For Auld Lang Syne?

Friday evening and, as usual, I am wandering into a bar to check out some music and sink a few jars. This particular bar is a regular haunt, the guy strumming guitar and crooning away a friend of mine, the bar staff well versed in my preferences and idiosyncracies. It is one of those places that feels utterly relaxing in its familiarity... so I was at first a little surprised when one of the barmen called out "Hey, Binty - where did you go to uni?". Not a question I am used to hearing from these guys... usually I get the progression from "Pint, Binty?" to "Do you really want us to call the cops, Binty?" over the course of the evening. But, being as sober as I was at that point, I answered truthfully. He then pointed to the other end of the bar and my surprise level rocketed.

There, in all his slightly balder, slightly fatter glory was an old acquaintence from the old Alma Mater. I do not use the word 'friend' because I can't say that we ever particularly were, although we certainly had many mutual buddies. Yet here he was beaming at me like he was my long-lost brother... and so began the unplanned evening of reminiscences.

I would not wish to bore you with all the details (that's a lie - I have no problem boring you all shitless, I'd just rather not bore myself again writing down all the "I can't believe it's been X years"'s and the "Did you hear about whatsisname?"'s), suffice to say long-forgotten and often cringeworthy events were resurrected and old names from the past bandied about... all the while with me sitting there desperately trying to remember what the fuck THIS guys name was! At some point in the evening I managed to introduce him to a local friend and all of a sudden, as they exchanged pleasantries (and names!) I was enlightened... except that the name still meant absolutely bugger all to me.

How many times do you find yourself in this kind of situation? Okay, maybe not on a daily basis, but even if it's just bumping into a kid you once temped with for a week at some dodgy office who then talks as if you and he were founding partners of the company, or finding yourself in line at the supermarket next to the mother of the boy you sat next to in playgroup (kindergarten, for non-Brits) as she tells you every detail of his life ever since... we cannot help but get locked down from time to time by these perfectly nice, totally well-meaning, yet ultimately time-consuming (and often dull) individuals. And this is where sites like Facebook, Bebo and MySpace have become both a blessing and a curse...

Yes, I have been sucked into the mire of the Book of Face, as have several other bloggers listed here - although under my real identity of course. And it has been serving me well, illuminating me on my true past friends whereabouts and allowing me to re-establish several good relationships that had fizzled out simply because of distance and time pressures. As for the people I half-knew, I have no problem with linking up with them and checking their page once in a blue moon as it is something I can do at my own leisure, editing out the inconsequential bits that they tend to leave in when involved in face-to-face trips down memory lane. Yet whilst Facebook has proven to be a great way of keeping up to date with my friends all over the world I find myself constantly baffled by some of the friend requests I get. I mean, who the fuck are all these people? Did I really know them? Oh, right... so you were my ex-girlfriends housemates cousins friends uncle who I met for 5 minutes at a houseparty in Wigan in 1996... well, what are we waiting for! Let's be buddies!

(Another aspect I am very careful about is making sure that none of my students - past or present - are buddied with me, something which offends a few of them but I am not prepared to change my mind about... for fuck's sake, if they read some of the comments my friends have left me I would likely find myself out of a job!)

But that's all by-the-by... my half-point is really that for many people we don't stay in touch with there are reasons, even if those reasons are not ones of dislike but simply not being arsed enough. And as nice as it is to catch up and remember the good ol' days with your friends - your REAL friends - do we really want what little time we have left for making new friends and new memories to be eroded away by people and stories we had happily forgotten? And surely none of us want to simply be a contribution to some kid's pathetically sad claim to have a gazillion friends on MySpace... do we?

Cheers m'dears!

NOT an apology post.

I've been really busy, I'm afraid. Not that you are actually interested in my day to day life, but I just thought I'd let you know that I haven't forgotten about you all. I mean, I hate it when bloggers tell you all about their ultimately tedious reasons for having not sat at a computer screen trying to be witty. It's as if they are apologising for having the nerve to not entertain the rest of us, which displays a level of irony as the aoplogy posts themselves tend to have very little entertainment value. And, for gods sake, it's not as if you all want to know that I had fish heads for breakfast this morning before going to get my man-gina waxed...

Is it...?

Cheers m'dears!

A Cross Stick

Bathtime is always portrayed as a curse on the young, but when I was a child I looked forward to my Sunday evenings, splashing around with my 'toy' boats that I had made out of lollipop sticks in school. Entertainment was achieved much more simply back then, and without the need to fork out ludicrous amounts of cash. Richard Gere is being a twat again, as if anyone really gives a fuck, although the Indian magistrates who are ordering him to appear before them because of his actions are behaving equally twattishly. English is something I speak but will never be able to teach. Fucked if I know why. 'Touching cloth' is one of those expressions that inexplicably sends a shiver down my spine....

