Further Tales from Daily Mail Island 2

After writing the below post, I possibly have a new favourite.

Women have no place in the army. They should stick to sowing and cooking and stuff.
- dunitburger, Coventry UK, 22/11/2009 9:06

Further Tales from Daily Mail Island

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you a new national pastime, one that will delight you for a few hours at least.

Visit the Daily Mail website, and select a news story at random. At the bottom, will be a selection of reader comments. Ok, nothing new there. Then select 'worst rated'. This shows up the comments that have been flagged as being offensive and in poor taste. They also appear to be unmoderated.

Then have a look at 'best rated'.

Although, the best one I saw was sitting unfiltered at the top of a story about ten female soldiers being returned from Afghanistan because they had become pregnant.

Here it is:

It takes two to tango. However when you put both sexes together in battle conditions a bit of comfort after the fight is understandable. Women should NOT be on the front line, or on board ships
- Margaret, Suffolk, 22/11/2009 16:33

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1229961/Ten-pregnant-Servicewomen-sent-home-Afghanistan-war.html#ixzz0XdQ1HTMw

Thank you, Margaret in Suffolk. Women shouldn't be allowed on ships. This is the voice of the people.

Good night, Great Britain.

Dudley, October 9th 2009

Welcome to Dudley, an improbable stones' throw away from where I used to wait for the bus each day as I went to college.

There used to be a pub by the bus station, called the Joe Darby. (My Dad insists it is known as the Josie D'Arby, which would have made it one of very few pubs in the entire country named after the Welsh actress.)

Anyhow, around the turn of the century the pub needed a reinvigoration. It seemed to be standard to make everything look like New York, lending weight to arguments for a new name. So a neon sign was ordered, hoisted into place...and a couple of years later, the pub lays dormant.

Sadly, it looks as if a bit of the neon sign has fallen off, too.

Welcome to He Metro Bap, Dudley.

Chat

Hello.

Judging by my last few posts, it looks like I have been spending a lot of time queueing in newsagents. This is true.

It is also how I discovered the tag line for Chat magazine:

Life! Death! Prizes!

Ugh.

Click here to see for yourself.

Oh, The Horror!

Last night, I wanted to write about the trend of the current culture of outrage about anything mildly offensive. The reason was this newspaper headline:

Link to the web version here.

The story here is some students made some spoof advertisments in a student newspaper for commemorative 'Royal Doulton' style crockery. The subjects were well known murderers of the UK, and the theme was, apparently, "[celebrating] the plucky mischievous Brits who did gratuitous violence best".

The artwork and sentiment is good, highlighting the pithy nature of these advertisments in Sunday magazines, whilst cleverly transposing the tired images of Princess Diana or the Queen Mother with those of the The Wests or Peter Sutcliffe.

At the moment, more comedy theory than comedy gold. This is the thing that Viz (see links) have been doing, and doing it better, for as long as I can remember.

This is where the Birmingham Mail comes in.

Badged as an exclusive (how could simply reporting something that has already been printed in another publication possibly be an exclusive?), the story is the front page headline - "Fury at students' sick ad", with the sub headline of "China commemorates UK's violent child killers". More on that section later.

Using information garnered from the story itself, I can reduce this headline to virtually the word "Students'".

Within 61 words of the main text, the "ad" is revealled to be a spoof.

"Fury" seems to relate solely to the quotes from the un-named spokeswoman from the 'Support After Murder and Manslaughter' support group. She says, "It is incredibly offensive to bereaved families bereaved families and glorifies violence and killing". She ends with, "I will certainly be complaining to the university."

From this, I can confidently say that the spokeswoman was tipped off with information from the Birmingham Mail, and had no knowledge of this until contacted by them - the future tense of the complaint action is my clue here.

Support After Murder and Manslaughter are based in Finsbury Square, London, and more information on them can be obtained by clicking here.

The response from the university can hardly be called "fury". An un-named spokesman for the University of Birmingham will be censuring the un-endorsed newspaper by telling them to stop using their logo and to not distribute their magazine on campus. Damn! That's fury alright!

"Sick" is entirely subjective. Some people who have been affected by murder or manslaughter could find this offensive, but I feel that they are not responsible for raising this important issue to the attention of the Birmingham Mail - otherwise they would have been quoted. Or, at least referred to in some way.

