Why I've Never Won a Caption Competition.

In the dystopian future of 3045, King Kill-o-Tron 8000 surveys the scene at his Moscow Death Square while a woman's head explodes next to him. "Good..." his circuits whisper.

(Anyone who can do better than that, feel free to leave it in the comments)

A Few Short Annoyances for a Friday.

Con Air - Specifically its slow degredation from gritty, intense drama into a run 'n' gun musclefest.

Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Con Air, I did. But I can't help but think that if it ran for another half an hour there'd be robots and space ships and that in it, Or Nicolas Cage would spend the last twenty minutes parachuting through an exploding universe while God himself played a rockin' guitar solo as Hulk Hogan scored a triple backflip slamdunk in a basket ball hoop seven trillion miles into another universe. What starts off as interesting meeting of minds and agendas in a stolen plane quickly turns into a film that Arnie would've turned down in his heyday, saying "Thur is tew much shooting in eet". I don't mind mindless action films, but when a film starts off so cleverly (And John Malkovich is fucking brilliant as criminally insane genius Cyrus), it's sad to see it resolve with OH MY GOD WE'RE GOING TO CRASH INTO VEGAS THEN DRIVE A FIRE ENGINE THROUGH A TUNNEL AAAAAAARGH BANGBANG BANG THERE'S THE CHILD KILLER PLAYING CARDS. The film suddenly shits out any pretention of being a serious film for grownups when they end up in the plane graveyard (The moment they remember the plane is absolutely packed to the fucking gills with guns and other weapons, and then just proceeds to degrade itself more and more with each passing minute, like a hooker who's not had a punter in a few weeks and has got to the point where she'll put anything anywhere for a few bob. I know you don't care about it anywhere near as much as I do.



Children of about 13 who have been allowed to your local city unsupervised for the first time.

Who's idea of 'common courtesy' is standing by the shop assistant they've decided they want to shorten the life of, who is already in mid conversation with someone, and going "Excuse me excuse me excuse me excuse me" Continuously at half a million decibels until you're forced to either appease them, or use the most potentially damaging piece of stationery you can find on their head.



People who "know their rights"

No you fucking don't. You know that you're going to go home and ring some head office and complain to some spotty sixteen year old who gives less of a shit than the people in the shop, and you'll be back in the store next week, regardless of your claims otherwise, you spineless cunt.



British Telecom

BT are absolutely, irrefutably, fucking shit at their job. Their job, for those of you who presume it's promising to ring you back and then not, not providing you with the service you are paying for while sending you to every department in their network along the way (then finally giving you the number for the department you need, which you ring, to find it closed, and closed since 1972 at that), is actually to provide you with various differing forms of telecommunication. As you probably know, however, they aren't very good at this. In fact, they are about as good at it as I am at having periods (which I'm frankly rubbish at, I've never even managed one, unless you count the time I sat on a pencil and bled like a motherfucker all over Wrexham). And this annoys me. BT essentially have the monopoly when it comes to phone lines (they own the fucking things), so even if someone else is your service provider, BT still have their manky little paws in your business somewhere. And after years and years of being the only telecommunications company there was in Britain, you'd think they'd have more practice at not being complete and utter shitstick at being a cunting telecommunications company. A quick list of the problems Ceri and I have suffered with BT:

Didn't cancel the previous account here three times

Called us "Miss Savvy" continuously, even when I was on the phone and it's neither of our fucking names

Took 45 minutes of our lives filling in an account form, then losing it.

A pitched battle while we tried to convince them NOT to send us another fucking homehub

Not connecting the line because they'd lost our details again

Promising us seven trillion Mb, and then essentially strapping a hamster in a wheel to our connection.

Giving us their 'Broadband sales' number, which turned out to be BT World Business. (You don't half feel like a prize prick phoning them up. Especially when they give you the right number, which it turns out is the one you rang yesterday, but because you couldn't succesfully find your way through BT's push button dial tone labyrinth, you pressed 6 instead of 7 and got put through to their All Year Round April fucking Fool's Department)

Not knowing when our account was due to close.

Closing that account without telling us.

Ringing me up and asking why we were leaving, then not accepting my answer of "You are bunch of fuckwits who I wouldn't trust with a cup and string."

Bollocks to them. British Telecom? British Phone Cunts, more like.



People who are "Welsh and Proud"to an almost militant standard, but don't speak a word of the language.

Your hypocrisy astounds me. I'm not a particularly patriotic person, so I speak English because a) It's the language I was taght and b) It's more widely used than the old Cymraeg. However, when I'm in a pub and I see you in your Welsh Rugby Jersey, your Woad, your dragon trousers and Daffodil hat stomping about the place, bawling about how much the English are a great big bunch of oppressive twats and how you fucking hate everything about them, stop yourself for a second and ask what fucking language you're speaking, you gigantic clutterfuck.

