Woah, Deep

Good Old God

2009-10-26T19:00:38+01:00

I sometimes get a little irritated when people claim that a belief in a God is a "crutch". I for one find believing in God almost incapacitating. Think about it. Everything happens for a reason. There's some kind of plan that's not revealed until we frickin' die. So when a baby dies, a devout man is struck down with cancer or a poor village is flooded - it happened for a reason. Can you imagine what kind of world I have to live in? It's like one of the Saw films, where horrific things keep happening to us and around us and we have to put up with it while simultaneously work out why the fuck they keep happening.

A crutch? Fuck that. I wish I was atheist. I'd like to be an atheist. That'd fucking show Him. I mean, all this time I've been giving him love, faith and doing my best at protecting him from bad-mouthers... and how does he repay me? Indifference.

If I do get to heaven, He's getting a kick in the fucking groin anyway. I never asked for this life. He plucks me out the ether, plonks me into a body and gives me taxes, disease, interest rates, rent, a job, commercials, billsand police. Is that your idea of fun?

Atheists have it easy. Ignorance is bliss.

Comments

Hooray, I'm Moderately Successful!

2009-07-23T15:13:53+02:00

I got an article published today on a real life, money paying website that people read and everything. This has made up for the fact that I fixed my tire last night only to have it flat again by the time I got to work.

http://www.cracked.com/funny-138-archaeology/

Comments

Something Unpopular

2009-07-14T11:30:37+02:00

I was watching Steven Fry In America the other day. Did you know, that in Oregon or Washington, if evidence of a Red Tree Vole’s habitat is identified, then an area of 10 square miles is protected from development? This is the value we put on the life of a red tree vole and its potential family. Quite incredible.

The magic of humanity is in our ability to adapt. We adapt in two ways. The first way is the way that all life adapts to change on this planet – we evolve. We change to suit our surroundings both physically and mentally – we learn.

The other way we adapt to change – and this is where humans have been able to dominate the life-forms on the planet – is we manipulate the world around us. Too cold? We don’t grow more hair, we build a shelter. To hot? We make protective clothing. Going hungry? We invent agriculture. Need protection? We build walls. The ability to be able to use the environment around us to suit our needs is an evolutionary step that other animals are a long way behind us on.

Both of these methods of adapting are equally important. One compliments the other. Earth has created a natural singularity – as we learn we build, and as we build we learn.

So we do with society when dealing with diversity and ‘other tribes’. It can take us a while to adapt and accept changes, but it is generally understood that in a modern progressive society we must learn to adapt to change and diversity.

Look at multiculturalism. Do we force new cultures within our borders to become more like us? No, we co-exist. We may not have liked it at first, but eventually we changed. The problem was not with them – it was with us. For our society to become more tolerant to multiculturalism we did not make it easier for them to change into what we wanted, no – we changed for them. We became less racist, more inclusive, more open-minded (or at least this is the ideal).

Look at feminism. When women (and men) began to ask for equality among the sexes, what was the tactic? To make women more and more like men? To make it easier for women to act, think and behave like men? No – society changed. Women could stay the same, but society had to make allowances for them giving us new jobs, laws and lifestyles. Women wanted to be part of society so society changed – not women (or again, this is the ideal).

It’s the same with homosexuality. When homosexuals began to make their voices heard and stories of their struggles and everyday prejudices they faced, what did we do? Did we simply say “Sorry, we must make it easier for you to pretend you’re not gay” so that homosexuals could fit into the society we created? Or did society change? Did we become more tolerant, understanding to their needs and learn to treat them with the same dignity and respect that is owed to each and every human being? The latter, it is hoped, it what will be achieved.

Apparently not. For instance, what’s all this talk about banning the burkha? Why? Multiculturalism – if that is what we advocate here has to accept these burkhas. If we have a problem with not seeing the face of a person we are talking to; if we have a problem not being able to see what someone looks like; if we have a problem with someone dressed dramatically different from us: who’s at fault? We are, we have the problem. Hopefully, over time the burkha will be fazed out, but as it stands we as a society have to learn to adapt to this change. It is what we preach. It is what makes immigrants want to come here in the first place. If we have learnt to enjoy the presence of cross-dressers and punks, I am sure we can accept the burkha.

I try to remain consistent in my philosophies. In philosophy you cannot quantify concepts, you have to work in general rules. “Stealing is Wrong” is a general rule. “Stealing is wrong, unless it’s only something small and the victim is very rich” quantifies the rule, making it redundant. Unless you can logically justify each and every variable, these variables become fallacies.

I suppose this is my problem with the issue of abortion. A human is a human whether it is inside or outside the womb. It is genetically identical and there is an unbroken progression to becoming a child outside the womb. Calling it an ‘embryo’ or ‘foetus’ is quantifying the concept. They are names for what the human looks like, that’s it. Unless we can justify these variables, then they are a fallacy. How is an embryo different from a foetus? How is a foetus different from a baby? When these quantities are sufficiently justified, I might back down. Until then, it is not a question of choice, it is a question of whether or not the organism inside a mother’s womb is human or not.

So that’s my stance on abortion. I have reluctantly arrived at that conclusion. Now, going back to my original point. Abortion has become necessary to many women in a society that (a) does not support single mothers (b) does not have the capacity to deal with unwanted children and (c) attaches a stigma to pregnancy outside marriage.

These are the things that we have to work on. My problem with abortion is that it is seen as the solution. It’s not a solution. A solution to the problem of an “unwanted pregnancy” is to make it not a problem – take away the “un-”. It is us, we who are at fault here if the only way that a women can deal with an unwanted pregnancy is to terminate it. Meanwhile, the stigma attached to single mothers and bastard children sticks.

What’s bizarre is that this state of affairs is happily admitted: “A woman in her position cannot possible have that child.” So who’s at fault here? The child? No way. It’s us. If we cannot find it in our hearts to make space for these unwanted children in our society, then abortion is a sign of our failure, not of our success.

Are cosmetically enhanced breasts a sign of the success of medicine or a failure of society’s to make the woman feel happy with her own body?

Did we demand that black people change their skin colour, or did we learn to treat them for what they are – humans?

Look at the effort that is made to save the red backed vole in the US. Can we really not extend that care and compassion to the human mother and child in the same position?

Comments

Will

2009-06-29T12:31:42+02:00

My flat mate is an absolute cunt.

His favourite book is by Dan Brown.

His favourite film is Planet of the Apes directed by Tim Burton.

His favourite band is Oasis.

He works in Public Relations.

He holidays in Belgium.

He wants to live in Norwich.

Comments

Sex and the Shitty

2009-06-16T12:56:28+02:00

I’ve changed my opinion on Sex and the City. As you would expect, I hate this show.

I used to think this was because of its vapidity or its inherent misogyny. Or was it that men were disposable accessories, good for comfort when it was needed but ultimately only there to serve as a lesson.

I am not well versed enough in the show to tear it apart completely, but I have watched enough (even the movie god forgive me) to know that I don’t like it.

You may be wondering why I am going on about this now of all times, when the show ended about 5 years ago and the film is already forgotten.

It’s like drugs or porn, it turns up in someone’s house and before you know it, people are watching it, making excuses for it and I find myself sitting, staring into the abyss with them, my teeth grinding and my fingers tapping as I watch these women ruin everything they have achieved in the past 40 years. A box set has turned up at my girlfriend’s house. People are watching it. People are dying.

Yeah, it does broach feminist topics and it is ‘current’, in the same way that Big Brother is topical and relevant. But really, it seems to confirm every prejudice that men have about women. They talk crap, they are fashion obsessed, they really don’t get men at all and hold in higher esteem shitty puns and embarrassing word-play than anything else in the world:

“As I stood there with the discount clothes on one arm, I knew I could not discount my own feelings.” [actual quote]

And that’s what really annoys me about this fucking show. Ignore the fact that it is a spinal tap on the hope of western civilisation. Ignore that it is worst piece of feminist writing since Deepthroat.

It is terribly written. I mean really, it is god-awful. Horrendous. Atrocious. Fuck me it’s bad. That is what pisses me off about this. It’s the fact that people will watch and enjoy something that, to me, seems conceived with the notion that HUMANS ARE EVIL and a SLOW AND PAINFUL DEATH VIA THE EARS AND BRAIN is a fitting death. This, this is the kind of writing Douglas Adams was referring to when he spoke of the Vogon’s poetry. Writing like this is truly horrific.

Here are some quotes, thankfully taken out of context that I have found on a FAN site. So these, presumably, are the good ones.

“I'm good at crossword puzzles, I'm not so good at people puzzles.” (Carrie)

“Maybe all men are a drug. Sometimes they bring you down and sometimes, like now, they get you so high.” (Carrie, who is not a teenager)

“I don't believe in the Republican party or the Democratic party. I just believe in parties.” (Samantha, a member of the adult population)

“Maybe the past is like an anchor holding us back. Maybe, you have to let go of who you were to become who you will be.” (Carrie)

Seriously, this is like eating turd. And you have no idea how many of Carrie’s quotes begin “Maybe…” An annoying amount is the answer.

Comments

Don't Let the Man Keep You Down

2009-06-15T15:06:58+02:00

Anybody read Watchmen? Alan Moore was spot on when he included the concept of social retrospection during times of hard ship and uncertainty. In times of trouble, nostalgia becomes popular, while overly progressive attitudes and a 'futurist' aspect wane. This is exemplified in Watchmen by the marketing of a perfume. In the beginning of the novel, during a time of near revolution, discomfort and anger the popular perfume of the time is called 'Nostalgia'. By the end, these posters have been replaced for a product named 'Millenium', reflecting the optimism and fresh zeitgeist. It was well observed.

This psychology has given rise to a ridiculous spate of advertisxing campaigns - for example, can anyone tell me who was the first supermarket in the UK to introduce the avocado? Why the hell would anyone know this? Even I don't. But at present, both Marks & Spencer and Sainsbury's seem to be claiming the same thing. Their TV advertxs are almost identical. It's all about how they've been around for years, serving the British public and have been awfully progressive and friendly and at some point in the sixties (thanks to them), the avocado was introduced to the UK bringing with it a taste so bland that you'd have to also fork out for a bunch of other exotic ingredients to make the damn thing palatable.

Then there is the Hovis adverxt. The one with the kid running home, while a moving montage of events, the suffrage movement, VE Day and the miner's strike plays in the background. The message being that Hovis has been through the same things we have (and therefore we would like to eat their bread).

More are to come. Radox's new campaign is also going to feature a tale of its 100 year heritage. This is not a coincidence. Why else would anybody care how long a shampoo has been around for?

So now "New" is no longer a self-evident virtue. "New" now has connotations of wastefulness, expensiveness, foolhardiness and guilt.

This is understandable, but is it A Good Thing'? One expects businesses to create or explore current trends in thinking - they can recognise that we are unhappy with the world in general and would wish to exploit that.

But it's worse - we don't see recovery in sight... in fact, do we even want recovery? Do we want to revert to the status quo of inflation and a lunatic economy? Probably not, but do we want to become introverted, feather our nests and comfort ourselves with our own meagre but sufficient surroundings? The attitude of 'fuck it' that over 60% of us said to the European elections, as well as to all the banks and big businesses and governments is all well and good but then we can't expect them to pull us out of think funk either. If a man pushes you in the river, don't expect him to pull you out (unless your plan is to pull him in as he pulls you out, but then you'll find you're alone on the shore and nobody wants your help and this analogy isn't working).

Hopefully, we won't be throwing out the baby with the bath water. We've allowed a massive pile of garbage to build up in the corner of kitchen that desperately needs to be got rid of, but underneath it all there's a nice metal swing bin, a double wall socket and this analogy doesn't work either.

I suppose that's why I try to remain positive. Banks and governments may be incompetant, but WE aren't. So don't hold back on their behalf. We're not gonna slow down cos they fucked up. We're just gonna have to circumvent them somehow. Prove we don't need them, so next time they come and push us into the river, we pull a vaulting-pole out of our bum and leap over onto the other side and that analogy kicked ass.

Comments

Reasons to be Cheeful

2009-06-11T14:02:12+02:00

One can often receive a heavily weighted view of the world if one spends too much time on blog land. The reason for this is because I think a lot of people started blogging as a way of getting things off their chest, so ‘rant’ entries are fairly common. Combine that with the fact that many of us blog from work (or as a resulyt of chronic unemployment) and everyone can come across as miserable old sods. Me included, don’t worry.

But I try to make an effort at being up beat and cheerful, especially when there’s so much stuff to gripe about. It’s important to keep an equilibrium!

First of all, there’s always the funny side. There’s the funny side of the Tube strike, the funny side of terrible TV, there’s even a funny side of Big Brother if you discount the fact that it’s in its tenth year and it actually still exists.

There’s the funny side of Obama – his wife is treated as a fashion goddess for no particularly good reason as far as I’m aware.

There’s the funny side of Gordon Brown – that weird thing he has with his mouth is quite funny. And you know, once he leaves, imagine all the demotivational picture memes that will crop up with phrases like “Worst Successor Ever” or “Be Careful What You Wish For” written all over them.

I am sure you can see the funny side. As a matter of fact, I think it’s funny just to try to see the funny side of things. It becomes a challenge, attempting to avoid slipping down the slope of simply laughing at people’s misfortunes. This is a no-no.