Out here, and despite the wide group of friends I have, I find it easy to feel isolated and lonely, yet I have no desire to return to the bosom of my family and find myself either unwilling or unable to maintain contact with friends I left behind. Fickle fucker that I am.

I went to a St. Andrew's Society ceilidh last night, which was interesting but tame compared with the ones I grew up attending. Never done a 'Strip The Willow' in the tropical heat before, a dance that could only have been invented in a country as cold as Scotland. Societies such as this always bring out a mixed feeling of intrigue and fear in me and whilst I cannot help observe like some stalker-ish peeping Tom I have never wanted to join one. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, yet no-one has ever bothered to explain why a person so named would wish ridicule upon himself by choosing such an alliterative occupation. It would be like me finding employment balancing books for butchery and baking businesses. Rebellion itself is strangely nothing more than an act of conformity, as every generation takes their turn to do it. 'Abba-riginal' is the punchline to a joke I was told last night, but it is far too crap for me to waste your time with. 'Trochaic' is a new word I learnt only recently, which may in part explain why I will never be able to teach English, at least from a literary perspective. In the end, does any of it really matter? Once we look below the shiny trappings we have surrounded ourselves with and see them for what they really are, will they still hold the same allure? No, of course they won't......

Cheers m'dears!

What the...?

Having had a long day of hard work followed by an even longer night of hard liquor it was perhaps unsurprising to discover the next day that exhaustion had prevented me from leaving my clothes anywhere other than the floor. And it was by no means the first time that a half eaten packet of crisps, the evidence of a belated atempt at soaking up the alcohol, appeared to have been scattered on my bedside table. Nor could it be considered unusual that my missing house keys had turned up still in the lock of the front door - although that last had only recently become a worrying development.

What was strange, however, was my mobile 'phone. My best guess is that I had been attempting to 'sleep-text' in the middle of the night. No message actually got sent and who I believed I was writing to is a mystery but upon a morning inspection of my 'phone I discovered that I had been composing a slightly bizarre message. It read like this...

"Whats ur e-mail address again? Need 2 stay in touch! Mine is +65 followed by blue, red"

And there it ended, apparently unfinished. If anyone out there has any insight into what the fuck was going on in my brain that night I would love to hear from you! I honestly have not a clue!

Anyway, enough of that twaddle. I'm off to chow down on some bits and pieces of animals you wouldn't normally consider eating all minced up and cooked inside a plastic bag that's been made to represent a sheeps stomach, all whilst enjoying the skirl o' the pipes and steadily getting bladdered on fine whisky. I probably ought to hide my 'phone first, though... Happy Burns Night to ye all!

Slàinte m'dears!

One for the Roadie...

You may remember that a month ago I wrote about the Iggy Pop rider... No? Fair enough, I'd forgotten about it myself until today when I received an e-mail notifying me of a new comment made on that post. Not that it's anything unusual to receive comments on old posts... it's just that this time the comment was from Jos Grain, the architect of said rider and roadie for Iggy and The Stooges. Which was a surprise...

Anyway, he provided me a link for his own site where a fresher version of the rider can be found (I think there are one or two additional laughs in there too)... If you haven't read the rider yet, do - it's well worth it! If you have then may I advise you to check out his site anyway... hell, it amuses me! I particularly like his weird artwork, most especially the statuette entitled "Uzi Godmother" which he apparently gave to Spider from the Pogues as a wedding present last month...

There's nothing like a crazy Dutch guy to brighten your day. Apparently.

Cheers m'dears!

Lust for riders...

Okay, I hold my hands up and admit that I am wilfully stealing from a fellow blogger here... but I just found this too fucking funny not to share. A few days back Flying Rodent posted a rider list for Iggy Pop and the Stooges... anyone out there not knowing what a rider is, let me explain -

Riders usually have two parts: the tech rider is all the PA gear the band need (and in some cases drums) and is fairly standard, unless you're only playing Damien Rice covers on a battered Spanish guitar in the Fuckwit and Firkin on a Sunday afternoon. The other half of the rider is all the stuff you can ask for to keep yourself sustained and entertained backstage. This usually starts from 'a couple of bottles of water and maybe some tea-making equipment' if you're a random chancer who has only managed to score a gig in a proper venue by dint of someone else dropping out, but can eventually rise through the inevitable alcohol requests to the likes of 11-course banquets, hookers, coke (not the fizzy), livestock and pretty much anything else a warped mind-blown megalomaniac rock star might want...

...which is kind of the position that Mr Pop and his band occupy.The thing that makes their rider list, however, is not simply the demands (of which, in truth, only one or two might appear over the top) but the way in which it is written. If I hadn't been assured by the faeries at the bottom of my garden that the Stooges and all their road crew were clean-living spiritual souls I might have suspected the influence of some illegal substance...

