crappy personality quizzes in them. And don't use that old "we didn't know you were in hospital" crap on me because it just won't wash. If you'd cared enough you would have made the effort and found out. And before any of you wags get started I was not in for a liver transplant. Har-de-fucking-har! Anyway, as I don't especially dig Christmas (especially the overblown crap that goes on here) and my family is halfway around the world anyway hospital wasn't a bad place to be for the last few days. Lots of attractive nurses for one thing... and if Christmas does have one perk it's the mistletoe! Wha-hey!

But I digress... what I meant to say was Merry fucking Bah-Humbug to one and all. And I'll see you all (in the online not-really-seeing-you-but-you-know-what-I-bloody-well-mean sense) the other side of Hogmanay!

Cheers m'(rein)dears!

Talking absolute crap...

As befitting someone who has been largely avoiding solid foods (excepting a regular intake of peanuts and assorted crappy snack items) in favour of a mainly liquid diet (we're not talking soup or protein-shakes here) I have, perhaps unsurprisingly, developed a rather free-flow evacuation procedure when it comes to my, uh, "waste material". Now, this is something which I always used to dread - the kind of internal motion that would creep up on you unawares, masquerading as a smidgen of trapped wind, and then flood out to surprise you in the most inconvenient of places. But what is nice about this present "irregularity" is that it is, in fact, pretty regular - therefore no getting caught with your trousers down (bad analogy, when I think about it).

In fact, this new high-speed dumping process has also left me with much more time on my hands. We're not just talking the reduction of the effort usually expended in the pushing, the flexing of those anal muscles - no, what is particularly pleasing is the minimised wiping effort. No scrubbing with endless reams until it's just as red as a baboon's because God, in a fit of cruel humour, decided to give me a better beard on those cheeks than on the ones usually reserved for such an honour. Instead one delicate 'swish', like those seen in kitchen roll adverts, and the minor mopping-up is complete.

And the final triumph? The fact that I no longer have to do either the "repeat-flush technique" or the "bent-coat-hanger-down-the-U-bend maneuver", as was so frequently required during my previous level of consistency.

How long this faecal heaven can last, I am unsure, but for now I'm as happy as a pig in sh... oh, wait - another bad analogy...

Cheers m'dears!

Hey, it says "random" in the title, doesn't it!?

There is a woman who I see often as I wait for my bus to work. She looks a bit odd, a bit like a Chinese version of Anne from Little Britain ("Eh, eh, eeehhh!!"). And she walks backwards. For weeks I thought about this and finally decided it must be some kind of weird bone disorder that makes her legs unable to function forwards, and I felt very sorry for her, only able to see where she'd been, never where she was headed. And it must be dangerous too. And then one day, as she was walking along, she suddenly turned around and started walking forwards... go figure.

I just had it pointed out to me that a certain bottled water manufacturer has a sense of humour. I always wondered, having lived in countries where the tap water is perfectly safe, just what the obsession was at paying what seems to me over the top prices for a bottle of H2O... but then if you spell Evian backwards...

I think I may have another bout of hem... haemorr... heamer... *sigh* piles coming on. Or should I say 'pile' since I only ever get one at a time. I got my first one at the tender age of 20, but have been grape-free for about 3 years now. I think they are the reason I will never understand Sarah's obsession with anal beads...

Yesterdays date was 6/6/6, which freaks the shit out of some folk but not over here. The Mandarin word for "six" sounds a lot like the word for "lucky" or "good" or something so yesterday was a bumper day for weddings. Although I worry a little about any births that may have occurred.........

Apparently Wayne Rooney has been spotted kicking a football. Apparently the whole of the English press are having multiple orgasms over the "event". Apparently I couldn't give a flying fuck what that arse-faced twat does.

I once dated a girl who thought I was romantic because I said her eyes looked like eclipses. I wasn't being romantic. She had blue irises (what the fuck is that plural? Irees? Iri?) and around the pupil there was a kind of thin but very uneven golden ring. I wasn't trying to get laid, I just said what I saw.

King Darius the Mede wasn't called Darius at all but Darayavahush. Typical Anglicization of a name. I wonder how many kids out there know that. I wonder how many kids out there know that there was a guy called Darius that wasn't simply famous for being a twat on Pop Idol, or whichever wank show it was that he appeared on.

Oh, and by the way... Feet really piss me off. Especially YOURS!

Cheers m'dears!

Self-harm - not so cut and dried.

On Brewski's current post he mentions people who self-harm... he brings this up in his usual 'what the fuck is going on?' kind of way (quote: "And what's with every cunt self-harming these days anyway? The world has fucking left me behind pal.") and in the midst of a typically humorous post, so rather than bring everyone down by getting all serious in his comments box I have decided to write on the subject here...

Now, I have worked with (in a mentor / student capacity) and been friends with many people who have or still do cut themselves and to my mind they fall into three distinct categories:-

1) The ones that genuinely want to kill themselves. These are the ones I have met least, partially because... well, you don't know who they are until they do it. Only those who fail in the attempt get brought to your attention, and only if you are close to the individual or work in some kind of medical or social field where you would need to know. Your average person in the street would be oblivious to this type of self-harmer as they tend to keep the scars well covered to avoid detection.