Vuvuzelas.

So, FIFA want to ban the Vuvuzela, because it can offend and annoy a few people who don't appreciate it.

In defence, pro-Vuvuzela parties have stated that it is part of their country's heritage and tradition, and as such should not be banned and should remain in stadiums. Just because foreigners don't like it, there's no reason not to have the Vuvuzela, they say, and they're right. They say they'll continue bringing the Vuvuzela with them, and they'll carry it proudly

People from all over the world, however, have decided that the Vuvuzela must be banned, as they don't like it, and won't listen to reason.

Now relpace the world 'Vuvuzela' with 'English Flag', and weep huge tears of shame that we live in such a fucking hypocritical country. You shit yourselves in defiance every time some rag spits out a story about banning a piece of our heritage and culture, but you've got no problem sitting at home and demanding that people aren't allowed to have theirs. You insufferable, hypocritical cunts. If you had a shred of self awareness in you, your own morality would have strangled you to death by now.

Fuck.

Dog Gives Birth To Puppy, Newspaper Considers it News.

Well done Mariah Carey...'s dog.

ChaCha, the Jack Russell owned by the aforementioned diva, has had a puppy.

Do you care?

Well, the Mail do, evidently: Not only has somebody wasted two hundred words on this complete and utter non-story, it's currently listed in the 'Don't Miss' section of the website, along with the terrifying news that Natalie Imbruglia wore the same dress two days running. OH FUCKING NO.

Elsewhere, some horrendous people call Konnie Huq fat, some more twats say Nadine Coyle looks better now she's put weight on, and there's an article about how hard it is to be a woman but not have a man (even the pro-single woman talks about how "There are times, particularly on a long winter's night, when the familiar ache of loneliness creeps in", like she's a fucking Disney princess or something).

So, everything's normal in Daily Mail world today.

Seriously, what's the fucking point?

Self Awareness.

This is an oldie, but a goody.

Here is a brief – and terrifying - glimpse into the world of those people who spend time commentating on the Daily Mail’s website.



This morning the paper posted a story about a paedophile who is to be beheaded and then crucified in Saudi Arabia under the country’s Sharia law (not normally a Mail favourite).



So far the story has attracted nearly 300 comments. To gauge the tone of the debate we decided to look at the top rated comments and then the worst rated.

Very instructive.

Here they are:

TOP RATED

A good punishment for a sick peado. Why can''t we hand out this very appropriate sentence to UK offenders? Put it this way, he won't re-offend, or cost the taxpayer anything in the future.

- MARTIN CANE, CLITHEROE, 4/11/2009 8:47


well that is certainly a punishment that fits the crime, pity we can't have a few in our courts.

- Jane, UK, 3/11/2009 20:02


fair punishment for a terrible crime against children ... should be the other way round crcify him, castrate him too for good measure and then behead him just before he dies.

- Nick, Chatham Kent, 4/11/2009 8:47


Let's see what the do gooders say about this decision.

- KDINSYDNEY, Sydney, Australia, 3/11/2009 19:59

It strikes me that if Sharia Law was called "Big Billy British's Bulldogs, Pie, Chips and Football Law Who-are-ya who-are-ya who-are-ya", it would be far more popular.

The fact that people will bellow "Muslims are animals, they still stone people" in the same breath as "Paedophiles want bloody stringing up" without a hint of irony astonishes me.

A Welshman's take on #ABE.

This morning, my attention was drawn to an article in the Telegraph entitled 'Exploring the Anyone But England Phenomenon'. Now, I could tear the article to bits for not so much exploring the situation as just stating a few blindingly obvious points while seemingly not asking anyone about it (how you can explore without doing any investigating I don't know), I just thought I would offer my own personal opinion on it as a Welshman - I don't claim to speak for anyone else in this post.

Which actually, brings me on to my first point. English people, you are not 'representing' Great Britain, you are representing England. The TV adverts, the newspapers, the patriotic sweet wrappers simply serve two purposes: One, to remind the rest of us Non-English Brits that our teams didn't succeed in qualifying, and two, it implies a certain assumption that we are going to follow you purely because we happen to share borders with you. Imagine if your next door neighbour came banging on your door, demanding you supported their child in their sports event, despite the fact that your child's team had failed to qualify. Whilst you'd be happy for them had they just kept schtum, the fact that they had constantly bombarded you with hats, flags, songs and Christ knows what else in the weeks beforehand, while assuming you're going to go all out in your support for them purely because they invited you to a barbecue last year (Which you had to bring your own beer to) is likely to breed more than a little contempt. What makes it worse is that we know that if Wales were against England, we'd still be bombarded with the same blanket gibbering about something that happened 44 years ago and how that somehow means that it could happen this year, coupled with a Derby game style competitiveness when the game was taking place.

