Keep On Truckin’

“I’ll get him to give you a ring back. What’s your extension?”

“Two-Four-Six-Eight.”

It took all the willpower I have in the world not to shout out “Motorway!” at that point.

UPDATE: This has just reminded me of a quote from Mitch Hedberg:

I hope the next time I move I get a real easy phone number, something that’s real easy to remember. Something like two two two two two two two two. I would say “Sweet.” And then people would say, “Mitch, how do I get a hold of you?” I’d say, “Just press two for a while. And when I answer, you will know you have pressed two enough.”

See what I mean?

I’d Much Rather Be A Zygote, Anyway

The Guardian reports that social networking sites risk “infantilising the mid-21st century mind”.

This all sounds very familiar to me. Throughout history various new things have been accused of such things.

Therefore I have produced a list of things that also create the illusions of sociability and decrease your attention span. I look forward to speeches in the House of Lords decrying these things.

Chess. It’s clearly not very sociable. Only two people can play for goodness sake. Much better to play Ludo (4 players) or Monopoly, which has the added incentive of inducting one into the ins and outs of laissez-faire capitalism.

Fire. Just look at it, burning away there! It’s so violent.

Masturbation. Oi, that’s a bit selfish! What about a spot of daisy-chaining?

Novels. Dr Arnold would be having words with you, reading away like that. It’s lovely outside, get out on the playing field.

Nuclear Families. Much better to go for polygamy and/or the extended family.

Telephones. What’s wrong with a face-to-face-conversation?

Text-messaging. What’s wrong with a telephone conversation?

Video Games. Just ask Jack Thompson. Violent video games enable teenagers to rehearse their sinister murdering plans. Oh yes.

Any others to add?

Gail Trimble

I managed to answer one question before she did, and that was through a mouthful of chips.

As I’m not in Manchester though, it was a bit of a pointless thing to be impressed with myself about. (Who was expecting Wendy Cope to turn up? That was a bit odd.)

If I just shouted more about food and had thicker eyebrows, I’d be an entire Monday night’s TV on BBC2.

It Must Be The Moustache, I Guess

Why do I keep getting Sir Allen Stanford and Dr Alan Statham confused? I suppose I should be thankful Alan Sugar didn’t get involved somehow. That would have been too much to bear.

Jack, I Want You To Draw Me Like One Of Your French Girls

Shopping for me is an activity that is often frought with anxiety and horror.

Being rather self-concious as I am, I find myself over-analysing shopping situations and how it might make me appear: I can’t go in that shop, there’s nobody in there and the shop assistants will stare at me and probably try and redirect me to the final reductions rails. On the other hand I can’t go in the shop because it is too busy and everyone will stare at my purchases in the queue.

The number  of purchases is also essential. My ideal number is two as hopefully the two items with either complement each other perfectly, or be so radically different it will prove I am a person with varied and electic taste in books/shoes/music/pens/underwear etc.

Bearing all of this in mind, it was perhaps an odd idea to buy the following two books yesterday:

To the shop assistant’s credit, he didn’t do anything, not even raise a quizzical eyebrow. I would have done. My train of thought may have ran a little something like this:

Here is someone buying two books, both recently made into films, both featuring Kate Winslet. Clearly this buyer is obsessed with her. Ah, but look he is trying to throw me off the scent by buying the editions that pre-date the film adaptations. Well I’m onto you, pal. Here’s your change.

Normally I would have thought this through and maybe thrown in a third book, or gone to two different book shops. But I didn’t. Is this an end to shopping related anxiety?

No, but it’s a start.

The Oxygen Of Publicity

I’ve been watching the following O2 ad in several ad breaks recently and I am, I’ll admit, utterly bemused by it.

Here it is if you haven’t seen it:

We start off with some bubbles in a pond. Rising to the surface we encounter a whole load of frogs, croaking and hopping about.

We leave the pond following a bunch of dragonflies to some some of cafe which seems to have one wall completely missing and one midway through being built. A man picks a flower from the outside and presents it to his significant other. They kiss. Aw! We pan across to a slightly older looking couple, with a young daughter clutching a teddy bear.

It appears her bear is talking to another bear who then walks out into a world where it would appear BEARS AND PEOPLE CO-EXIST IN PERFECT HARMONY. Oooh look, there’s a panda. There’s a bear reading the paper, fantastic! Did I mention that there are toy cars on the middle of the road? Well there are.

We then pan to the roofs, via several flying newspapers. Dogs are on the roofs, howling at the moon. And now several more moons are appearing, we now have half a dozen. This is starting to get even more odd.

The moonlight seems to be shining through several houses onto a concert taking place on a apparently very rickety stage. Annoyingly, several people have left their phones on and the ringtones can be clearly heard. I hate it when people do that.

Then Sean Bean does his spiel and we’re back in the water. The whole thing accompanied by When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again.

What was all that about?

I’m so confused that I’ve drafted an email to Sean Bean:

Dear Sean,

I’ve just been watching the most recent O2 television advertisment and have to admit that I’m confused. Could you please explain to me what on earth is going on?

Kind Regards,

Billy

PS. Loved Sharpe, though I kept being distracted by the fact that your mate was the man who shouted about “Perfumed Ponces!” in Withnail & I.