Below I give you a selection of the very few moments from this 18 page stream-of-consciousness epic that can actually be reproduced in short sentence format, but many of the best bits are longer paragraphs that take you off on random tangents here, there and everywhere. So if you have the time I truly recommend that you read the whole damn thing!

"...AMPLIFIERS that have been tested recently. And when I say "recently", I don't mean "Sometime in the three weeks preceding the occasion when it fell 5 meters off the top shelf in the warehouse"..."

"...TOM-TOM WITH MOUNTING. And if you can't bring the mounting to us, we'll have to send a bloke called Mohammed to the mounting..."

"...By the way our guitar roadie, Chris, assures me that the panda is not of the genus "Bear", but is actually a part of the "Pig" family. Could this possibly be true?..."

"...GUITAR (Clear and bright like the sound of jackboots on wet cobblestones)..."

"...NO TOY ROBOTS, TELEVISION EVANGELISTS, or TELEVISION CAMERAMEN..."

"...We had a lighting designer once, but he went mad so we shot him..."


I tell thee, it's fucking genius... and speaking of fucking geniuses (geni-i? geniuse?) and of stream of consciousness, it's nice to see Brewski making one of his sporadic posts...

Cheers m'dears!

Super-Scrooge

Superman - what a tight cunt. Seriously, I was discussing this with a female friend the other day (who was gushing over that new fella that played him recently - apparently he's gay though) and she mentioned about the romantic nature of literally being swept off your feet, a remark which prompted me to cough, splutter and dribble my beer. (Oh, fucking hell! I really hate waste!)
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Sure, it must seem like an incredible thing to be able to whisk a young lady off on a whim, but that kind of ability surely pales into insignificance when you realise the hard work your average tosser goes through just to take a beloved for a weekend in Bognor. I mean, say your lady friend wants to visit the romantic city of Paris... what do you do? Dip into the savings you have been putting aside for emergencies? Put in some overtime and save up? Rob a bank? Just so you can fly in the cramped confines of Cheapo-Jet Economy class and stay at a dodgy bed and breakfast in the wrong end of the city? Not old Supes! He doesn't need to put his hand in his pocket (pretty good thing really... my wallet can be uncomfortable in loose fitting jeans - where the fuck would Kal-El stick his?). He just says "hop on me feet, luv" and then it's up, up and away!
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"What's that, Lois? Paris? Yeah, why not. And how about we pop off to Rome for a late supper, then maybe catch a show in Vegas before watching the sun come up over the Taj Mahal?" And how much does this dream date cost him? The best part of fuck all, I'd warrant! Even when he's in Paris do you reckon he joins the back of the queue to pay his however many Euro's to go up the Eiffel tower? Like fuck!
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And what about in the 3rd Christopher Reeve film... right at the end the bastard picks up a lump of coal and squeezes it into a diamond for one of his floozies (can't remember whether it's for Lois Lane or Lana Lang - and, by the way, what the fuck is it with all those L's? There's alliteration and then there's plain fucking stupid!). A fucking diamond. A fucking diamond the size of a fucking golf ball, no less. I could work 60 hour weeks for the rest of my life and never, NEVER, afford something like that! Yeah, thank you, you twat. Thanks for upping the ante so far out of the reach of the rest of mankind!
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So, ask yourself girls... despite the 'buff' look, and even if you get off on the idea of a guy who wears tights (US - pantyhose) under his suit, would you really want to date a guy who could so easily give you anything that it really is of very little importance to him? A guy who, despite the potentially extravagent gifts, is essentially tighter than a duck's arse?
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....yes, I guess you would!
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Cheers m'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!

A Little Light Relief (and other not-so-tall tales)...

In Jamaica the argument over distribution of condoms in male prisons (fought between the pro-"protecting against STDs" group and the anti-"encouraging sexual activity" lobby) has finally been settled with the Government opting to allow inmates to kill each other off slowly and painfully by spreading AIDS. A poor-taste humourist might make a crack about lethal injection, but not I...

In India, however, they may want to consider banning lightbulbs rather than condoms as one inmate recently had to have one removed from his arse. Intact. Claiming to not know how it got up there (what the fuck?!) Fateh Mohammad had gone to the prison hospital with a pain in his lower abdomen. Upon its discovery (see x-ray, above) a delicate operation ensued to remove it without breaking the glass... perhaps unsurprisingly Mohammads doctor states that he has never encountered anything like this before...

In other news I am astounded to learn that research has unearthed the cause of Japans falling birth rate. Quite simply, people are not having sex. Yep, that'd do it. Various reasons are to blame (you know, the usual shit like long work hours), although maybe people are just finding each others footwear a turn-off... this is the country from which those evil flip-flops developed, after all. I have always said, right from my very first post, that those things should be destroyed - and now evidence is on my side that even if they don't play a part in Japans demographics they still fuck up your ankles (and your career).