Alright, so the country might be in a bit of a shambles. Everyone you talk to is beginning to sound like Richard Littlejohn, exclaiming that the whole country, nay the planet are all going to hell in a hand cart and you couldn’t make it up.

But there is beauty in that! Don’t despair! At least everyone knows we’re up shit creek! There’s got to be comfort in knowing that. It shows that people are not as stupid as they make out, it shows solidarity among the normal folk of Britain, it shows that mass media can work as long as we can discern the real from the not-so-real. And we can. Gordon Brown is on his way out, and the entire government is in turmoil because we’ve made our voices heard one way or another. The general animosity towards authority makes me glow with pride. Look at us! Don’t “sheeple” me you negative bunch, we know what’s good for us. Slow to anger, that’s what we British are (except Scottish, who are angry all the time), but there’s still life in us yet!

So the BNP got a couple of seats. Big deal – the national backlash has been much more impressive. Isn’t that good? They won’t do so well next time – look what happened in France when Le Pen did marginally better than he was supposed to. The French came out in droves for the second vote and put that little dream to rest. We can do the same with the BNP. Pfff, I mean look at them. Hitler claimed that his Third Reich would last a thousand years. That little dream only lasted 12 years and he ruled all of Germany. The BNP have 2 seats in a Parliament so big it’s got time zones. This won’t last, don’t you worry.

And don’t worry about our creativity either. Yes, Hollywood keep churning out crappy sequels and prequels and remakes and unbaked films – and Universal Music and Sony keep signing shitty pop acts whose lyrics make alphabet soup look worthy of publication and whose music is so Urgh and Fuck that we can barely allow ourselves to listen… but there’s a lot going on besides. All you have to do is be willing to find it. Support them, investigate. There’s an enormous amount of music being made at the moment, young hip bands who, if you can ignore the sun glasses and bracelets, have a lot to offer. Film makers with awesome productions, fascinating ideas. Go and find them. Next time you go to the cinema, go to the local independent. Read subtitles. And if you need your Michael Bay fix (I know I do) download that shit.

I mean, I could be depressed about Terminator Salvation. So far I have seen childhood loves – Terminator and Indiana Jones get raped by sequels – but hey, see the funny side. Visit www.the-editing-room.com and get it off your chest. Yeah Terminator Salvation sucks, but it’s been worth it simply for getting to know Christian Bale better via a conveniently recorded weird English/American accent rant thing. Plus, I’ve heard the lighting on the new Terminator film is brilliant.

Comments

Immigration - A Third Way?

2009-06-08T13:16:07+02:00

I don’t think we need to start taking the BNP seriously. Sure, they got a coupla seats in the European Parliament (amongst the THOUSANDS) and they have been making a lot more headlines recently, mostly spread with a thick lair of condemnation from the media. But they’re still a small party but because of their views, make a lot more noise than is proportional to their size – like any lobby really.

No, we don’t have to take the BNP seriously, but I think we have to take their voters seriously. Let’s not be unfair, they clearly have concerns and it’s possible their concerns are legitimate (although I balk at the idea of some concerns being labelled as more legitimate than others).

For while those who vote BNP can be labelled as racists, do we actually know why they voted for them? Do we know how many others would have voted for them if they’d been unafraid of stigma or simply felt it wasn’t a wasted vote?

Let’s not patronise them either by suggesting that they are either too stupid to know better or that by voting for the BNP, it is simply a dig at the current Labour government – a tactic used by those in power I am sure to down-play what could be real concerns for these people.

In actual fact, I don’t really have any idea what the BNP stand for. All I have is what I have been told (by non-BNP members), which is that they are nothing more than a single-issue party whose central agenda is racially motivated.

But do you have to be racist to be anti-immigration?

To me, it seems unfair to ask. For a start, it begs the question that immigration is a race issue. It is a scoundrel’s refuge to hide behind the polarising effect that the race-card brings to the table.

Let’s be pragmatic here. Let’s not get caught up in the romance of both sides – neither the love affair with patriotism nor the love affair with socialist dreams of free movement and universal liberty. Both are disingenuous.

I believe in the freedom of movement. All things being equal, people ought to be able to live where the heck they choose – this planet belongs to us after all. I know if I’d lived only a few centuries ago I’d have immigrated to the US. I’ve been to California – it’s awesome. If I’d lived 2000 years ago I’d have left the frozen wastelands of the North and moved south into the prosperous and peaceful Empire of Rome. It was also awesome. See, what people often don’t realise about the Barbarians who were constantly being total dicks to the Romans was that they weren’t trying to destroy the Roman Empire, they were simply trying to get a piece of that sweet sweet ass.

But, such was their ferocity in pursuing that dream they ended up, like a couple of drunken frat boys at a house party, ruining it for everyone. Or you can blame it on Christianity, but I’m going for the men with beards and axes.

But that’s just it. All things are not equal. Celebrating the fact that some countries suck and others (i.e. yours) don’t is unpleasant – but pretending that the inequality doesn’t exist is also dumb.

So let’s be pragmatic. Britain is better than Polanistan. We know that, but more importantly, the Polistans know that.

So, do we pretend that nobody realises this and allow freedom of movement anyway (and by freedom of movement, I mean in one direction only), or do we act like miserly knob-heads and tell everyone to eff-off?

Let’s say Polanistan has loads of oil. It’s full of the stuff and it’s great. Britain, which has loads of oil for itself decides it would like a little more. But without paying for it. So they build a big pipe-line under the North Sea and through the Shmaltic Sea all the way to Polanistan. Then Britain starts siphoning off the oil from Polanistan and takes it back to Britain. Oil in Britain gets lovely and cheap and the oil is happy – it’s being used in a way that back in Polanistan it was never going to get used as there wasn’t the facilities to dig for it, refine it, distribute it and use it as an end product.

I’m sorry for the heavy-handed analogy. It’s probably quite irritating to read. But Oil is not a country’s most valuable resource. In fact, there is no resource quite as valuable in a country’s inventory as its people. Which is why, when a nation is in dire straits they shut the border (China, Soviet Europe, warring African Nations).

Polanistan (and many other countries) are ‘developing’ (who isn’t?) To me, it seems a tad unfair that at the moment, these foreigners, eager for work are allowed to leave their country to come and work for us. For free. We don’t pay their home nation a dime. They simply go, leaving a gap in their place – and not just any gap, but a gap the shape of a plumber, or a doctor, or carpenter, engineer or any number of trades that the country they’re leaving would LOVE to have, if only they could give them the work.

Now, it’s easy to be sentimental at this point and consider the human element, try to empathise with the human beings who are trying to win bread for their families. I don’t want to come across like a stone and yes, it is a common description of the Right that they lack human compassion (thanks Cheney), but there’s a time and a place for sentimentality.

But what’s the alternative?

Both sides seem to have an overall idea that “it’ll sort itself out over time.”

Plan A says that if we allow completely free movement from one country to the next despite their economic differences, eventually all countries will become equal. I’m not sure how this will happen, except through the following ways:

- the immigrants, having made their money eventually return home

- the richer country, via the process of trickle down economics eventually ends up lifting the developing country out of its negative economic situation

- eventually, the whole world becomes one nation so it doesn’t really matter where you live as everyone has moved around so much borders become obsolete and economic differences become non-existent.

Plan B says that migration should be restricted, that the economic differences between the economic zones (nations) are too great. But eventually, all countries will become equal. This is achieved by:

- forcing the potential migrants to stay at home, where they will eventually pull their country out of poverty

- trading on an equal playing field puts market forces into motion that will help the developing country to develop.

Plan A forgets that migration is a necessary evil for most people. In most cases, people don’t want to up sticks and leave their home town, their friends and family and their culture. They do it because they need to find work or to escape persecution. Immigration sucks big time. They’d much prefer it if they could find a job at home.

Plan B forgets that sometimes the conditions in a developing country are such that staying there can often mean a life of unhappiness and misery and surely it is the unalienable right of everyman to live in freedom in the pursuit of happiness?

Is there a third way?

How can we repay a country for allowing (nay, encouraging) their citizens to leave for greener pastures?

Comments

Find this Funny or DIE

2009-06-05T16:54:39+02:00

http://www.27bslash6.com/overdue.html

http://www.geekologie.com/2009/06/the_ducks_are_not_mine_david_t.php

http://www.27bslash6.com/matthewsparty.html

In the spirit of Henry Root, this guy has the most hilarious email correspondances. Read at least one of them, they're great.

Comments

Big Brother, My Mouth

2009-06-05T13:59:07+02:00

Alternative Big Brother

I’m not going to watch Big Brother, if I can help it. The bastard program ends up taking over TV for the summer so you always end up watching part of it. Then there’s the problem of other people wanting to watch it. I have tried making a pact with my friends that we won’t be watching it, but I can see the weakness in their eyes.

They always provide an excuse “but this one’s different”, “something interesting has happened” or “it’s more like how it was originally, more a social experiment…”

I used to think that. That it was some sort of psychology demonstration. But now that we’re onto BB10, it’s no longer a ‘fair test’. There are no benchmarks for normal behaviour. There’s none of the humility that went with the first one where the contestants and the producers had no idea how watched the program was going to be. It’s not like that anymore.

In a way, despite the fact that there are dozens of personalities and manufactured situations, the program is still predictable:

What happens when you lump together a bunch of camera-whores, egoists, thickos and degenerates, representing nobody in their demographic for the nation to scrutinize? Nothing unexpected what so ever. You get three months of atrocious behaviour, monumental examples of ass-backwards thinking, wayward morals, baffling motives and screaming. So much screaming.

The program should end with a masked man entering the house armed only with a mattock then, following frantic instructions from the baying crowd outside commits a massacre. The only survivors are those who learn to shut the fuck up, and are left huddled in the corner somewhere, weeping at the carnage and at the penetrative introspection they are experiencing for the first time.

So here’s my break down of the contestants this year, an answer to Channel 4’s own online blurbs provided for each of them.

Angel

Survival of the fittest must be one of the most worn out and knackered clichés ever used when describing Big Brother's many, but in Angel's case it's about as true as you could get. Moving to England from Russia 12 years ago, Angel is a professional boxer and is very self-confident. But she does have a soft side – she runs a keep fit class for the elderly ladies of Herne Hill. Aww, bless. But, never mind that – let's get back to the hard stuff. Angel claims that she is mentally strong and can't remember the last time she cried, and when she was little she wanted to be a detective. She also believes that in the future, there will be a war between fit and unfit people. Okay, so apart from the fact that we know which side she'll be on, does anyone else think her biography sounds a bit like a Terminator screenplay? She's quite ambiguous when it comes to sex too – she can't 'do it' for a month before a fight, but when it comes down to it, she's another one who’s not quite sure whether she's Arthur or Martha. Bring it on…

So apparently Angel is fit. This, for the copywriter is exciting news. Oh, and she’s Russian, so that means she’s probably a Communist or a vampire or something. Nothing else described is the least bit exciting. Even the writer’s attempt at mentioning something exciting like The Terminator falls flat when it becomes apparent she has no idea what the films are about. That’s probably what pissed me off the most about this whole write up.

Sophie

Well, if there's one thing that's going to get Sophie noticed it's, well, two things. And apparently, in case you have to know, they are 30GG. Even though she's only 20, she’s already done Playboy and would not rule out having a 'boob job' to make them even bigger. Sophie claims that her proudest achievement at school was failing all her GCSEs. Well, that’s just showing off. When it comes to things she doesn’t like, it's pretty straightforward: boring people, spiders and sand. Okay, we can understand the first two, but sand? Sand? As far as ambitions go, she did want to be Airline Hostess, but realised she didn't like flying. But she did manage to jump out of a plane for charity and has raised over £10,000 for Britain's soldiers. Sophie reckons she's going to be very competitive in the House and confesses to only having one bad habit – smiling all the time. Well, it's better than making soup from kittens.

If there were only five women in the world with fake tits, the fact that one was in the Big Brother house might’ve been cause for excitement. But that fact that every dumb blonde that becomes famous for a season has had breast enhancement really means it’s not a talking point. What would have made this so much more interesting is if she was clever. But no, Channel 4 have pushed the boat out and presented us with a bleached blonde girl with fake tits who is, wait for it – dumb as fuck.

Lisa

On first impressions, Lisa might look a little bit scary. Some people have even said she looks ready to kill, but far from it. She might have more front than Selfridges, but we suspect she’s hiding just as many treasures behind her Mohican, tattoos and piercings. And we might as well get her bad habit out in the open while we’re here – she loves cleaning up. Lisa’s gonna be real popular. Oh yeah. As long as she manages to control her, ahem, urges. Lisa is a very sexual being and talks about sex all the time. To describe Lisa as a sexual predator would be like calling a crocodile a sweet itty-bitty thing. But it’s not all about sex. Spiritualism plays a big part in Lisa’s life and she has all the hallmarks of a genuine, kind individual. Her downfall, she believes, is her lack of confidence. Well, there’s nothing like a Baptism of fire to sort that out once and for all.

Goodness, tattoos and piercings, whatever next? It feels like 1977! And someone who likes to talk about sex! What taboos are being smashed! Nobody and I mean nobody talks about sex. There’s nothing on TV about it. My friends don’t talk about it, I certainly refrain from talking about sex. I wonder what she’ll teach us? My indifference is overwhelming.