I don’t hold out much hope of a reply, especially as I don’t even know his email address.

The Holy Roman Empire Was Neither Holy, Nor Roman, Nor An Empire

Godwin’s Law is one of my favourite internet tropes, where an online argument decends into “well you know who else said that? Hitler!” a kind argumental equivalent to “I know you are, but what am I?” or “Your mum!” etc.

Such distinctions are lost on the likes of Jonah Goldberg, whose tome Liberal Fascism has just been published over here (and recieved a glowing review in the Observer of all papers. Oh… it’s reviewed by Nick Cohen, that explains it)

An entertaining and very detailed fisking of the book can be found here.

Anyway, despite all of this nonsense, can we assume that the National Socialist Party were neither National nor Socialist?

And, as the Voltaire quote above states the Holy Roman Empire was none of those.

Does anyone know of any other similar things?

Blessed Are The Skeletons

According to the interwebs, today is St. Skeletor’s Day. Hmm, I must have missed that canonisation, even as I do tend to introduce my own canonisations. From the organisers themselves, inspired by Richard Herring:-

St Skeletor’s Day is a non-commercial alternative to the corporate whorefest that is St Valentine’s Day. Each year, on February 15th, the festival of St. Skeletor occurs worldwide.

Skeletor’s wikipedia page is conspicuously light on his evil deeds but does contains a ridiculous amount of detail about his head. Apparently his voice is nasal despite the fact he doesn’t have a nose.

But do the evil realise that they’re evil? In the Masters of the Universe cartoon, when Princess Adora was captured and subsequently raised by the Evil Hoard she never realised they were evil. This was despite the fact they refer to themselves as the Evil Hoard and their leader Hordak was prone to break into peals of maniacal laughter in her presence. Such naivety is charming, and puts me in mind of this Mitchell and Webb sketch:

Some music should be appropriate on St Skeletor’s Day, luckily the fantastic Letters Have No Arms! blog have recently posted several selections, all of which are excellent.

I particularly recommend the Shellac track.

Valentine’s Day Wank

Of all the odd things I’ve been told in a pub-type situation where you could cut the awkwardness with a knife was that Mussolini used to hang around with the King of Italy because he happened to be shorter than him.

This sounds suspiciously, well, false but I like it anyway. Wikipedia, bastion of all that is accurate about painters’ dates, says the following:

Unlike his paternal first cousin’s son, the 6′6″ tall Amedeo, 3rd Duke of Aosta, Victor Emmanuel was short of stature even by 19th century standards, to the point that today he would appear diminutive. He was just 5 feet tall.

Mussolini was 5 foot 6. I’m not sure if this proves it, but at least the basic fact is correct.

Anyhow, in an effort to make myself appear more beautiful, I’ve decided I should start hanging out with Will Oldham, although hopefully not in a a Jeffrey Lewis kind of fashion. (He uses Billy as an pseudonym too!)

I’m not sure he’d be interested though.

Person Writing On The Interwebs Hates The Interwebs

Remember back in the day we all used to gather around our own computers in the dim light of a summer evening, idly dipping garlic bread into our supermarket-purchased wine before attempting to make a smart-arsed-but-not-too-smartarsed comment on someone’s weblog (that was what we called them back then, he says, acting like he is some kind of fucking pioneer) and then hoping someone would do the same in return to us.

The sinister forces of the mainstream media and their minions didn’t understand us and would on occasion write articles decrying us wasting our time when we should be out in the real world like the one they lived in you know the real world of fake health scares and how the homosexuals are taking our children away from hard-working taxpayers who raised drug addicts and we were probably socially maladjusted and most likely teenage males even though we weren’t and so on and so forth.

They were uncomprehending and we’d link to their articles slagging off the internet and then published on the internet and wonder if they were aware of the irony, which for once was proper irony and not the usual fake irony that takes it’s place along “virtually spotless” and other such phrases as exceptional examples of the idiocy of our times.

(For as long as I can remember I have really wanted to use the insult “fuck you in the pissflaps” in a blogpost but can’t help thinking that this one isn’t that one. Maybe some other time. Here’s hoping)

Well, let joy be unconfined. For I have found another one of those articles, published recently.

Of course they’ve moved on in the main from blogs to Facebook, where you have to use your actual name (Quelle horreur!) and Twitter (where your characters are limited) and so on. The author of this piece is one Janet Street-Porter, who has form.

Read the horror here.  Read it! I’m not going to fisk it, I’m tired. And lazy.

Even though the focus of the article is the Facebook she does find some time to chuck some ire the way of the blogs:

Most blogs are a litany of the humdrum, with bulletins about new tricks the cat can do, or how many times a day the baby has pooed.

Yesterday the cat taught me Knockout Whist and the baby pooed six… no make that seven times.

Oh wait… I don’t have a cat. Or a baby. Obviously this can’t be a blog.

Just read the article and shake your fist ineffectively at the screen in the hope of shattering the fuckwit hegonomy.

And, for those who don’t care for such rubbish which is better: Norwegian Wood in Punjabi or Puff the Magic Dragon?