The peice ends with "[editor of the magazine] Mr Bacon refused to apologise and said: "It is deeply regrettable that people waste their money on this kind of sentimental tat advertised in Sunday newspapers, which our 'advert' was clearly lampooning."

So, pretty much a non story.

So offensive were the images and their potential to "glorif[y] violence and killing", the responsible and considerate journalists print the pictures in colour over two pages.

Following on from recent high profile, agenda setting outrage news stories (i.e. Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand, Carol Thatcher), it appears that the Birmingham Mail has finally found something truly shocking and will not stop until it has hounded the protagonists into a Mail-engineered forced apology. 

The editorial piece on page 52 seems to confirm my view; "...the mock advertisments...are crude, silly and just plain wrong. [...] Those behind this muddle-headed escapade should grow up, get real and apologise immediately".

Erm, apologise to whom, exactly?

Friday the 13th saw the expected follow up piece, headlined by "Legal action by University of Birmingham over student newspaper". The legal action in question is referring to the unauthorised use of the university crest. (Link here.)

This misplaced crusade for justice I am sure will be quietly dropped as soon as some real news arrives. Like snow.

As someone who has taken risks with humour ever since taunting the school bully for comic effect, this is concerning to me. Misunderstandings often ending up causing the most offence, and, perversely, I am more offended by the Mail's cavalier approach to bargain bucket journalism than the original spoof commercials. Misunderstandings often arise by people who mean well, but take things too far.

Hopefully, the Chinese Embassy in London won't misunderstand my email, underlining the fact that the Birmingham newspaper with the circulation of 176,395 (Source: ABC) printed these very words on their front page: "China commemorates UK's violent child killers".

But sadly, my piece was delayed by some urgent Solitaire or something like that.

Today's Independent features a (much better than mine) article on outrage and tolerance, by Johann Hari. Last week, he printed an article on the same theme, questioning the thinking behind the UN's decision to take religion out of 'free speech' during discussions. For example, if there is a discussion about unsavoury practices of a hypothetical 'particularly religious nation', this can be struck down as it is an apparent 'attack on my religion'.

Anyhow, this open thought peice was reprinted in Calcutta, which caused rioting and call for not only the local publisher but Hari himself for arrest. (The editor and publisher were subsequently arrested.)

Please read this article, if you can find it online.

The most important thing for me in that article is this, "Putting up with offence is part of being a free adult".

Here endeth the sermon for today.

Cut and Paste job:

I looked at the BBC News website (as I do most days!) and saw this headline:

Snow-crazed stoat 'goes berserk'

I know that the snow has driven people crazy, but stoats too? Click the link above to see for yourself.

Stand by for some more photography from the week Britain ground to a halt / enjoyed some real winter * delete as applicable.

Different Class - The Musical

Hello,

To celebrate the re-decoration of this place, I have decided to pour forth on one of my better yet still remaining madcap ideas of the last five years ago.

One autumn morning in 2002, I found myself raking up leaves in the street, listening to Pulp's Different Class on my Walkman. As the familiar songs rolled by, I imagined them strung together  as a narrative. The story of a man in the mid-nineties struggling to come to terms with rejection, class, relationships, culture and change. So that's where the idea came from.

So, in 2009, I plan to structure the musical, keeping to the original songs (but not necessarily the same order) and writing the story.

Watch this space!

Esther Rantzen / Daily Express

Esther Rantzen appeared on the front cover of Friday's Daily Express bemoaning the way that swearing has permeated through society, and how Britain has become a less courteous society.

Whilst I agree that Britain is less courteous than at any other point I can remember, I find it strange that I am being lectured by a woman who is mostly well known for bringing swearing dogs and suggestively shaped vegetables into living rooms across the nation.

Swearing has happened to a lesser or greater degree for as long as there have been expressions of despair and heavy things to drop on one's feet. Upon my tisket! There are some that overuse swearing - this is genuinely a lack of imagination and vocabulary. As David Baddiel's father said, "...If everybody says f*** all the time, it gets boring doesn't it?", Swearing, at the appropriate time, can either summarize an entire situation in one word, or finish a scene in a comedy to great effect.

So, it has got to the stage where a woman who has had a career furthered by mild vulgarity, is now railing against it.

Glorious!

Secret Crush - Crushed

A few months ago, I mentioned a secret crush on this very page, of a newsreader.