Sree

A business student from India, Sree won't know what's hit him when he wakes up in the Big Brother House. He's used to sharing a house with two girls - and they both cook for him. Wonder if he'll be able to convince any of his fellow female housemates to do that? When he's not studying for his business masters degress, Sree can nearly always be found on his university campus, probably down the student union bar. Sounds like perfect Big Brother training. This first-class honours grad grew up in southern India, and he thinks England is the safest place in the world. Sree reckons he's the happiest man alive, not that surprising as he’s never had a job in his life. All he wants is to make others happy. Wonder how long that'll last?

Boring. As. Shit.

Rodrigo

Brazilian-born Rodrigo is going to get pulses racing with his cute good looks – and it won’t be just the girls’ pulses he’ll be interested in. No, because ‘our’ Rodrigo is a bit of a swing door, if you get our drift. Look, he’s bisexual, okay? And he’s also very tactile and loves hugging and kissing – culturally, being this close with people is a natural thing for him, but how will his fellow interns react? So, that’s all the nice stuff, now for the not-so-good. If you put a dustpan and brush in his hand, he’d probably have a hissy fit as he hates cleaning. And he’s not keen on cooking either, preferring to live off Pot Noodle and sandwiches. Also, if he’s left on his own for too long, he has been known to pick his nose. And his feet. Eugh! And he farts and blames it on other people. What a charmer. Single at the moment, Rodrigo would like a relationship, but fancies too many people, apparently because in England “everyone is good looking.” Oh Rodrigo you charmer!

Rodrigo has the least ‘pulse-racing’ face I’ve ever seen. I’ve eaten flumps with more aggression than that dumb-ass smile. The way the corners of his mouth push into his cheeks makes me want to grate his face off. Ooh, but he picks his nose! And his feet! The man’s barely human!

Freddie

What is Freddie going to make of the Big Brother? The 23-year-old grew up in a stately home, where he still lives, with his family, and four staff. At least he'll be used to busy mealtimes. An aspiring politician, he loves campaigning and doesn't have time for any narrow-mindedness. A self-confessed free spirit, when he's not fighting for some cause or another, he's singing, partying on probably on the pull. He is, by his own admission, a bit of a charmer. And watch out boys AND girls, no-one's immune from Freddie's alpha-male charms.

I can see the producers wringing their hands in excitement at what this toff will bring to BB. Problem is, he’s an aspiring politician which means he going to be so middle of the road he’ll have cats eyes for nipples. But oh! What’s this? He’s bisexual? Then he must be exciting because bisexual people, as a group, are all really fun to be around. Ask one.

Marcus

Woof! That’s right – woof! Because if there’s one word Marcus is going to say, it’s woof! Or maybe graaaaarrrr. Or Yeah! Because Marcus is a bloke, yeah? Fearless and manly are two words he openly uses to describe himself, and he’s ready to take on any task or challenge to prove he’s ‘the man’. If he could have his dream job, it would be as a porn star. Yeah! And if he could break the law, he’d do a bank job for the ‘high rock and roll factor.’ Yeah! Oh, did we mention Marcus has lived on his own for 20 years with his cat. No, thought not. Surprisingly, Marcus does have one or two bad habits including swearing, chewing his nails and arguing. He freely admits that he uses the worst swear words around, so ‘bleeps’ should be expected. Do not adjust your set. Naked ladies, toys and guitars make him happy. People who dislike his hair offend him. Did we mention that Marcus was single? And has a mullet?

Is the copywriter of these ridiculous blurbs annoying you yet? I’m annoyed. So Marcus wants to be a porn star. Oh dear. Channel 4 has once again mistaken ‘controversial’ for ‘interesting’. If you’ve ever watched porn, you’ll know that male porn stars’ personalities are so barren, you’d have more fun dating an isosceles triangle. Besides that, wanting to be a porn star in NOT controversial. It’s exactly what a man with a dismal sense of humour would say in order to appear exciting.

Beinazir

Don't mess with Beinazir. This tough-talking, no-nonsense Londoner works with disaffected youth. So she should be well-placed to deal with anyone she comes into contact with inside Big Brother. She's a family girl who still lives at home and puts a large chunk of her wage packet back into the family pot. Beinazir is hard-worker and would step up to any task. Just don't ask her to cook dinner - she can't. Although single now, the 28-year-old wouldn't mind finding romance in the House - but they've gotta be tall, strong and brave enough to face a challenge. It could happen, Beinazair, it could happen.

How many the fuck people are they going to get who can’t cook? It really isn’t that exciting. She “wouldn’t mind” finding romance in the house? Jeez, looks like the interviewer really had to drag that one out of her. And she works with “disaffected youth” a phrase clearly written by someone who has absolutely no idea what the fuck she does, or who has even seen the inside of a post office. Wow – poor people. They’re so real.

Saffia

Saffia is certainly not your average shy and retiring type. Strong on voice and opinion, her views on men might shock the faint-hearted: “they are just sperm donors.” Yowch! And heaven help anyone who challenges her skills as a single mother of two. She also freely admits that she always gets everything she wants. Already sounding like a recipe for trouble, yeah? According to rumour, she’s perceived as a show off, a bitch and a fantastic mum, all of which she confirms as being absolutely true. And the thing she likes most about herself? Why, her appearance of course! Saffia is a beauty consultant after all. Independence is a massive issue for Saffia too and she won’t even let men buy her drinks, let alone pay for a meal. This is one fiery chick, except in the bedroom department, because as far as Saffia is concerned, she could do without sex for the rest of her life. Or so she says, because in the next breath she confesses that she kissed a girl and liked it. Ooh, what would Katie Perry say?

“Bob! Looks like we’ve got ourselves a screamer!”

“I’ll put the oven on!”

Cairon

Don't be fooled by Cairon's accent. This 18-year-old student might sound like he's from across the pond, but Cairon is really a Londoner. Born in south London, but raised in America's deep south, he's now back where, he says, he belongs. He's a self-confessed joker with an eye for the ladies and secretly wants to be the next 50 Cent. Music, says Cairon, is his life. Before moving into the House, he moved in with his girlfriend. But if it doesn't work out, he says he'll move in with his granny. Seems like you can't keep Cairon away from the girls.

Wasn’t there a previous contestant almost exactly like this, called Science or something retarded? Prepare for hilarious differences between black and white people. This man’s music is “his life” which makes him really really different from so many other people. I’m glad he’s recognised the value of having been a Big Brother contestant in terms of his music career – there is no way that this is a bad idea.

Karly

Ladies and gentlemen, may we introduce Karly for your delectation? Blonde, blue-eyed, footballer-chasing Karly is a part-time glamour model whose proudest moment is when she made it into the Top 100 FHM High Street Honeys. Just don’t mention that she never made it into the top ten, peaking at number 16. Or that she got sacked from her job for appearing in the list. Hang on – what’s this? Karly has another ‘proudest moment’ when she got accepted into Dundee University. See – brains and beauty. Just don’t mention that she quit just three weeks in. However, the biggest shock for us was when she revealed her perfect celebrity type – Simon Cowell. No, it’s not a misprint, she really did say Simon Cowell. So, inevitably we must come to the bad bits. Karly reckons that her untidiness alone will make her very unpopular. Add to that a tendency to always be late for everything and having a ‘gutter mouth’ and you’ve got Karly.

Let me guess – she’s only a part time model because she doesn’t get enough work. Dropping out of university after three weeks does not equal ‘brains’. Going 10 seconds into a bout with Quentin “Rampage” Jackson before legging it out the area does not make me ‘tough’. What we have here is out resident thicko – but it’s better than that, she probably thinks she’s empowered.

Siavash

If you were to open a dictionary and look up the word ‘cool’, Siavash would have you believe there would be a little photo of him waving back at you. We think it’ll be up to you to decide, but there’s no harm in giving you a few facts. He’s absolutely obsessed with fashion and it is obviously a huge part of his life, though where the money comes from he can’t quite say. Siavash says he can’t really describe what he does for a living, but he always has money in the bank. Maybe he’s a politician? Whatever he does, he doesn’t worry about money as he is sure he’ll be a millionaire in 10 years. So, the bad bits? Well, if a girl doesn’t succumb to his, erm, charms, he’ll move on to the next one. Oh, and he blows bubbles with his spit. That must look so attractive while he’s out at dinner. He also says that fat people and ugly people make him angry. Sounds like a complex character…

The man clearly lives off his parents. And with them. The man is about as ‘cool’ as voting BNP.

Charlie

Okay crew, set phasers to camp – it’s time for a gay-off! When Charlie arrives in a room there’s no doubt that he’s ‘arrived’. Like a child who’s eaten half a kilo of fizzy cola bottles, Charlie is as camp, chatty and engaging as it is possible to get. And his proudest moment – oh, it brings a tear to our eyes – was when he won the Best Easter Egg competition at school. Winning competitions seems to be a bit of a theme for our Charlie – he won Mr Gay Newcastle and was a runner up in Mr Gay UK. Unsurprisingly, Charlie has been known to take his clothes off and dance in his pants in some of Newcastle’s nightclubs. Of course, he’s got some bad habits – snoring, picking his nose, biting his nails etc. And he’s alarmingly candid and eerily precise about his sexual conquests – 69 men and 103 women. Hmm, we’re wondering about that ‘103 women’ statistic. That’s a mighty large number of women for a ‘gay’ man. Is there something Charlie’s not telling us?

If I was gay, I’d just love Channel 4 and their totally fair and measured representation of homosexuality on Big Brother. You know, I never took gay men could be such screaming camp-festivals, but it looks like I had my head buried in the sand. Thank you Channel 4 for opening my eyes and showing the world that yes, rampant exhibitionism is OK, as long as you have an ambiguous sexuality. And by ‘ambiguous’ I mean ‘horrifying’.

Sophia

At a fairly short 4'11”, Sophia isn’t the tallest girl in the House, but when it comes to attitude, she’s got the goods. A pretty tough childhood left Sophia with the philosophy to embrace every day as it comes and treat it as your last day. An attitude that some might see as stubbornness. Especially when she claims that she'll never start an argument, but if someone starts one with her then she will end it - even if it has to go on all night. You go girlfriend! On a trust front, she's very wary of people, which might explain why she doesn’t have a best friend to speak of and she’s single at the moment – men give her headaches as she doesn't know what they want. She’s probably not alone there! And what about Sophia's bad habits? Well, how about randomly breaking out into song, talking to herself and farting? Will that do?

Oh! Random! Look what it says: she “randomly” like to break out into song. She must be so random. She wants to treat every day as if it’s her last with a vengeance. Woe betide anyone who attempts to stop her from embracing everyday. She’s stubborn about this. I know, I was a bit confused by that sentence too.

Noirin

"I'm beautiful. If I don't love myself, who will?" Now, on one hand, this statement from 25-year-old Noirin is absolutely true – you have to love yourself before you love anyone else. On the other hand, when a drop-dead gorgeous girl like Noirin says it, you just KNOW there's gonna be trouble with the other girls in the House. Oh, and did we mention she was an all-Ireland athletics champion too? So, she’s pretty, sporty and hates things being untidy. And she's single too. Sounds perfect, until she lists her worst habit as not thinking before she speaks which means she frequently insults people. She also gets wound up by people who moan and sit about doing nothing and people who go on about missing their families. Add to this some pretty hard-line beliefs about sexuality and there could be a few fireworks. Now, we could be wrong here, but she does know this is Big Brother right?

Hang on, was the copywriter just philosophising with us? You have to love yourself before loving anyone else. Wow, thanks for that, I simply love platitudes. Ooh, I wonder what her hard-line beliefs on sexuality are - Never, under any circumstances should a couple fall asleep on the wet patch! And the fact that she speaks without thinking is a one up on the other housemates who all speak in the absence of thinking. Go girl!

Kris (with a ‘K’)

Okay ladies, form an orderly queue. This is Kris and he's single. But just before you start getting measured for the dress, let's just get a few facts out in the open. He picks his nose. And, erm, that’s about it really. He's quite switched on for a pretty boy and is concerned that people don't think there's anything beyond the looks: "when the package is this pretty, no-one cares what’s on the inside". Wow, that's a bit deep. He also has a bit of a James Dean Complex – he thinks he will live fast and die young. But that's enough soul searching, let's stay with the pretty bits. He loves his hair and thinks that "curls get girls" – 200 at the latest count according to Kris. But he's a softy at heart. He's been single for a year and would love to meet his 'lobster'. He obviously thinks lobsters mate for life, whereas in fact the alpha male in a lobster colony will do his best to get a bit of action with every female in the group. Still looking for your lobster Kris?

There’s a reason Kris is single and that’s because he’s a cunt. Really, look at his description. He says and does everything truly deserving of that moniker. Who was that bloke that got sucked into that relationship with the Geordie lass a few Big Brothers ago? He’ll be like him. Do you remember? Yeah, the guy who absolutely nothing to say for himself and was thus incredibly boring. “No-one cares what’s on the inside.” So not only is he a cunt, he’s an emo-cunt. Cunt.

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Revolution in the Modern World

2009-06-04T16:54:32+02:00

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Marrying for Money

2009-06-03T10:32:09+02:00

Marrying For Money

First impressions.

Who are we talking about here?

Are the ethics of such a decision irrelevant?

Is it a taboo?