2) The ones who feel like they are letting out the pain. This is kind of like a medieval style blood-letting and as well as the psychological idea of "bleeding out the bad" there is some degree of physical truth in the concept that calmness and "lightness" comes with a loss of blood. This type of self-harmer does this purely for themselves and is usually embarrassed about it. As a result they also tend to keep their scars covered to avoid detection.

3) The attention-seekers. Okay, that is a harsh phrase to use to describe them but it sums it up. They are maybe crying out for help, maybe simply wanting someone to notice them. Some just want to look 'hard', although I have not met many like that. These tend to be most obvious, the most noticeable to other people, as they ones rarely cover up their scars - the point of them is to be seen. Whereas types 1 and 2 will often be left with permanent scars type 3 will rarely cut that deep... of course, there is always the chance that - if ignored - a type 3 will graduate to type 2 or 1.

Okay, there is certainly some generalisation there and my intention is not to offend any readers who themselves self-harm. I do, however, base this on my observations and conversations with self-harmers, some of whom have been very close to me.

The basic fact is the people who we most hear about and see, the people who Brewski describes as "slicing 'I am a cunt' into your pallid skin, you poncey emo fucks you", they tend to fall into category 3. But there are so many more people out there who do this than we realise... your best friend; your kid; your secretary; your teacher... I guarrantee that all of us have people in our lives that cut themselves, yet we don't even know.

As usual your thoughts are welcomed...

Cheers m'dears!

For those who are interested here is a link to The National Self-Harm Network of the UK. For those outside of the UK there are other sites that may be more use - you just need to do a search.

XX or X-Why?

We are living in a time where more is understood and accepted about gender identity crisis than ever before (although, as in any so-called "minority rights" case we still have a journey ahead of us). Back in the UK I was good friends with a wonderful woman who had been born a man. To be frank, and despite my protestations of being 'right-on', I found it hard when I first met her as she was in a transitionary stage and some days she would arrive to work dressed as a man, others as a woman, but once she entered the final stages of her transformation and settled as a woman it was not even remotely difficult to accept her as such. And for her to have finally done this in her late '50's, having already fathered two now grown up children in a previous marriage, took tremendous courage.

That was not my first experience of meeting a trans-gender person (I know of two before that, but who knows - there may have been more) but it was the first time that I had taken the time to develop a friendship. And now, of course, living in South East Asia (where male-to-female ops are cheap and plentiful) , I regularly see women that used to be men... they can often be spotted as just being too damn perfect looking to have been born that way, although many of them, sadly, end up selling the body that they just bought in order to pay the loans that facilitated their surgery. Despite being able to accept that some people were not born the gender that they feel they are, however, I struggle - a lot - with this...

At seven years old your body is still in the very beginings of development, and so is your mind... not to metion your personality. I know it is a dirty word, but youngsters do go through "phases"... Heterosexuals sometimes have a "gay phase" where they experiment; likewise I know homosexuals who had a "straight phase" in their youth. Hell, I remember questioning my sexuality way back when I was around 12, and my gender frequently through my teens and even my early twenties. But how many of us knew who we were at seven? What if he changes his mind...?

I've been pondering over this story for the better part of a week and still I find I cannot actually articulate why I think that bringing this boy up in this way is any more wrong than bringing him up in the "conventional" way. But it still sits uneasy on me... as always, your input would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers m'dears!

Bone idle...

The good folk from London's Metropolitan Housing Trust got a bit of a shock earlier this year whilst attempting to collect 3 years of back rent from an errant tenant. Having received no answer at the Wood Green residence they decided to drill the door open, discovering in the process a large pile of unopened mail... you can guess what's coming next, can't you!

Investigating the bedsit the Trust employees discovered the occupant lying on her back, dead. This was no slightly-smelly-yet-reasonably-fresh corpse, however, and nor was it a vomit inducing rotting mess. No, after three years in front of the television (still on) and basking in the helpful-to-decomposition glow of the central heating (also still on) poor Ms Vincent had become little more than a skeleton - so much so that the only way to positively identify her was by matching her dental records with a holiday photograph.

Of course an inquest was launched after she was discovered (in January this year), although the police are so far not speculating anything other than death by natural causes. The scant information that has so far been confirmed to the deceased's sisters and other family members, however, essentially indicate that she died sometime in February 2003.

Whoah there skippy.... back up a little.... Sisters? You mean they hadn't fucking noticed!? No-one had thought, "Oh, haven't seen old Joyce for a while. Wonder what she's up to?". Three days, yeah. Three weeks, sure. Three bloody months, even.... but three whole fucking years! And I thought MY family was close....

Actually, can we back that up even further... Television? Heating? Still on!? For Christ's sake, if I missed a payment for three months I'd be cut off! And I bloody wish my landlord would wait three years before coming around for the rent I owe him...

That not enough for you? Read the report here..., you gossip-greedy bastards!

Cheers m'dears!

ps - three years of daytime TV... is that purgatory or simply hell?