A few weeks had passed without 'accidentally' catching her on any of the news programmes, and my mind wandered to what she could be doing. Me being me, at first I imagined she could be tidying hotel rooms, dressed as a French maid. However, this would be ridiculous - but the image lingered.

I checked in on one of this great land's numerous comments boards, entirely devoted to speculation and screengrabs of lovely news presenters. I have some sad news to report. According to the group, she has left the company and won't be coming back.

Naturally, the past few days have been spent with an electrical tape black armband in grateful memory of those happy summers days when she'd would sign off the programmes with a special goodbye, specifically to me (surely!), and to the seventeen wonderous gigs of screengrabs and video on my hard drive.

So thank you for your time. You know your name - just as long as no-one else finds out!

n.b. There aren't seventeen gigs. This was made up for comic effect.

"Jews are dicks"

On the way home on the train this evening, I saw some quite large anti-semetic scrawlings on a billboard, between Small Heath and Tyseley - "Jews are dicks". I have no doubt that this was written by children, yet I felt strangely compelled to write about it. I wonder how long an equally provocative remark about Muslims would last?

This is also the first bit of anti-Jew grafiti I have ever seen that wasn't on some half arsed UK History Nazi-fest. Yay! Three cheers for progress and understanding in the UK. Also, I did hear anti-Jew chanting from West Ham fans on a tram outside The Hawthorns in about 2003.

I Was A Teenage Hitler Clone

Idea for a film! Not my life story. Honest.

It is November 1989, in a secret laboratory somewhere hidden away in East Germany. Two bearded ginger scientists rush around feverishly knocking over bottles and shovel papers into a concrete mixer. There is panic in the air. There are suggested links to cloning in the laboratory. As they continue to destroy ‘evidence’, they uncover a long forgotten safe, which has never actually been locked.

Inside, there are some effects, an old parcel of papers, and a dusty test tube with a tooth in it.

The scientists stop and look through the papers. This is the writings of Otto Unterhosen, the fabled researcher from the early days of the East German regime. They are agog at the unexpected discovery.

Detailed diagrams and graphs, and copious black and white pictures. The investigation becomes more hurried, then stops when they see a photograph of Adolf Hitler.

There is a circle of red crayon around one of his teeth.

Our two scientists make the link that the tooth is the last remnant of Hitler. Obviously, being communist faithful, they jeer loudly at the tooth of the detested leader of the fascist regime.

Their thoughts turn to the possibility of using the stored DNA in the tooth to clone a Hitler that could possibly be used good; maybe propping up the falling communist government, and the thought also occurs that they could make lots of them to chain to benches across the nation to be given a good hiding at any opportune moments – a stress Hitler? 

Anyhow, this is to irresistible an opportunity to miss, and with the sounds of ‘freedom’ playing on their radio, time is ticking down. They boil the tooth and extract the DNA in a way that is only possible in a short comic film. Preferably with tweezers.

So our scientific heroes (for want of a better phrase) store this DNA in a container with obvious danger markings. Knowing that time is against them, they shovel all the rest of the available papers into the concrete mixer and run out of a side door, leaving mess everywhere.

Here, there is a plot detail I’m yet to decide on; somehow the DNA makes it to a city in England, either on purpose or design. Is there a crash of some sort, or a plot that sees one of the scientists move here and marry.

This plot is vital, as it follows to the main crux, as very soon the Hitler DNA is (either by accident or criminally insane scientific design) impregnated into a ‘nice woman of child bearing age’. The more wholesome the better, this decades equivalent of Felicity Kendal, if you will. Scientists go to ground, in hiding.

Fade to black.

Caption: Today…

A skateboard park in suburban UK land. A cheerful helpful teenage voice is out of shot, saying polite and thoughtful things. Wide shot of the teenager reveals teenager in typical Emo clothes, but with obvious Hitler fringe and downy moustache.

Cue mishaps, as the child struggles to come to terms with occasional outbursts that are out of keeping with his wholesome upbringing, and lots of Nazi style imagery which the Emo kid fails to connect with. The essential point of the humour is that the central character has to totally oppose the views of the Nazi party, and if possible, come across as the Anti-Hitler.

Eventually the scientists come out of hiding when they see the kid win a national niceness competition of some sort and try to track the kid down.