Reading the Sunday Times Style magazine (I like the shiny pages), there was an article about a new book Smart Girls Marry Money: How Women Have Been Duped into the Romantic Dream — and How They’re Paying for It whose title is so long it means I am unlikely to learn anything more by purchasing the book than what they have already learnt by reading the cover.

Then that’s not going to stop me from having an argument with this book cover. An argument based upon certain presumptions I’ll make.

The first thing that struck me is the idea that women have been duped into the Romantic Dream. Contrary to all other pop/chick/relationship literature, the writers of this book seem to think that it is men who are the romantic ones, not women. But at first glance, this book seems to suggest that women have been tricked into wanting to be romantic, which is surprising to say the least. So have they been duped?

Women haven’t been duped into this, unless they’ve duped themselves. Marrying for love is a result of a whole plethora of circumstances made available in the last century, not men tricking them. The fact that women have a choice whether to marry a man for love or money stems from the women’s liberation movement and the fact that they can (or must) work for a living. Nobody’s duped them. Women came by this of their own accord.

Truth is, a relationship based on love is, relatively speaking, a luxury.

Shit, look at the rest of the world. ‘Primitive’ cultures the world over practice arranged marriages. Do you think that’s just about control? No way – they do it because they have to. That’s why it’s always “Oh, he’s a doctor/architect/lawyer” and not “meet Bob, he’s a bum. Enjoy.”

But before I needlessly explain how the women’s lib movement paved the way for giving women the choice between marrying for love or money, or working at a job or staying at home (a choice that is incidentally still unavailable to the majority of men), let me just interject with this little piece of words:

This is only an issue for Middle Class women.

It’s true.

See, the working classes have always been more oppressed than women, as a demographic. Today is very much the same as it was five-hundred years ago. Both the husband and the wife work. The men were the miners, the soldiers, the blacksmiths and the criminals. But the women were the maids, the flower sellers, the shop keepers and barmaids. Not only that, but their children were chimney-sweeps, mud-larkers, thieves, page-boys, stable hands and street urchins.

For these people, marrying for money was never an option. For a long time, romantic love resulting in marriage and children was the only privilege the working classes enjoyed. Hell, if money wasn’t involved, you could marry who you bally well pleased.

Not so with the Middle Classes. A hundred years ago, the women stayed at home. Well, the middle class women did. Everyone else went to work (I’m deliberately excluding the upper classes from this as their world is so different from the lower classes, there really isn’t any points for comparison in this). But they didn’t need to work because their husband earned enough to keep her comfortable as well as care for and raise children (see Mad Men).

Then the middle class women got bored with staying at home, especially after seeing how much fun working in a factory was during the wars. So they decided they wanted to work. But they didn’t want to work in any nasty, working class job where gender wasn’t an issue, they wanted to do what their husbands were doing. And waddya know – they found that every single one of these industries was weighted heavily in favour of men. Gradually, over the years, men shifted further along the bench giving more and more room to the women until we get where we are approximately today – that a woman has as much chance of getting a place on the bench as a man and rightly so.

Oh happy equilibrium! Now that everyone is earning the same, these middle class women no longer need to choose their husbands based upon the size of his bank account, they can choose him for his dashing personality, his sense of humour, his gorgeous good looks and the size of his hands. The one piece of human fulfilment that had evaded them for so long, but had instead found favour with the working classes – Love – was now for everyone. In celebration, the middle-classes everywhere expressed this new feeling of solidarity with the working classes by attempting to dress like them – they bought brand new pairs of torn jeans, wore ugly white sports shoes and made rich men of poor artists by buying and pretending to like their aggressive sounding music.

So what’s gone wrong? Who’s getting upset? Well, I guess I have to refer back to the article in Style magazine if I am going to make a genuine attempt at understanding this.

Well the first thing they do it admit that women duped themselves into the romantic dream. Elizabeth Ford, one of the two writers and a successful TV producer said “It is not a how-to guide… It is simply two educated and well-meaning women who are just going, ‘What the hell did we do?’”

Well apparently the idea that women ‘can’t have it all’ seems to be subverting the post-feminist movement. But that’s everyone’s fault really. It seems stupid now that a group of people were told they could have it all, when even the people they were competing against didn’t have it all, but that’s what was being sold. Loving marriage? Check. Kids? Check. Rewarding job? Check. Happy family life? Check. Active social life? Check.

Who the hell was pedaling this bullshit? Everyone. I mean sure, it would be so much more fun to blame this entirely on women themselves, but as with any paradigm shift, there are an annoying variety of factors to consider. I am not going to try and address them all now because, well, I don’t know them all and I don’t have the space. Although it’s enough to say that the idea was sold. By all sorts of parties. Just like any broad-jacketed, smooth talking salesman, the sales patter managed to seriously oversell a product – that working hard at a job somehow made life worth living – whereas in actuality all that happened was that there were more people making, and therefore spending money.

So now, because women realize they are not able to have it all (Oh hi, nice to see you back on Terra Firma) they have to make a choice between love and money (still, the fact that a choice is available is a sign of progress). Personally, I think this is fine. If you marry a man for his money, he’ll marry you for your looks – a trade off that many an aging millionaire has appreciated.

But some women have achieved the perfect life, as is described in the article: Farah is a 42 year old married woman with three kids, an active social life and is a self-employed internet entrepreneur. They are wealthy, happy and in love. Proof, if any were needed that What Women Want can be achieved. But once again I return to the class issue.

Of course she has achieved happiness – she’s made a lifestyle choice by opting to first become a journalist, then to develop a social networking site based around Jazz and Classical music. The fact that she admits she doesn’t have to work is the crux here, just like Kowal, another woman mentioned in the article who is married with a job as a horticulturalist at Kew. But how many women have that choice? Screw that, how many men have that choice? Not many. Most people work because they have to, not because they want to. Working class women work at working class jobs because they have to. Working class men work at working class job because they have to. Hell, middle class men work at middle class jobs because they have to (admit it, who dreams of being a hedge-fund manager?). The only people with a choice here are middle class women. Not bad!

I am somewhat confident that I haven’t offended anyone in this hastily written diatribe – why? Because it indicts the middle class. The working class dislike the middle class, the upper class are indifferent towards the middle class and no self-respecting member of the middle class would dream of labeling themselves as such.

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Music for a Summer's Day

2009-06-02T12:44:24+02:00

This blog gave me the idea. Music for a balmy day. Let's go!

Let's start with something obvious, a bit of Bob
1. www.youtube.com/watch?v=59G67qq19e0
(I'm at work so can't go on Youtube, but links should work)

OK, nice. Something some of you may be familiar with, Seals & Crofts:
2. www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLhDNvbtFp4

Keeping with the reggae-ish theme, Finlay Quay:
3. www.youtube.com/watch?v=seIZaeAv-ac

Booker T & The MGs "Green Onions", only because of my restricted access I couldn't find another tune. Still, I like this a lot.
4. www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGthEPeIEno

Which reminds me, I don't know why of Dj Shadow
5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpAN1MZUO1E

Moving on to Fun Lovin' Criminals
6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxZXEatfhSk

And before I forget, some chilled out Lemon Jelly
7. www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Lt3PegrIXs

And this one, love the bass line
8. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z66rDVkaK4w

And finally, disco sensation Donna Summer
9. www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8TBmeK9Abg

I hope some one enjoys this. Cos I didn't get to listen to any of it.

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Sex and Marriage in the Catholic Church

2009-06-01T16:04:46+02:00

I’m writing this to make it both clear to myself and others as there is a great deal of misunderstanding when it comes to understanding Catholic dogma, especially is regard to sex and marriage. Let’s face it – nobody really seems to know how or why Catholics have an attitude that is almost polar opposite to the modern, liberal sensibilities of today. Most just seem to think it is a result of institutional belligerence, intolerance and arrogance. But there is always a philosophy behind these things.

Why do they oppose contraception?

Why do they oppose gay marriage?

What on Earth is an annulment?

It all starts with Aristotle. Like any cultural phenomenon, Christianity inherited the history of the people from whom it came. Half was Judaism, and half was Hellenism (the historical term for what is generally known as ‘Western’ – that is Greek culture since Alexander the Great).

It is Aristotle’s ethical philosophy that has had the greatest influence on Christian thought, but which is also reflected in the Jewish religion.

His ethics stems from his philosophy on Causality (Teleology) – that deals with design and purpose. Briefly, he tells us that everything has four different types of ‘causes’:

- The Material Cause (e.g. the material cause of a table is wood)

- The Formal Cause (simply put the idea of an object)

- The Efficient Cause (that which brings about an object e.g. an artist to a picture)

- The Final Cause (the teleos, the purpose, the end of something e.g. the purpose of an eye is to see).

Are you with us? Don’t worry, I am only putting this in context – you won’t have to remember all of this.

How does this relate to ethics? Aristotle argued that everything that is done is done with a goal in mind – A Final Cause. This goal is ‘good’ because “good has rightly been defined as the object of all endeavor.” See? If we define ‘good’ as something that we are trying to achieve, then anything we do that has a Final Cause must be good (in a rather esoteric sense, not what you’d find in your concise dictionary). If that’s not clear, try looking it up – I am after all attempting to explain Aristotle’s ethics and Catholic dogma in a single blog – bare with me.

But is there a universal ‘good’, or Highest Good? What are we all aiming for? Aristotle decides that the Highest Good is “happiness”, which is more profound than it sounds – for what is happiness? Humans, he decides are rational beings who have a Rational Soul. Rationality therefore is our Final Cause and is therefore what makes us happy. I am not going to go into exactly what he means by Rationality, but at the very least, it is what differs us from the animals – it is beyond mere pleasure, fame or amusement.

Now Christianity.

The Final Cause of the sexual act is procreation. The sperm and the egg are in existence in order that they may, through the normal passage of nature, come together to create new life. This is a Final Cause, and therefore ‘good’. Anything that attempts to hinder this therefore is not good, or, to use Christian language, Morally Wrong.

This fairly simple definition manages to sweep away a large amount of activities that nowadays are considered to be neither right nor wrong, but simply ‘normal’.

- Contraception is Morally Wrong because it is a willful attempt to hinder the passage of the sperm and prevent fertilization of the egg.

- Any activity whereby sperm is prevented from achieving its Final Cause is wrong – so that would be any sexual activity that involves the male climax happening outside of the female’s vagina.

- This includes masturbation, oral sex (where climax happens outside the vagina) and of course anal sex, in particular homosexual sex.

An oft used phrase in Catholic writings is ‘natural law’ as it is the Catholic belief that Natural Law and God’s Law are twinned. God created the world, and with it all the Final Causes of its objects – the Final Causes of objects are in practice their nature. So the Catholic complaint that certain activities are ‘unnatural’ is not just the cry of a die-hard conservative who is afraid of change, it is the cry of someone who believes that by being unnatural you are behaving wrongly because you are going against God.

There we go! That wasn’t so difficult was it?

Now, in a separate, but connected issue is the question of extra-marital sex. Why is it so important that Christians do not have sex outside of marriage?

What is the Final Cause of marriage? Love? Really? Because although that has been the romantic notion of marriage for most of living memory, in practice the desirability or possibility of marrying for love is a modern concept. Through out history, in practically every culture the institution of marriage has been dictated by politics, economics and society, very rarely love. Why is that? Because marriage’s Final Cause has been the creation of a secure environment within which children can be born and raised.

This is why women very often married men who were much older (that is financially secure), that is why certain rich men have been able to have more than one wife (they are capable of supporting them) and that is why in the interests of peace, rival factions are brought together by marriage. Love enables a marriage to work well, but it is not the Final Cause of marriage.

For Christians, the institution of Marriage and the family is the most perfect condition into which children can enter the world. It is seen as reflective of Natural Law (God’s Law) as well as being expressly stated by God himself in the Bible. But was not just the Christians who thought this – the Jews believed this and so did the Romans, Persians and Egyptians. In all of these cultures, children born outside of wed-lock were ‘illegitimate’ – that is, there is nothing wrong with the child, but because they were not born within the marriage, they cannot legitimately claim the privileges that it brings which in most cases meant the inheritance. This was chiefly to protect the rights of the wife (as it was usually the husband who cheated) ensuring that it was her children who were next in line and not the mistress’s.

So Marital bliss are the circumstances under which the Christian God wishes humans to bring their children into the world. Sex, whose Final Cause is procreation should therefore only be conducted within this institution.

It is clear now what is forbidden within Catholic/Christian dogma.

- No sex without the possibility of procreation

- No sex outside marriage

And also

- Marriage is an institution whose Final Cause is for the protection and care of offspring. Without the possibility of children, there is no marriage.

This is why, under Catholic law, a marriage can be declared null and void if, for whatever reason, the possibility of children is somehow compromised. That is what an Annulment is. An Annulment does not say that the marriage is now over, it says that is never happened. If a woman decides, after getting married that she wants to have a child, and the husband says that he does not want a child, she has grounds for an Annulment because according to Catholics, a marriage is not a marriage if children are not part of the equation. Part of the definition of the Sacrament of Marriage is that there must exist the possibility of procreation.

And that is why Catholics argue that homosexuals cannot get married. It is not that they deny that homosexuals can love each other, or that their relationship is false – it is simply that ‘marriage’ can only exist where there is the possibility of procreation. There is no possibility with homosexual marriages. The problem they have with the argument for homosexual marriage is that it redefines marriage into something that is not what they believe.