...and I'm not even going to start about the Estonians. Bunch of fucking weirdos!

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!

Back to life, Back to surreality...

It's 1am and I'm currently standing in a dodgy nightclub surrounded by transexual whores, pissing around on the free computer to avoid catching the eye of one of the bar-stewards who like to force you into buying a hideously overpriced piss-water drink in order to justify your stay in the 'venue', whilst waiting for my friend to call and tell me where the fuck we are actually going to be meeting...

...just thought you'd quite like to know!

Cheers m'dears!

Random Tossery #01

Further to my much earlier post on suicide here is a classic example of how not to end it all. A headache you say? Hmmm, I wonder why...?

Cheers m'dears!

Oops, they did it again!

In my Churchill Statue post from a couple of weeks ago I asked for suggestions of what other unusual statues we might see... the last thing I expected was to find this sculpture so soon afterwards. With thanks to Clairwil for drawing my attention thither.

Cheers m'dears!

Absolutely Cream-Crackered!

It's been a fucking long day, so I'm just going to leave you with this....


It's from a new site called Married to the Sea by the same guy who does the Toothpaste For Dinner one I list in my sidebar. They tickle my fancy, anyway....

Cheers m'dears!

Cuddly Monsters, Bridal Goats, Rampant Lions and Mischevious Magpies!

Okay, I know I've already posted today, which is doubly unusual when you think how many days I don't post at all, but I have just reread my suicide piece and thought to myself, fuck... how about something a bit more cheery? Something like the revelation that Osama bin Laden likes hugs, or the news that a guy in Sudan was ordered to marry a goat after being caught in flagrante with it... or Scotland kicking arse in the rugby last weekend (hey, I've resisted the temptation to mention it for 3 days!).

Or how about this... I have been nominated for the prestiguous Blog of the Week Award over at Mischief of Magpies! Previous illustrious winners include the likes of Anti-Barney, Dept. of Hate and West Coast Ramblings (all of whom I voted for so I hope they fucking return the favour!). The only downside is that one fellow nominee is Mr Hynes from Bogol, whose site I very much like, as mentioned before. In case he's reading this let me say "Good Luck!"

The rest of you, however, do me a favour - Vote Tosser!

Cheers m'dears!

ps - If you haven't noticed yet there is a button down the right side for the Top 100 Scottish Blogs. I'm constantly floating in the mid-to-late-50's... If you're bored at any time, please do leave a comment there for me!

The world is full of absolute twats....

....and not just the one on the right. Allow me to demonstrate:-

Twat 1 (a.k.a. "the 'in-denial' twat")

Mr Taro Aso, Japanese foreign minister, has gone on record to state that Japan's involvement in wars at the beginning of the 20th century (including the Second World War) purely amounted to 'self-defence'. I don't know a huge amount about Japanese military history but historical sources I have come across would disagree. Just to use one single example of this unusual take on 'self-defence' take a look at Pearl Harbour. Just a pre-emptive strike, was it? Mr Aso (I wonder if that's pronounced in the same way as a bad english impression of a Japanese person saying "arsehole"?) made his comments defending the Yushukan war memorial which depicts Japan as defending itself against Western colonialists. Hey, I ain't saying the west weren't bastards who fucked up a lot of countries but this claim is completely twattish. I mean, why not suggest Hitler only went to Poland to get his ball back?

Twat 2 (a.k.a. "the bull-shitting twat")

Surprise, surprise. Fresh from receiving a remarkably light sentence from the Bali court, where she had been appearing in Muslim dress, the model-cum-Islamic-'convert' Michelle Leslie buggered off to buy some stilettos and slip into somethinga little more comfortable (emphasis on the word 'little'... and possibly the word 'slip' too). Considering the bewildering predictability of this chain of events I can't even be fucked to comment any further.

Twat 3 (a.k.a. "the suicidal-yet-in-a-rather-amusing-way twat")

Sadrine Helene Sellies had a fear of flying, and so before boarding her flight she took sleeping pills, swallowed down with alcohol. She is apparently also a big-time sleepwalker, so when (whilst half asleep and simultaneously drugged up) she decided she needed a cigarrette her brain did not register a problem at all with opening the door to step outside..... in mid-flight. She was stopped by the flight attendants, which was lucky... because if she hadn't there probably wouldn't have been any survivors to tell us about her complete twattery. She get's my vote for the next Darwin awards, although I have to wonder whether she has ruined an important plot point for 'Lost'...?

But wait, there is hope!

Amongst the chaos of twats like these appears the dim but heartening light of people with a healthy sense of realism mixed with a dash of wit... cue Mr Ozzy Osbourne, quoted this week as saying "I don't smoke, drink or take drugs anymore. But knowing my luck, a bird will crap on me and I'll get bird flu on the way home"

Many thanks, Ozzy, for restoring my faith in human kind......

Cheers m'dears!