In the end the kid is told about his genes, and he’s happy with it as the message is it’s out upbringing that defines our character and not out hardwired DNA.

Title of the film? No idea. But I’d pay to see it. I may have to write star, film and direct it myself though…

Bringing The Summer of 1986 Bang Up To Date

Hello.

If you have ever thought to yourself; "What happens when the people at major financial institutions have to wait between bits of work finishing?", well the answer is usually find something else to eat. However recently, thanks to an inspired moment of lunacy from Miss P, we bring to you the smash hit from the summer of 1986 re-worded for the binge-drinking generation. Obviously, writing something about chavs would be easy, and they wouldn't work as well with the 'source material', so here is the middle class - far too much wine - surprised man in chinos - version. With full accreditation, and directions for the music video too...

Lady Gone Red

With sincere apologies to Chris De Burgh

New words by Nothing Too Pretentious and Miss P

Scene: Dark alleyway. Brick wall behind. Man wears sports pullover around shoulders. Man looks thoughtful into middle distance. Gentle movement of busy town centre in background. Music begins. Man sings:

I’ve never seen you looking so munted as you did tonight

I’d never seen you have a fight

-

I’ve never seen so many doormen ask you if you wanted to leave

They’re looking for a little more calm, given half a chance

I couldn’t see that dress you were wearing

Oh, the highlights in your hair that match your eyes; you might be blind

The lady gone red, is hanging off me, cheek to cheek

There’s nobody here, it’s just you and me, you scared them all away

But I hardly know, this mad bint by my side

I never will for-get, the way you drank tonight

I’d never seen you looking so spaced out as you did tonight

I’d never heard you talk such sh*te, you were amazing

I’d never seen so many police want to be there by your side

They threw us out the pub, they took our drinks away

And I have never had such a feeling

Such a feeling of complete and utter shame, as I do tonight

The lady gone red, is hanging off me, cheek to cheek

There’s nobody here, it’s just you and me, you scared them all away

But I hardly know, this mad bint by my side

I never will for-get, the way you drank tonig-hight

I never will for-get, the way you drank tonight

The lady gone red

The lady gone red

The lady gone red

My lady’s gone red.

Scene: Dark alleyway, wider shot. Man holding wife’s hair back as she vomits spectacularly. Fade out with close up on man’s crushingly disappointed face.

Here are some words I invented...

Yep, just came across some words that I claimed to have invented in 1998:

• Glurty
• Sleb
• Gimm
• Perbulo
• Teg
• Flubble
• Gnaah
• Joom
• Furt
• Nenvex
• Goom

Musings

Hello world. I have succumbed to a debilitating and cruel injury, which has seriously knackered my typing and general computer skills. This is a nightmare for personal and professional reasons, not only will this blog update take hours to type - The Rest of the World as led by Tiger Woods will have to wait until I have recovered for their savage beating. And work will suffer too, but that's not important,

So I have some arse of a skin disaster, which in essence, tears each time I stretch the fingers on my left hand. Not nice. And a course of antibiotics and (really) cream that is usually marketed to sufferers of thrush.

Anyhow, enough of the rubbish.

Have you ever met anyone who has the ability to make you feel like the most special person in the world? Like you are the only person that has ever existed for them? Where occasionally, that person would with the right word or smile melt away the biggest problem that has ever happened? You could spend hours just thinking of them, and their happy smiling face. Even the merest thought of them unhappy makes you angry.

Conversely, have you ever met a person who could, with one word or movement of the face, fill you with dread? Make you think 'Ooh, Jesus.’ Bring you out in a huge cold sweat, and make your heart race with a mild terror.

Now, how many of you out there had the pleasure of person a being the same subject as person b?

I'm sure it can't just be me, as I have had more than one instance of this.

Moving around the subject, I visited an ex today and saw her beautifully arranged house and happy lifestyle, with the whole varied social life and successfully indexed and handled correspondence. This all sat well with her toned body and sunned complexion.

I then compared myself right now, with the same standards. We have both had exactly the same amount of time to shake our lives down following our break up.

I live in a box room, in a friend’s house, where the only people I talk to regularly seem to be my colleagues at work. All my possessions are strewn around the city, most of them in unattractive storage containers. Currently, I have just taken possession of my DVDs, and the only way I could reasonably store them is in an old suitcase - which I can't even open up because of my hand.