That’s my understanding of the whole thing anyway. If there’re any roaming priests/theologians who’d like to correct me on any of this, please comment. But I think I’ve got at least a bit of it down. Of course, there are other issues attached. But that’s all I’ve got at the moment. But bloody hell, it's better than Yahoo Answers.

Oh, and if you do want to comment on this and have a little debate, you’re more than welcome. Can I just say (I know what can happen on things like this), please keep your emotions in check. I will be moderating the comments as I don’t want some flame-war to start between commenters. It’s not cool. The Dude Abides.

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Martin Amis on Pornography

2009-05-29T12:12:24+02:00

This article is a few years old now, but it relates to one of my own I wrote recently on the things that worry me about porn.

WARNING: Article contains graphic descriptions of sexual acts that some of you may not have even realised was possible, let alone desirable.

A rough trade

Martin Amis reports from the high-risk, increasingly violent world of the pornography industry

Saturday March 17, 2001

Pussies are bullshit. Don't let them tell you any different. "Answer me something," I said to John Stagliano. We were stepping out of the porno home - on to the porno patio with its porno pool. This was Malibu. Down the slope and beyond the road lay the Pacific Ocean; but the Staglianos have no access to its porno shore, in the evening they can watch the porno sunset with its porno pink and mauve and blood-orange, and then linger awhile, perhaps, under a porno moon. "Answer me something. How do you account for the emphasis, not just in your . . . work but in the industry in general, how do you account for the truly incredible emphasis on anal sex?"

After a minimal shrug and a minimal pause Stagliano said, "Pussies are bullshit." Now John was being obedient to the dictionary definition of "bullshit" which is nonsense intended to deceive.

With vaginal, Stagliano elaborated - well, here you have some chick chirruping away. And the genuinely discerning viewer (jack-knifed over his flying fist) has got to be thinking: Is this for real? Or is it just bullshit?

With anal, on the other hand, the actress is obliged to produce a different order of response: more guttural, more animal. As Stagliano quaintly puts it, "Her personality comes out." He goes on: "You want guys who can fuck really good and make the girls look more . . . virile." Virile of course, means manly; but once again Stagliano is using the King's English. You want the girls to show you "their testosterone".

The name of Rocco Siffredi, again and again, was wistfully and reverently conjured. Rocco, the big-dorked Italian, and porno's premier buttbanger or assbuster (to use the dialect of this tribe).

"Rocco has far more power in this industry than any actress," said Stagliano, pleased to be pulling one back for the boys (generally speaking, men are the also-rans of porno). "I was the first to shoot Rocco. Together we evolved toward rougher stuff. He started to spit on girls. A strong male-dominant thing, with women being pushed to their limit. It looks like violence but it's not. I mean, pleasure and pain are the same thing, right? Rocco is driven by the market. What makes it in today's market place is reality." And assholes are reality. And pussies are bullshit.

Features and gonzo

There are, at present, two types of mainstream American pornography: Features and Gonzo. Features are sex films with some sort of claim to the ordinary narrative: characterisation, storyline. "We don't just show you people fucking," said a Features executive. "We show you why they're fucking." These movies are allegedly aimed at the "couples market". Couples, it asserted, want to know why people are fucking. I can give these couples a three word answer that will hold true in every case: for the money.

In Flashpoint (Wicked Pictures), for instance, a bunch of porno stars are dressed up as firefighters. As the film opens, we see the porno stars sliding down the pole and boarding the crimson firetruck. An exploding car, a colleague (not a porno star but an ageing extra) falling in the line of duty. There follows an insanely boring funeral, which includes the whole of the Lord's Prayer and the slow and solemn furling, by a porno star, of the American flag. Porno star Jenna grieves for the fallen extra. After returning from the funeral she finds herself alone with another porno star dressed up as a firefighter. He seeks to assuage her grief, so she gives him a blowjob plus full intercourse. The next sex scene, which occurs about a millennium later, is also triggered by grief counselling. Here a male porno star comforts two female porno stars, one of them anally . . .

After a while you begin to think that porno stars, despite being very bad at acting, are very good at acting in one particular only: they can keep a straight face. But then humourlessness, universal and institutionalised humourlessness, is the lifeblood of porno. Films like Flashpoint go out to the video stores and, in the soft version (where the hard action is partly obscured by some stray object - a fireman's hat, say, or a fireman's boot), are sold to cable and to hotel chain franchises, and so on. Features owes the humiliating fatuity of its conventions to an old legal precedent called the "Miller Test".

Miller v California (1973) established that a dirty movie was obscene if it was "utterly" without social, literary, artistic, political or scientific "value". In juridical terms, the key word here, of course, is "utterly" and millions of dollars have been spent on its definition.

With a wife like Hillary, Bill Clinton could never be a true pal of porno, but he largely left it alone on First Amendment grounds. Unlike his two predecessors, who systematically harassed the industry with confiscations, multiple prosecutions, fines, jail terms. It's a fair guess that porno never felt more gorgeously secure than when Clinton, in his second term, became in effect the porno president.

Now porno is tensed and braced forchanges. It feared Gore. It dreaded Bush. Gonzo porno is also known as "wall-to-wall". It shows you people fucking without concerning itself with why they're fucking. There are no Lord's Prayers, no furled American flags in Gonzo. Features porno is much, much dirtier than it used to be, but Gonzo porno is gonzo: way out there. The new element is violence.

Strength and Pain

I had lunch with Temptress (Features). I had lunch with Chloe (Gonzo). And the next day I joined Chloe on the set of Welcum To Chloeville.

My lunch with Temptress was a relatively sedate affair. At first I was reminded of the time I interviewed Penny Baker, a Playboy Playmate of the Year: within a minute I had run out of questions. Temptress, like Penny, seemed to be inhibited by the presence of a company executive - in this case Steve Orenstein of Wicked Pictures, for which she is a contract player. But Temptress loosened up.

"Tell me, Temptress," I said (having apologised for the corniness and mild hostility of my inquiry), "what won't you do?"

"I won't do anal," said Temptress. "They keep trying to coax me into it. You know: 'Just a finger or a tongue. Or just a little bit: just the tip.' But I won't, I used not to do facials. But I do them now."

Temptress is not talking about beauty treatments. She is talking about the destination of what is variously referred to as the "pop-shot" or the "money-shot": the ejaculation of the male.

"What happens," I asked, "when a co-star can't get hard?"

The fiasco used to be the nemesis of porno. A penile no-show could make the difference between profit and loss. But the situation has been changed, I was told, thanks to Viagra. On Viagra, the actor performs 45 minutes behind schedule, with a flushed face and a headache. "You also lose a dimension," John Stagliano would explain. "The guy's fucking without being aroused." He's just "showing off" - and pretty soon you're back to bullshit.

Another thing with Viagra is that the guy can have a problem with the pop-shot, thus endangering the facial.

"What do you do then, Temptress?"

"You get some pina colada mix. The cock's in your mouth and you let it, like, ooze out around it."

Physically Temptress reminded me of the daughters of my friends. She didn't sound shy, but she looked it. With her long straight hair frequently steered over her shoulders by her slow-moving hands, with her face unglazed by cosmetics, with her gently narrowed eyes, she exuded what Philip Larkin called the "strength and pain/Of being young". I asked about her history and she told me something of it. And there was strength and there was pain (and there was certainly youth: Temptress is 21).

"But I don't want you to write about that. And could you not mention my real name? . . . I don't have relationships any more. They make life unstable. The only sex I have is the sex on screen."

Temptress is one of the lucky ones. She's a star. After lunch I went to Wicked Pictures and had a talk with Jonathan Morgan (performer turned director) in a computerised cutting-room while he edited his latest Feature, a fantastically unfunny comedy called Inside Porn.

"Ah," said Jonathan. "Now here we have a double anal."

A double anal is not to be confused with a DP (double penetration: anal and vaginal). A double anal is a double anal. And there have been triple anals, too. "The girls could be graded like A, B and C. The A is the chick on the boxcover. She has the power. So she'll show up late or not at all. Ninety-nine point nine per cent of them do that." He gestured at the screen and said, "Here you have a borderline A/B doing a double anal. Directors will remember that. She'll get phone calls. For a double anal you'd usually expect a B or a C. They have to do the dirty stuff or they won't get a phone call. You've had a kid, you've got some stretchmarks - you're up there doing double anal.

"Some girls are used in nine months or a year. An 18-year-old, sweet young thing, signs with an agency, makes five films in her first week. Five directors, five actors, five times five: she gets phone calls. A hundred movies in four months. She's not a fresh face any more. Her price slips and she stops

getting phone calls. Then it's, 'Okay, will you do anal? Will you do gangbangs?' Then they're used up. They can't even get a phone call. The market forces of this industry use them up."

I thanked Jonathan Morgan for his candour. But he wasn't as candid as Chloe. We met in the lobby of my hotel and we strolled out to her Mustang.

"See that?"

The number plate said: STR82NL

"Straight to anal," said Chloe.

And she hadn't even got started.

Chloe was gonzo. She gave me the truth.

Extreme Productions

A single issue of Adult Video News (April 2000) yields the following. Last October porno star Vivian Valentine attended the XXX-Treme Adults Only vacation in Mexico sporting the black eye she copped from Jon Dough on Rough Sex (Anabolic Video).

"I have no regrets or bad feelings about it," she said. Regan Starr who worked on the second film in this "line", Rough Sex 2, had a different take. "I got the shit kicked out of me," she said. "I was told before the video - and they said this very proudly, mind you - that in this line most of the girls start crying because they're hurting so bad . . . I couldn't breathe. I was being hit and choked. I was really upset, and they didn't stop. They kept filming. You can hear me say, 'Turn the fucking camera off', and they kept going." The director of the Rough Sex series (now discontinued), who goes by the name of Khan Tusion, protests his innocence. "Regan Starr," Tusion claims, "categorically misstates what occurred."

If you don't like Khan Tusion, you won't like Max Hardcore. AVN's regular "On the Set" column carries a cheerfully scandalised account of the making of Hollywood Hardcore 13. In this scene, actor-director Hardcore is having rough sex with Cloey Adams, who is pretending to be under age. "If you're a good girl, I'll take you to McDonald's later and get you a Happy Meal." Hardcore then "proceeds to piss in her mouth". Addressing the camera, Cloey Adams says, "What do you think of your little princess now Daddy?" Nor is Hardcore through with her. "Turning to the crew, he calmly says, 'I'll need a speculum and a hose' . . . One of Max's favourite tricks is to stretch a girl's asshole with a speculum, then piss into her open gape and make her suck out his own piss with a hose. Ain't that romantic?"

Now. American porno (and how could it be otherwise?) is market-driven. We can see what the above tells us about porno. But what does it tell us about America? And if America is more like a world than a country, what does it tell us about the world?

• The average American spends three hours and 51 minutes of every day watching porno (video and internet).

• The average non-homeowning American male spends more on porno than he spends on his rent.

• Porno accounts for 43.5% of the US Gross Domestic Product.

Like pussies, these statistic are bullshit.

I made them up. But the true figures are similarly wild, similarly dizzying, similarly through-the-roof. This isn't bullshit.

• Porno is far bigger than rock music and far bigger than Hollywood.

• Americans spend more on strip clubs than they spend on theatre, opera, ballet, jazz and classical concerts combined.

• In 1975 the total retail value of all the hard-core porno in America was estimated at $5-10 million. Last year Americans spent $8 billion on mediated sex.

Whatever porno is, whatever porno does, you may regret it, but you cannot reject it. To paraphrase Falstaff: Banish porno, and you banish all the world.

Chloe

"I have herpes," said Chloe as she drove me to a smoker-friendly bar. "After you've been in this business for a while, you have herpes. Everyone has herpes. On the set sometimes you'll say to a guy, 'What's this?' And he'll say, 'What? That? It's a fuck sore.' And it may well be a fuck sore, what with all the traffic. But it's more likely to be a herpes sore, and that guy shouldn't be working. My movies are all-condom, but condoms won't protect you from herpes. They don't cover the base. Sometimes when you're doing girl-girl you'll say, 'Honey, I think you should go and see someone.' It can be a very stinky scene down there. I'll send her to a porno-friendly doctor (the others treat you like shit) and she'll come out holding her Flagyll prescription with multiple refills."

Chloe is 26. For 10 years she trained as a ballerina; then, at 17, she got into drugs, mostly speed ("I'd fuck for 72 hours"); at 20 she started shooting up heroin and was already in the industry by the time she quit, over two years ago. Chloe has fair, fine red hair and a warm and clever face. She has a ballerina's body: strong legs, a full muscular butt -

"- and no tits. It's true that some Features companies urge the girls to have implants and offer to pay for it. On the road [ie, stripping] girls used to boast about the cubic capacity of their titjobs. 'I've got 840s.' 'I've got 1220s'. One of them turned to me and said, 'Get tits or suck cock.' I'd rather suck cock, I really would."

If you're going to be a porno star, what do you need? It's pretty clear by now. You need to be an exhibitionist. You need to have a ferocious sex drive. You need to suffer from nostalgie de la boue (literally "mud nostalgia": a childish, even babyish delight in bodily functions and wastes). And - probably - you need damage in your past. You also need to be humourless. Chloe is not humourless. When she talked to me she was like someone peeping over a wall demarcating two different worlds, telling me stories about the other side.