Secondly, the England team quite often contains men of strong Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish heritage - Or in the case of some players (Michael Owen is a good example), men who grew up and live in our country. Owen actually went to school a few miles from me, and so far as I know, still lives in Wales - but stood on pitches around the world as an Englishman. Treachery is probably too strong a word, but the general feeling is that men like this have been drawn in by the relative glamour of the prospect of playing for the bigger, more successful team, and have used what could be seen as a loophole in the rules in order to do so. To use my previous analogy, imagine the people who moved into your old house came into money one day, and your child decided that because you used to live there, they were part of that family now; a family who once again, would bombard you with information about how fantastic the child that was once yours is, whilst strongly suggesting that you still cheered him on in his endeavours.

Thirdly (And this may be more relevant to myself than anyone else), Hearing fellow Welshmen refer to the England side as 'us' simply winds me up. I'm not some nationalist nutter, don't get me wrong, but the simple fact is that if Wales were still in the competition, England would be anything but 'us'. Thinking about it, this is sort of an extension of my second point; when there's a chance Wales will do it (See: Rugby), the English are the Enemy and are there to be beaten, but when Wales aren't even in the running, 'we' are England.

Of course, some people just have that local competition mindset - An Everton fan will love hearing about Liverpool losing, and in many ways the same applies at an international level. This can manifest itself at a number of different levels, from friendly ribbing all the way up to borderline militaristic racism, although the people who fit the latter category are probably twats that no-one would want to speak to in the first place - They're usually the ones who claim to 'fucking hate the English', but don't know a word of the language of the land they claim to love.

How do I feel about it? At a sporting level, I couldn't give one whether England win or lose. However, the quicker England sink out of the competition the sooner I won't have to hear about it every fucking day, and if they win I'm going to spend the next 44 years of my life listening to how it 'could happen again'.

In-ger-lund.

The World Cup can fuck off.

Actually no, that's a little harsh.

The cartwheeling, bellowing, air-punching excitement over the World Cup can fuck off, to be specific. At time of writing, the bloody thing hasn't even started and yet everyone in my office is talking about the Argentinian defence and how England should be attacking - for a while this morning I thought the Falklands was back on. Now don't get me wrong, I'm happy to let the world cup happen, I'm not that much of a curmudgeon - But just leave me the fuck alone if I don't want to watch it please.

The World Cup brings with it this immediate assumption that you are a) Interested in football and b) Hoping England will win, which as a Welshman living in Wales, I find a little unusual. Truthfully, I couldn't give less of a shit who wins, and I'm not going to be one of those turds who complains about it being on TV - I understand that it's a big event that is obviously more important than everything else that's going on on telly - If only there were special sports channels where they could broadcast this sort of stuff... Obviously that's utopian future stuff that you and I won't be alive for, but-

What, you mean they already exist?

Well why the fuck do they poison the normal people's airwaves with this shit then?

It's not just the airwaves, either. The shop near where I work (In Wales, it should be said) is full of white and red tat, and the only time I want to see that much plastic with a red cross on it is if I were to stumble across Girls Aloud trying on PVC nurse's outfits. I don't want the flag banned, I just don't understand how buying England earrings will help our lads romp to victory in a competition they haven't won in forty-four pissing years.

Nor do I understand why people assume you like football come World Cup season, or even want to join in - I don't want to join your fantasy football leage, I'm not partaking in your fucking sweepstake, and I don't want to dress up like a country or have a penalty shootout against the management. I want to go home and pick my nose, eat Pringles and cry, and I'd appreciate it if you'd just leave me to it, thanks very much.

IMPORTANT NEWS STORY.

From The Mail:

Baywatch's Pamela Anderson is back on the beach... but what a difference 18 years makes

Look! look! someone looks older now than they did in 1992! Quickly, tell your friends, they'll miss it! Don't look over there! Look here! For the love of God, look at this!

In other news, some milk left on the side three days ago has gone off.

For fuck's sake. Any excuse for the Mail to print a picture of a woman in a swimsuit.

The Times Paywall.

From The Guardian:

"What we are trying to say is we are not going to show you all the news, [like] going to Google News and seeing 4,000 articles, we are going to give our take," [Sunday Times executive editor, Tristan Davies] said.

So yeah, rather than getting a balanced view of the world from all the papers, now you have to pay to read the version of the news approved by an insane millionaire who knows fuck all about the modern world. That sounds really good.