The food I cook is often the very finest of the two pot variety (look out for my cook book shortly). All of my post is precariously balanced on my scanner. Six months of it.

This brought huge waves of introspection; was I jealous? I have worked hard over the last few years to overcome my insane jealousy, so I'm fairly sure that wasn't it. It then dawned on me that it was my own lack of motivation that made me feel down. If I had driven myself to look harder for a flat, I could have a nice-ish place of my own. The post would magically be handled if I responded to it swiftly, instead of leaving it to gather on the scanner. My food would be more interesting if I could be arsed to cook something that wouldn't easily fit in two pots. Then, I may have the 'go' to wash the chuffing stuff up.

So, it's not jealousy - it's my own problem.

I then handled some frankly bizarre questions about 'us', and as I put two and two together to make a figure surely in the high teens, my subconscious was poking me in the eye and screaming "She's seeing somebody new!”

Everything seemed to fall into place. Little clues around the place that my overactive imagination was forensically stitching into shape.

This made my heart sink. I actually felt sick. Even though it shouldn't have any bearing on me.

I have had girlfriends who have gone on to have a legion of kids by a selection of hand chosen unsuitable men. I know they have had sex with other men; damn, there is living proof. Here, the merest unproven suggestion was sending me into uncharted gloom.

I really don't have any opinion. What she does is no longer any concern of mine. But to have those feelings are a very deep concern. Is this natural?

Indeed, if I was to have struck up some improbable immediate relationship after leaving her, would my feelings be the same?

I am a man, screaming towards thirty like a runaway cliff-top house, with the insecurities of a five year old and the social skills of a cat.

Sorry if this all seems gloomy and down, but trust me, it feels better to be on the page than racing around in my head.

Fear not! There are some redeeming features. At the very bottom of the page, I asked "can I keep this up for longer than a week"? I have now been a user of Blogspot for months, so in the adopted words of George McFly - if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything.

I Shouldn't Be Doing This...

Evening,

I vaguely remember studying English at School and College - I even have a Degree and everything. However, sometimes, as Depeche Mode sang in Enjoy The Silence, 'words are very unnecessary'.

So sit back, turn up your speakers, and enjoy possibly the most base and primevally funny video on YouTube.

Note: This film contains one instance of a very West Country stronger swearword.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JJI3rRdZAYE

More tales from the internet later. It's 1.22 am, and my body has only just woken up.

Is there a social problem in Britain, and if so, what would you do to remedy it? Be sure to show your workings.

Caution. This post may upset.

It also may not read like a well constructed argument.

I was in bed this morning, listening to Radio Five Live, and Victoria Derbyshire's discussion show. A woman rang in to add to the topic of sex education in schools, and said that she saw older boys repeatedly having sex with eight year old girl in the next garden. She called the police, and shouted at the boy, who responded with swearing, and leaving the girl lying on the ground with her underwear round her ankles. The caller claimed that she had called the police, and that nothing had been done by them.

This evening, I was treated to an hour long documentary, "Cops With Cameras" on ITV.  Normally, I can be entertained by stolen car chases with a passive/aggressive voice over, or youths being pummeled by HM Rozzers accompanied by dramatic music, but this took things to a new level. Here, as police were arresting Bob Marley (not that one) some local herberts took time out of their day to swear and abuse the coppers. Who laughed it off. Surely, that's a criminal offence, to abuse a police officer?

Another aspect of the programme was a relatively mid-scale drugs bust, with a obscured man in his pants vehemently denying that there were any drugs in his house. Once the dogs were in, they found substantial quantities of amphetamines, cannabis, ecstasy, and boxes of knock-off clothes and counterfeit cigarettes ("These are bad for your health!", as one helpful officer described them).

The day before I saw a programme "Snog, Marry, Avoid" on BBC3. On researching this paragraph, I saw that today they are showing "Britain's Youngest Grannies". Two of the contestants seemed to be too caricature-ish to be invented. One had just received a boob job as a present from her father, the other appeared to think that she could channel Paris Hilton.  In their preview videos, the one went out with black electrical tape as suitable upper-wear, both were keeping the fake tan and glitter industry alive. One even went under the name of Levi, even though she was called Gemma.