"I like to be peed on. I like being spat on: it feels like come on your chest. I like to be choked. I like to be fisted. Here we have the 'no-thumbs' rule? A girl can have 16 fingers up her. But no thumbs." She laughs, and continues: "For vaginal I prefer a girthy kind of dick. And some of these guys" - Chloe seizes the broad base of a water glass on the table before us - "are like this. For anal I prefer a longer, thinner kind of dick."

"So when you do DP you get one thick one and one thin one."

"Right . . . No. Come to think of it," she said brightly, "I get two thick ones. I like to feel crammed. You know, I did my first anal for $200? I still can't believe that."

"And what are your rates now, Chloe?"

"In Gonzo, you're paid, not by the picture, but by the scene. So it's girl-girl: 700, plus 100 for an anal toy. Boy-girl: 900. Anal: 1,100. Solo [a rarity]: 500. DP: 1,500. I won't do anal fisting or double anal. People ask me how I can hang on to my title as Anal Queen of LA when I won't do double anal. But I have hung on to it."

In common with about 10% of the porno girls (her estimate), Chloe retains the approval of her parents (and so does Temptress). In fact, Chloe's guardians are gonzo. She recently shot a film out near their place, and her stepfather (while absenting himself from his stepdaughter's scenes) "was like a towel-boy". And Chloe's mother, for two years running now, has marched out of the AVN Awards, brandishing Chloe's Best Anal trophies above the heads of the crowd.

After lunch we drove to Chloe's apartment: barred gates, the feel of a two-floor motel, a modest, comfortable, orderly apartment, featuring a cute black cat with a porno name, Siren. Chloe thinks that some porno girls get their names by looking out of the window at the road sign: Laurel Canyon, Chandler, Cherry Mirage.

For a while Chloe talked about her love life. She is torn, at present, between the neglectful Chris, a rock musician (bass), and the attentive Artie, a fellow performer. She suspects that Chris just strings her along because it's a status symbol for a rock star to have a porno-star girlfriend. Chris, I think, knows about Artie. But Artie doesn't know about Chris.

"And with Artie, he comes over and I'm horny as hell and he says, 'I can't, I have to do two scenes tomorrow.' "

"With private sex, is there a crossover in your head?"

"Oh yeah. I find myself thinking, 'Fuck. I should be being paid for this.' Or 'Fuck. I wish I had a camera.'"

"I'd better not write about Chris and Artie."

"Go ahead. They'll both be over anyway. Here, it doesn't last."

Chloe was unforgettable. I won't forget the way she said this (she said it with sorrowful resolve): "We're prostitutes . . . There are differences. You can choose your partners, and they're tested for Aids - you won't get your john to do that. But we're prostitutes: we exchange sex for money."

"You've thought this through."

"I looked it up in the dictionary and that's what it says."

In etymological terms pornography is what I'm doing: I'm writing about whores. I will see Chloe on set tomorrow morning. The scene they'll be shooting? Gonzo girl-boy-girl anal.

Mister Monster

Towards the end of Rabbit At Rest, John Updike writes: Rabbit thinks of adding $5.50 to his bill to watch something called Horny Housewives . . . The trouble with these softcore porn movies on hotel circuits, in case some four-year-old with lawyers for parents happens to hit the right buttons they show tits and ass and even some pubic hair but no real cunt and no pricks, no pricks hard or soft at all. It's very frustrating. It turns out pricks are what we care about, you have to see them. Maybe we're all queer, and all his life he's been in love with Ronnie Harrison.

Or, as a friend would put it to me later that week: It's no good without Mister Monster. You must have Mister Monster.Must you? Gore Vidal once said that the only danger in watching pornography is that it might make you want to watch more pornography; it might make you want to do nothing else but watch pornography. There is, I contend, another danger. As I sampled some extreme productions on the VCR in my hotel room, I kept worrying about something. I kept worrying that I'd like it. Porno services the "polymorphous perverse": the near-infinite chaos of human desire. If you harbour a perversity, then sooner or later porno will identify it. You'd better hope that this doesn't happen while you're watching a film about a coprophagic pigfarmer - or an undertaker. That week in Los Angeles I found out what I don't like.

I don't like Mister Monster.

High up in higgledy-piggledy Hollywood Hills, I hobnobbed with Andrew Blake, the Truffaut of porno, and two incredibly beautiful girls in incredibly expensive underwear (and six inch heels).

Strictly speaking, Blake's work is Gonzo: scriptless, storyless, with the performers interacting with the camera. But Blake is pre-eminently "high-end". His actresses look like voluptuous fashion models, and he flatters and glorifies them on the screen, with oils, unguents, silks, cords, ribbons, textures.

"I hired Monica because she has these beautiful breasts," he told me, "and that's what we're going to be concentrating on. I've never worked with Adriana before but she seems to be really something."

Laconic, gruff, direct and, of course, humourless, Blake goes about his business.

"Now put your hand into her panties . . . And maybe a nipple comes out, a nipple is revealed? . . . Squeeze them, caress them, do the whole nine yards with them . . . Try opening your legs. Kind of tease the panties . . . Don't smile so much. Just kind of be into yourself . . . So is the bra ready to ride? Kiss the nip . . . Arch up your butt a little more . . . Cross and uncross your legs. Show a little pussy . . . Now this is the panties coming off . . ."

Behold. A platonically perfect pubis, wearing nothing but the latest hairstyle, a minimal mohawk.

"This must be a tough day's work for you," said the make-up girl amiably. "Someone's got to do it. Right?"

Her remark obliged me to examine my "affect", or feeling-tone. I admit to a strong sense of furtive beauty-assimiliation. But the instinct being aroused in me was not sexual so much as protective. Naked Adriana was 20 years old. And the last thing I wanted to see, at that moment, was Mister Monster.

Outside, during an intermission, Blake said in his flat, declarative style, "I'm into looking at woman. Not all this 'pissing and fisting'. I've never had any legal problems."

Work permit

A "tough" day's work for me, then, and the same could be said for Adriana and Monica. They weren't being slapped around by Khan Tusion or peed on by Max Hardcore. But were they being "used up"?

If you're a porno performer, your latest HIV test is your work permit. Two years ago the actor Marc Wallice started to become evasive about his work permit. He was using an out of town health centre and seemed to be fudging his results. By the time he was found out, Wallice's condition was fulminant. He infected six actresses.

"The tests we take only test for Aids," says Chloe. "We've contained Aids in the industry but what about all the others? You know we're now up to Hepatitis G?

"You should be at least 21 before you work in this industry. You should know your body, understand your body. But that would wipe out half of San Fernando Valley. There are whole lines on the 18 pluses."

And there are: Dirty Debutantes, Nasty Newcomers, Filthy First Timers . . .

One of the actresses infected by Marc Wallice (his condition now is so pitiful that no one thinks him worthy of persecuting) is Mrs John Stagliano. Stagliano himself, the pioneer of gonzo, is HIV-positive (he contracted the virus recreationally, in a Rio bordello). A medium-sized fortune has been made by Stagliano, in a business where, contrary to popular belief, very few fortunes are made. But I often think of the Staglianos, out by the pool, gazing at an ocean to which they have no access.

Gonzo Girl-Boy-Girl

Chloe's shoot is on Dolorosa Drive.

The porno house, the porno fish in the porno tank (the fish are porno-coloured: yellow, mauve, blood-orange), the porno TV set (as big as a double refrigerator), the porno deck, the porno pool, with a plastic duck floating around in it. Beyond the fence stands the house of the pain-in-the-ass neighbour who keeps climbing on to the roof with a mouthful of nails to get himself shocked enough to call the police.

Girl-boy-girl: the girls are Chloe and Lola (a friendly Amerindian-style beauty); the boy is Artie (Chloe's offscreen lover: tattooed, muscular, balding). Artie seems to be a nice guy, but he keeps talking with a jokey French accent. Porno performers are great ones for funny voices, funny faces. German scientists, Russian spies, French connoisseurs; in Features they can keep it up all movie long.

There is a crew: the DP (for the time being this means Director of Photography) and the sound-recordist, who go about their business like middle-aged handymen; a plump youth who seems to be there for general work experience; and Chloe's sister, Shannon, caterer and towel-girl. Chloe will soon be calling out to Shannon, "Stop that phone!" Shannon: "It's the home phone! There's like ten of them!"

Artie is giving us more French accent, then more French accent, while Chloe and Lola strip for the "pretty girl" shots that will go on the box-cover. Chloe, with whom I spent five hours the previous day, walks past me, naked. It doesn't bother her that she's naked. She doesn't know she's naked.

The porno stills by the porno pool. "See pink? Want lots of pink?" "Let's have some booty." "Open it? You want it all?"

It is barely 10 o'clock in the morning, and I am, I realise, experiencing the kind of anxiety that usually precedes a mild ordeal. A line is about to be crossed. I shouldn't be here. None of us should be here. But we all have work to do.

Fifteen minutes later, referring to the achievements of Lola, Chloe stabbed a hand through the air at me, and shouted with joy and triumph (Chloe is the director, remember, and she was thrilled to have this scene in the can): "That's the kind of blowjob I was telling you about yesterday!"

I reeled out into the yard with my notebook, laughing, and shaking my head. There are plenty of "jokes" on a porno set, and there is much raucous mirth to dispel tension. But only a Chloe, only an exception, can inject humour. She sounded like Mel Brooks, in The Producers, saying, "That's our Hitler!"

The kind of blowjob Chloe was telling me about yesterday was this kind of blowjob. It is as if the girl's passionate - indeed desperate - intention is to kiss the boy's lower abdomen. She faces an obstacle. She can't go around it. She has to go through it. "I mean," Chloe had said admiringly, "some of these girls go down. Drooling and slobbering, saliva everywhere, choking dry-heaving."

It had to be said that the dry-heaving, from Artie's point of view, was visibly efficacious. When Lola was done, he gazed down with some complacence as Mister Monster went from three o'clock to half past 12.

And that was the tenor of it: heat. That is where the market is taking us: toward heat, intensity, a frenzied athleticism. More than this, porno, it seems, is a parody of love. It therefore addresses itself to love's opposites, which are hate and death. "Choke her!" "Spit inside me!" "Break me! You can't break me! Try!" "COMING!!!" Chloe screamed this last word like a mother answering a child's cry from the other end of the house. Then, to Lola, "Choke me!" And Chloe's entire upper body flushed with pink, and she seemed to swoon . . .

"I wanna piss," said Artie, during one of his many intermissions.

For a moment the DP's eyes widened in alarm. He thought, wrongly, that Artie wanted to piss on camera. "Pissing is as bad as coming," he confided to me. "They're supposed to piss and they can't. They go off to the shower, then they say they can piss and they can't."

Artie trudged back from the can, worriedly nursing his condomed erection. "God I'm old," he muttered, as he headed back to the fray.

Well I'm old too, and I blew a kiss at Chloe and took my leave - before the anal and the popshot. Shannon drove me back to the hotel. Poor Shannon: she was having one of those days. First, shopping in a health-food store, she dropped a jar of wheatgerm on her foot and was now limping heavily. Then she discovered that her boyfriend was cheating on her - and she fired him. Contemplating the suspension of her love life, Shannon said sadly, "And when you compare it to that, the sex doesn't seem much anyway."

I knew what she meant, in a sense. Chloe-Artie-Lola made me feel like a virgin.

The owl and the bullshitcat

Later that afternoon I journeyed from San Fernando to Pasadena. I was expected at a conference on "The Novel In Britain, 1950-2000" at the Huntingdon Library. After some prompting, I told a gathering of delegates about my recent experiences. "Pussies are bullshit" became the (unofficial) conference slogan.

If pussy is bullshit then bullshit is pussy. On the second night I played a regrettably sophomoric parlour game on this theme with Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie and Mr and Mrs Christopher Hitchens. What's New Bullshitcat. Bullshit in Boots. The Owl and the Bullshitcat ("Oh lovely Bullshit! O Bullshit, my love,/What a beautiful Bullshit you are.") Bullshit-whipped. Bullshit-wagon. Bullshit's in a well. Someone mentioned the character from Goldfinger: Bullshit Galore, Salman Rushdie paused; his eyes widened and he said, suddenly,

"Octobullshit."

Jokes have been defined (by Nietzsche) as epitaphs on the deaths of feelings. In other words, the best jokes are always a new low. It is utterly characteristic that the coiner of "pussies are bullshit" had no idea that he was joking. In any case, porno is littered - porno is heaped - with the deaths of feelings.

Every time a porno star opens a megastore, or advertises a line of perfume, or does a walk-on in a TV show, porno people start saying that porno is "mainstream", that porno is hip, that porno is cool. Is masturbation hip? It doesn't feel hip. And it doesn't look hip either: you don't see anyone doing it. Porno can never be mainstream, partly because of the contrarian nature of the form. For porno to become mainstream, human beings would have to change.

Porno people: they've changed. In the yard of the house on Dolorosa Drive, during a break in filming, Chloe, Artie and Lola stood there naked, discussing a new rollercoaster ride called Desperado. They were all smoking. I came across many a good little smoker in pornoland. What with the risks they run already, who cares about smoking? Then it was butts out and back to work. And I do mean work. Porno is a proletarian form. And porno people are a hard-grafting, ill-paid fraternity who, by and large, look out for each other and help each other through. They pay their rent, with the deaths of feelings.

No, Chloe, you are not a prostitute, not quite. Prostitution is the oldest profession. And porno is the newest profession. You are more like a gladiator: a contemporary gladiator. Of course, the gladiators were slaves - but some of them won their freedom. And you, I think, will win yours.

Comments

Equality in the Work Place

2009-05-20T11:02:11+02:00

I can’t remember the name of the program that was on last night, all about women in the work place.

Clearly, this was a program attempting to really get to the core of the debate at hand. This was achieved by someone dressing up as an egg and asking people their opinions, getting school children to run around and pretend that they are interested in becoming an astronaut and throwing highly dubious and utterly meaningless statistics around like confetti.

To be honest, I was only half watching it. My girlfriend’s flat mates were watching it when I came round and I am aware that I have a nasty habit of undermining the premise of any program they seem to be watching. So while I ate, I kept a stony silence, throwing out questioning grunts only every now and again.

That’s not to say I have a problem with women earning the same as men. Of course I don’t, but you have to compare like with like.

There was a couple of points that I found of interest, that were only touched on with one interview with a professor. He mentioned stuff like the fact that women choose jobs and careers that have better working environments than men, etc etc.

During one of their light-hearted displays of common prejudices among school children, the presenters would hold up various flashcards of aspirational careers such as a doctor, judge, astronaut or lawyer. The children were asked to run to one or other side of the room depending on whether they thought the job was more for men or women. For the purposes of such a test, there was of course no option to say ‘either’ – that would have been pedantic and counter-productive. They found, to their chagrin that there were only a few jobs that were strongly associated with men, but otherwise it was 50/50. They then went around to congratulate the children on such a sterling effort and asked them how this exercise in futility had affected them. The girls were all gushing about how they could do the job of a man and how they all now have wonderful aspirations thank you BBC.

What they didn’t do was hold up flashcards of shit jobs, difficult jobs, jobs that injure you, put your life at risk or have a profound effect on one’s social life. Jobs like:

Miners,

Lumberjacks,

Fish Trawlers,

Oil Riggers,

Site Labourers,

Truckers,

Security Guards,

Refuse Collectors,

Traffic Wardens,

Etc

Noticing a trend here? I am sure if the kids had been asked who these jobs were more strongly associated with, they would have all recognised that they were masculine. And, once that was established, do you think the girls and the TV presenters would be all “see, you too can do these jobs – don’t leave it to men to risk their lives, their health, their lifestyle in order to provide for themselves and their families – you can do it too!”

Did they hell. Just saying.

Comments

J.M. Barrie on Smoking

2009-05-19T16:35:01+02:00

Some short extracts from J.M. Barrie's book My Lady Nicotine.

The circumstances in which I gave up smoking were these:

I was a mere bachelor, drifting toward what I now see to be a tragic middle age. I had become so accustomed to smoke issuing from my mouth that I felt incomplete without it; indeed, the time came when I could refrain from smoking if doing nothing else, but hardly during the hours of toil. To lay aside my pipe was to find myself soon afterward wandering restlessly round my table. No blind beggar was ever more abjectly led by his dog, or more loath to cut the string.

I will not admit that, once sure it was doing me harm, I could not, unaided, have given up tobacco. But I was reluctant to make sure. I should like to say that I left off smoking because I considered it a mean form of slavery, to be condemned for moral as well as physical reasons; but though now I clearly see the folly of smoking, I was blind to it for some months after I had smoked my last pipe. I gave up my most delightful solace, as I regarded it, for no other reason than that the lady who was willing to fling herself away on me said that I must choose between it and her. This deferred our marriage for six months.

Two cigars a day at ninepence apiece come to £27 7s. 6d. yearly, and four ounces of tobacco a week at nine shillings a pound come to £5 17s. yearly. That makes £33 4s. 6d. When we calculate the yearly expense of tobacco in this way, we are naturally taken aback, and our extravagance shocks us more after we have considered how much more satisfactorily the money might have been spent. With £33 4s. 6d. you can buy new Oriental rugs for the drawing-room, as well as a spring bonnet and a nice dress. These are things that give permanent pleasure, whereas you have no interest in a cigar after flinging away the stump. Judging by myself, I should say that it was want of thought rather than selfishness that makes heavy smokers of so many bachelors. Once a man marries, his eyes are opened to many things that he was quite unaware of previously, among them being the delight of adding an article of furniture to the drawing-room every month, and having a bedroom in pink and gold, the door of which is always kept locked. If men would only consider that every cigar they smoke would buy part of a new piano-stool in terra-cotta plush, [pg 7] and that for every pound tin of tobacco purchased away goes a vase for growing dead geraniums in, they would surely hesitate. They do not consider, however, until they marry, and then they are forced to it. For my own part, I fail to see why bachelors should be allowed to smoke as much as they like, when we are debarred from it.

Nothing is more pitiable than the way some men of my acquaintance enslave themselves to tobacco.

Nay, worse, they make an idol of some one particular tobacco. I know a man who considers a certain mixture so superior to all others that he will walk three miles for it. Surely every one will admit that this is lamentable. It is not even a good mixture, for I used to try it occasionally; and if there is one man in London who knows tobaccoes it is myself. There is only one mixture in London deserving the adjective superb. I will not say where it is to be got, for the result would certainly be that many foolish men would smoke more than ever; but I never knew anything to compare to it. It is deliciously mild yet full of fragrance, and it never burns the tongue. If you try it once you smoke it ever afterward. It clears the brain and soothes the temper. When I went away for a holiday anywhere I took as much of that exquisite health-giving mixture as I thought would last me the whole time, but I always ran out of it. Then I telegraphed to London for more, and was miserable until it arrived. How I tore the lid off the canister! That is a tobacco to live for. But I am better without it.

Continue reading here, where he goes on to describe his much loved Arcadia Mixture, a superior blend of tobacco leaves.

Reading this book is the strongest argument ever presented to me for giving up smoking.

Comments

By The Sea

2009-05-18T11:41:39+02:00

Here's my effort for La Spice's little poetry competition. Theme: 'By The Sea'.

Berwick

This appalling smoke

That appears from nowhere

Sponging the holiday from the weekend crowds.

Where does it come from

The foreigners’ heads shake

I told you Scotland was a bad idea.

An easy mistake to make:

Strange accent, tartans, the blue flag draped

Outside Dalgleish’s window

A proud Pict in this land of Angles,

Relishing the certainty of his clan.

The mist distorts the border

On a warm Summer’s day.

At the mouth of the river

The clouds plummet into the town

Only the clock tower surviving, but unseen.

This fat man scratches his brain

When his bleached tanned trophy says

“They call it the Ha”

Neither are sure,

And the man takes note

To ask later again.

From out of town, descending

From the undulating hills

A child points out the window.

Look Ma, It’s the Ha.

She notices the caravans and shorts

Too bad, too bad

They’ll never again come this far.

Comments

Caption Competition #2

2009-05-14T12:18:46+02:00

The photographer was professional in everything he did, except for the way he addressed his crotch

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Captured in Three Panals

2009-05-13T12:25:43+02:00

Comments

Caption Competition #1

2009-05-12T17:58:59+02:00

"Look," said Enid, "there goes the collapse of Roman Imperialism!"
"Golly!"

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Worrying Messages

2009-05-11T18:02:07+02:00

Ahem.

I used to work in this office in Newcastle, where my boss and I are still kinda loose friends, i.e. we text each other every now and again when something funny occurs to us.

Normal.

Sometimes, and I mean infrequently enough for it not to worry me, he sends me a text telling me how well he's been doing in the gym. How he's a bit of a stud and his arms are massive. That he just recently had sex with an 18 year old model.

I didn't ask for these texts but, I thought "I'm OK with them." I never saw this guy outside of a work context, but whatever.

So a coupla weeks ago, I get this text:

I'm looking suprisingly good these days. Having changed my hair slightly. I don't wash it as much. And my stubble and lush lean muscular body. Women sense my danger and confidence. My icy blue eyes and latent power. They have an innate urge to be held and entered by me. I look 25 at most. Maybe even 18.
[the guy's 32].

OK. That was a bit wierd. No, actually, that was pretty fucking odd. What am I to make of this? I am baffled as to his motivation.

A day or so later:

Lads [he seems to have a mailing list] I'm now formally seeing Leigh. My sister thinks I've been on steroids. Right now, there is a tidy blond checking my bi's out on the train.

Oo-er.

This:

Comments

Horoscopes May 09

2009-05-11T17:12:01+02:00

Summer is coming, so in light of the inevitable merriment, I have invited Milly Whipsnade, a young girl who attends an all girls boarding school in 1950s Pembrokeshire. Among her many hobbies (which include bed making, mystery solving and ballet) is astrology. She is very excited to test her knowledge of the stars on you readers this month, so here are her eagerly written horoscopes for you all to enjoy.

Libra

What-Ho! I can’t tell you how awf excited I am about being given this wonderful opportunity to test my skills! Peering through the 3” telescope Uncle Georgie bought for my eleventh birthday last night, I can tell you this much – your summer is going to be truly spiffing, filled with all sorts of capers. You will meet a tall, dark stranger - he turns out to be smuggling whiskey from the Isle of Skye and it is up to you and your pals to apprehend him!

Aries

England is the most wonderful place to be on our dearest Earth during the summer months, and I won’t here a word against it! This year, the whole of my school house will be having a beano at my Aunt’s farm in ‘Spa. I jolly well suggest you do the same, as my charts tell me if you do plan on having some such get-together – it could quite possibly be the paramount summer event for all your acquaintances!

Cancer

Do you have a bicycle? I can’t impress on you enough how much you really ought to get one – they are the most terrifically entertaining contraption for a youngster. Of course initially you may look a bit of a boob when learning to keep balance, but once you’ve got the knack, the japes never end!

Sagittarius

I say, have you ever noticed the rather out of the ordinary events that occur on the night of a full moon? My pals and I jolly well have. Why, only the other evening after Vespers as we were making our way back to the dorm we heard some of the most awful shrieks coming from the Arboretum. We alerted the groundskeeper from the common room window using our secret flashlight but to no avail. After a quarter of an hour the shrieking stopped. In the morning we went over to investigate and found there to be nothing wrong. Uncanny!

Virgo

It is so important to help those less fortunate than yourselves, which is why I became a Girl Guide. So far, the gang and I have: rescued a little girl from a burning building, testified against an architect attempting to build a shoddy home for the elderly, taught a gypsy boy the importance of self-belief and drove a travelling salesman out of the county for being a wog.

Taurus

Now, I know this may seem impertinent coming from a young girl like me, but one of the benefits of a private education is the ability to speak with authority on any subject, so here goes! You must beware of all the rot surrounding Rock and Roll. The girls and I all agree that while the rhythms are catchy and the tunes a lot of fun, one must not begin to think that the lifestyle is attractive. The Rock and Roll lifestyle is notoriously dreadful to the female of the species and I urge all you girls to stop listening to it by the time you are engaged to be married. It is not right that a husband should be encumbered by his wife’s past misdemeanours as well as taking the burden of your family’s financial stability.

Gemini

It surprises me greatly to think that there are still many people living in this nation who believe that a female should not attend University! The women who advocate this position must already be happily married so I ask them – where else is a well educated lady meant to find her future husband? At the meeting of the Women’s Institute? In a Mayfair club? The mind truly boggles!

Scorpio

My latest copy of Bunty for Girls suggests ways of making a bit of money for oneself during these languid summer months. If I may, I would like to offer one of them to you now as some of them are quite charming. Of course, rewards from the bank are always available to those girls who manage to catch the villain, but according to Bunty, the most cost-effective and risk free way of earning your keep is to solve the mystery of the missing lead from the church’s roof. The rector always pays us in sacramental wine and getting sloshed in the sun is always a good show.

Capricorn

There is so much to be learnt from foreign cultures ladies! The girls and I learnt this two summers ago when we were staying the night on Uncle Obadiah’s yacht. We accidentally left the harbour and went to sea for a whole two weeks! We ended up on the Canary Islands. The natives took such special care of us we didn’t worry too much when they left for Spain in our yacht never to be seen again. In the end we were picked up by an eccentric balloonist who dropped us off back in Lidney-upon-Severn in time for tea! What larks!

Pisces

I cannot tell you how much I am looking forward to falling in love! My father says that’s what comes from watching too many films at the picture house – I’ve even noticed I’m saying “Okay” a lot more than a girl like me should. But one day I am sure I will fall into the arms of a loving, Christian and ambitious under-graduate who will sweep me off my feet, all the way to Paris! Don’t give up ladies; there is a white knight for each and every one of us!

Aquarius

At the end of our overgrown garden is a railway. My siblings and I love to run down to the railway line to wave as the train passes by – trying to warn them that there is a Psamead living in the gravel who knows where our father is. So far no one has been killed but I am thinking of showing my petticoat in order to get the driver to brake next time. My brother Percy says I am a whore.

Leo

Make sure you keep on top of your baking skills! There is nothing quite like a thick piece of ginger bread or even lardy cake on a Saturday afternoon! Not only are they tasty little treats, you can exchange them for smoking shag at school.

Comments

Music Plug

2009-05-11T13:43:36+02:00

Oi you bunch of miserable bastards.

I have loads of sisters. They are all talented and wonderful. But today, being in a generous mood I have decided to advertise as best I can the music of two of them.

Here's my sister Lizzie's stuff. She 31 and now lives in the North of England. Why that matters I don't know. I also can't work out if you can embed the player from Myspace, so I'm afraid all I have is a link (however it should open in a seperate window so your navigation is not screwed around with).

Lizzie Bell.

My favourite is Peter Was Never My Boyfriend. A beautiful, honest song we can all relate to, and one which makes the usually well butch, devil-may-care and emotionless brother come over all unnecessary.

And here's a link to my other sister Lucy.

Lucy John-Paul.

All her songs are pretty nice, though my favourite is Take Me Back. Ok, they are rather sentimental, but there are some real gems nestled in among the lyrics. She's only bloody 20.

That's her solo stuff, she also does a duet thing with this friend:

Lulu & The Boy. They gig occassionally around SE1, London.

And that's it really.

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You Can't Please Everyone

2009-05-08T15:17:42+02:00

Everyone please visit this blog:

You Can't Please Everyone

It lists what is usually considered great pieces of art, either music, film or literature... then gives the 1 Star reviews that they recieved on Amazon. Makes for some startling, though hilarious reading.

Such as this 'review' of Sgt Pepper's (The Beatles):

This album is a rip off Pink Floyd’s DARK SIDE OF THE MOON. The beatles copied Pink Floyd and this is the reason why Pink Floyd are better. Simply a weak and disgusting effort. Best avoided.

Comments

Home Is So Sad

2009-05-08T12:56:36+02:00

I read this poem for the first time in a long time, and I love it. It captures the mood so perfectly so I thought I might post it here.

Home Is So Sad
by Philip Larkin

Home is so sad. It stays as it was left,
Shaped to the comfort of the last to go
As if to win them back. Instead, bereft
Of anyone to please, it withers so,
Having no heart to put aside the theft

And turn again to what it started as,
A joyous shot at how things ought to be,
Long fallen wide. You can see how it was:
Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

Comments

History Sticker Book

2009-05-07T12:03:43+02:00

I've just had an excellent idea. These things happen, between me writing my erotic fiction and planning my own suicide.

When I say 'excellent', it is of course quantifiable and entirely subjective, but bear with me.

Remember those football sticker books. Course you do. I want to make one, but based on History. Yes, I am a die-hard nerd, so these things appeal to me. A sticker book based upon history characters, arranged and ordered by Movement or Era.

Shut up, course kids will like them. Even if they don't, aspirational parents will, so I'll still make money. Although of course I am more interested in the imparting of knowledge - especially now just having returned from work experience in a school. Yes, I am going to become a History teacher. Those of you who who have debated with me on aspects of history - I am sorry if this worries you, but I guess that's what the national curriculum is for!

Anyway, imagine this: you'd have the Renaissance page in the book (somewhere in the middle I'd imagine), and there are two dozen stickers you have to collect featuring prominent figures of the time like Raphael and Lorenzo d'Medici. Then you'd have 'shinies', the special ones - for the Renaissance I imagine them to be Erasmus and Leonardo de Vinci.

There'd be a page on the Enlightenment, classical composers, Ancient Greek philosophy, Roman generals etc. I don't know if it would be practical to have a Worldwide edition, so I am just talking about Europe here, or maybe Western Civilisation (from Hellenism to US super-power). I dunno. Still, I like the idea because as I have said, I am actually quite sad.

In order to prompt some debate (although this usualy leads to embaressing silence) What is your favourite era, and who would be your 'shinies'?

Comments

Nique la Police

2009-04-16T12:28:58+02:00

I always thought we were kinda lucky in this country in that we didn't hate our police force. Sure, the underclasses and criminal element have no love lost with the police, but for regular law abiders and the middle classes, the police are generally seen as A Good Thing.

This is in comparison to a country like France who do have an effective police force, but one that is largely despised and derided. Students don't like them, professionals don't like them and the majority of the working class don't like them. The phrase "Baise la Police" shows a fairly common sentiment in this country and popular films such as Taxi and the excellent La Haine portray the police as either bumbling idiots or lackeys of an oppressive government.

The problem with such an ingrained negative attitude towards the police force, as has been described by French people I know, is that because everyone regards the police as a bunch of bullies and idiots, it means that only bullies and idiots end up being recruited. In France, to even think about joining the police force someone has to have been a massive prick in school, gets off on power over others and has a desire to hang around with boneheaded wankers. So the cycle continues.

And even if there is a recruit who doesn't fall into this stereotype, years of ridicule and hatred will surely turn him into the person he wanted to avoid becoming - a tyrant with a baton.

It is my sincere hope that this doesn't happen in this country, yet I feel that with recent events, it is going this way. The protests, not just of the last month but throughout the labour years (and beyond) have given the populace a rather sinister feeling towards the police, a sort of "OK, now we know whose side you're on". When once we looked to the police to protect our rights and freedoms, we are beginning to look at them as a barrier or obstacle in out struggle for democracy.

For me, the biggest offenders are not the riot police however. I have a feeling that some of you may agree - the worst kind of police are the dreaded small town police. Police in places like Wisbech, Berwick upon Tweed, Scarborough et al. The kind that prowl the streets in the cars doing fuck all for anybody, pointing cameras and speedometers out the windows and generally being a public nuisance. I'm sure everyone who lives in a small town has an annoying story about how someone they know got pulled over for nothing, or someone's been brought in for questioning simply because they argued with them.
I blame this on the same thing that I blame for the abuses at Abu Ghraib - boredom. I wonder if police are trained in how to deal with boredom (that is without giving a warning to a man sitting in a van, with the engine running who is not wearing a seatbelt).

I think they're also encouraged by the actions of local councils who also display characteristics of megalomania, groupthink, sheer stupidity and a complete ignorance of the mandates with which they first came into existence.

For your entertainment, a clip from La Haine - the scene is the next day following a suburban riot where police were injured and property was burnt and damaged. Listen to the words.

Comments

Horoscopes! April 8 - whenever

2009-04-08T16:52:24+02:00

In these times of uncertainty and worry, who better to guide us in the ways of profiting from a financial meltdown then someone who has done it themselves? Meet Mikhail Prokmovich, a Russian billionaire who made his personal fortune (worth over $8 Billion in 2008 according to Forbes) through a combination of savvy business acumen, opportunism and “fear-mongering” (quote from his auto-biography). Before becoming a board director to various natural resource companies following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Prokmovich had been an active member of the ruling party and is rumoured to have been in the Spetsnaz. He does not deny this rumour only remarking “it is often an advantage to have a past that casts doubt on a seemingly benign exterior”.

Libra

The image of scales can teach you much about business world. When you look to scales, one side be lower than other. But that not mean this is bad – this mean that one side have more than other side! Everyone may look at higher side and say “Ah, we like this side, it close to heaven”, but you know that real heaven is a private island in Caribbean with pool and own airstrip.

Aries

Don’t be little weakling like a mole or man from Minsk. You must be like big bear to be king in this world. Much to be learnt from history of Russia. Two men who were great come from my country – man named Attila and man named Leonid Brezhnev. First name create mighty empire from being crazy like man on vodka holiday. The second name is from Soviet history. He reach power by rewarding his friends and not rewarding antagonists. In my experience, the best way of not rewarding an antagonist is to threaten their family.

Cancer

You think it easy to have $8 Billion? It not easy comrade. My father not speak to me, my first wife not speak to me, my priest not speak to me – it very difficult to maintain this good situation. You must surround yourself only with people who are understanding of you. See, I am director of many company. You think I do this alone? No, my friends are also directors of the same companies. We all sit around big table and laugh while buy controlling stake in public sector industries.

Sagittarius

Don’t be fool and think you can be smile and happy when on top. Yes, wear big suit and drive big car, but no be famous. Be quiet with your money. It help people believe you good man, humble. But if people do investigate, they see you very very rich and they become scared. This is good. You must have image like Russian foreign policy – it not quite good, but you not want to provoke either because of massive nuclear arsenal. That is how I am, except I am having only one nuclear warhead and no delivery system.

Virgo

The film ‘Taxi Driver’ I love very much. Why like I this film? Because this film show man with focus. Man with focus can achieve much as this film shows. I see bad all over Russia. It would be fun to clean Russia with gun – then people will behave. If I am not billionaire with government ties, I would like to be a taxi driver with gun. In end De Nero is hero. You can be hero too if you make like gun.

Taurus

Money has many perks. Money gets me very many hot women. Money means my second wife will not ask where I go on weekend. Money means my second wife can also see other men to practice her love on. Money heals all differences. Eventually my second wife will leave me, but this is OK, she wants to be famous. But how can famous man have many prostitutes at his house – newspaper think rich people should not have prostitutes. This is mad.

Gemini

If you want to succeed abandon belief in god. Sure, there many rich people who are religious, but many people keep asking them questions. Tell me who is Vahid Alakbarov? Not know? But he is 48^th richest man in world, and good friend of mine! No questions about him. But George Bush have many question and not much money. See, I say no to morality. Morality only obstacle on road to domination.

Scorpio

For men like me, I enjoy making horoscopes. Why? Because if anything is controlling me, it be a big ball of nuclear explosions floating in sky. I am like star – I am distant to people on Earth, but I have much control. You must try be like this. Are you in control of your life? Where is your wife? Who is your boss? Can you go on holiday tomorrow? Remember – to climb to top of human pyramid, you must tread on face of others.

Capricorn

Many horoscope give advice about love. This is bunk. Love is weakness because it attaches you to someone else – what can they do for you? Beatles say “Can’t buy me love”, but I say “Love can’t buy”. Love not buy my place on Federal Assembly. Love not get me private viewing of confused bikini models on my birthday. Love not help me hunt and kill rare Siberian tiger.

Pisces

I like actor named Arnold Schwarzenegger. He my kind of man. He make great influence by making scared of people. Now where is he? He governor of California and nobody care that he make film called Hercules in New York. This not bullshit story. He is another man with focus. He good at lifting heavy things so he use it to become governor. I good at meeting friends, now I have excellent friends. Find your power and use it.

Aquarius

Many people are silly and pathetic. I look at people running around on world and laugh at them. Come, join me in laughing at funny little people making effort in world. They cannot do much about life. For people like me (and maybe you) the world is for us. Our abilities are great but even more – we can grab axe and swing round head when others sit on doorstep and weep. Weeping is for Kulaks. Laughing is for us.

Leo

Try not show off power too much. But to enjoy money, wear big grey suits and have driver. These cities you should enjoy – London (Harrods, but do not enter yourself), Los Angeles, Dubai and Singapore. These places have many people ready to support things you want. I do not like to wait long for helicopter to take me to Opera. In these cities, there many ways of getting what you want. Never live in Russia, only if you have money to support whole town (like me).

Previous Horoscopes

Next Clairvoyant?

- Wild West Cowboy
- Enid Blyton Character
- Comic Book Villain

Comments

A Comedy of Errors

2009-03-31T14:13:37+02:00

This is an article about Dane Cook.

This is an article about how Dane Cook is not funny. If you haven't heard of Dane Cook, good, this means I can predispose your mind to not finding him funny if you come across him unexpectantly.

Yes, he's the smug looking git on the left who appeared in this movie which was needless to say, awful. Yep, even the fact that Jessica Alba had loads of screen time could not save this film.

Unfortunately, Dane Cook is popular. I mean really popular. His Stand-Up comedy album Retaliation went DOUBLE PLATINUM and became the biggest selling comedy album in America for 28 years.

And despite the numerous claims by other, less shit comedians that he has plagiarised material, his own stuff is appallingly average. I mean too average. Sometimes watching him you think he's lined up a good joke but he ruins it by being un-edgy, un-unpredictable and downright soft.
This is the amazing thing - he does observational comedy, but seems to miss the whole 'comedy' thing. He seems to be another case of an American missing irony. I only think this because at some point in his life he must've heard somebody say the ironic comedic axiom "It's funny because it's true" and taken it at face value.

Well it's not true. In order to procure comedy from the mundane, one must subvert the audience's expectations. To say "Don't you hate it when strangers sneeze on you?" is not funny, even though it's true.
To achieve good observational comedy, one must take something that is true and twist it a little, put something unexpected in there, combine it with a similar concept or if you're really struggling a bit of old reductio ad absurdum.
You also have to make the audience empathise with the subject matter. A good comedian can make the strangest, most alien thing funny to an audience. I have never been hunting, but Pryor's re-telling of a hunting trip with his dad cracks me up.
It is not an adequate replacement to simply use the first person plural in the hope that this kind of subtle rhetoric will get the audience on side.

Dane Cook does none of these. He describes a situation, then expects us to laugh.

Except, the problem is of course his moronic audience DO laugh. Why? Apparently something to do with the huge amount of effort he puts into self-promotion. It's all there - Twitter following, Myspace, blog and he actually replies to fan male. It makes me sick. It's almost like people are only laughing because of all the effort he's gone to. At least I hope that's the truth because I really don't want this guy to mark the future of comedy.

For comparison's sake, let's have a look at some examples:

Dane Cook re-telling 'stuff' that, had he been talented, could have been funny:

Whereas, he are some talented people (providing the editor doesn't fuck up which it seems to be doing right now).

Comments