So, from listening to the radio, watching the box, as well as looking out of the window, I can tell that this island is sinking under the weight of track-suited school-avoiding knife-wielding sex mad boys, who know the law and refuse to respect the authority of anyone, and girls who view Barbie as a viable fashion icon, whose only interest is clubbing and who believe any attention is good attention.

All this can surely lead to one inevitable conclusion...

As you may be aware, the UK has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Western Europe. Did you know, in 2006, there were 1200 births to girls under 16, and 45,000 births to those under 20?

Anecdotally, it has long been suggested that having a baby as soon as possible is a direct route to a free council house/flat, combined with benefits. According to a Councilor who spoke on the radio this morning, she is besieged with young women demanding a house, and near to their mothers'. The caller who spoke about the disgusting perpetual rape of the girl said that she lived on an estate that was full of households with the school age mum with no interest in baby.

This doesn't seem to be a problem limited to one part of the country, we have systematic, knowing abuses of our benevolent benefits system by people who have no interest in either formal learning or working.

So what do we do?

I understand that every baby has it's own story, and that generalisations like this could upset people. So, sorry if you think that this post is attacking you, or someone you know. It isn't. What it is doing is acknowledging that there is a problem of abuse of benefits, housing and society.

Can we stop child benefit immediately? No, as this will only pull the rug from under the very people whom the benefits were created for, the mothers to provide for the children.

The same can be said of disability benefit. There is widespread abuse of this - a case in point being the men (it always seems to be men) who claim for being written off in an industrial accident yet are filmed by Police casually throwing petrol tankers into the sea. Surely something sensible can be done?

If all benefits were to be stopped overnight, there would be radio phone ins jammed with rightly unhappy genuine claimants, and the Police would have to try to control the looting.

The Police have a very difficult job in controlling the feral youths on the edge of society. I'm sure they would love to belt some sense into them, but they cannot. They can't sentence them - that's up to the courts - and often have to deal with them them the day after the courts release them with no sentence. Our prisons are so full of scum, there is no room left.

Which brings me back to the drug dealers. Drugs have exploded in availability and reduced in price. Vietnamese gangs are renting houses to farm cannabis. Offices up and down this land are awash with staff still coming down off their weekend ecstasy buzz on Monday, and have official procedures for "Suicide Tuesday" - when the high finally wears off. I have no evidence to support this, but I believe that some lottery winners have a lot to do with the rise in organised crime and drugs in the UK. 

According to Camelot's most recent winners press release, The National Lottery has paid out over 2,100 million pound plus prizes. Surely not all of the money has gone to the 'deserving'? Examples like Michael Carroll tell us that statistically, some of that money makes it's way to the more nefarious members of society - in turn unlocking the door to the toys of say, counterfeiting or buying lorry-loads of drugs.

In the same way that the car helped social mobility in the 20th Century, enormous swathes of cash may have helped to mobilize the criminal element in the 21st.

I understand things change, but surely, in the truest Daily Mail islander fashion - something MUST be done to stop the crims and the council estate no-go areas?

One answer may be to make schooling non-universal. Instead of wasting time and money on making kids go to school only to exclude them, ask the parents whether they want their kids to go or not, and then spend the rest of the cash on extra Police, and each school class is reduced, solving overcrowding.

Or possibly, in the words of on of the late Kenny Everett's characters, "Round 'em up, put 'em in a field, and BOMB THE BASTARDS!"

Normal service will be resumed, as soon as I have calmed down. And no, I'm not drunk, either.

Weather vs. 'Don't Speak' by No Doubt

Earlier on, I wanted to hang out my washing. As I stepped into the garden, I could hear 'Don't Speak' by No Doubt, apparently being broadcast by a tree. This is possibly my least favourite song (of a band that I like) in the last twenty years.

I was so disgusted, I returned inside and the washing is still in the machine, requiring drying.

That's without question, the most adverse reaction to hearing a song, ever.

Fishing For Cats

Evening,

As things like washing up or attempting a social life begin to decrease in importance, new hobbies/exercises in time-wasting spring up in their place. This is where fishing for cats comes in.

Increasing numbers of local cats visit this house when the windows are open to have a nose around. Then they see me, and then run away. I decided to try to lure in a cat to play with for a while, just to see if I could.  A couple of nights this week, I laid some tuna out in a bowl, which caused severe interest, but no actual sightings. Cats prefer fish to sweet-corn, in a shock development.

After reading up on Felis catus, and learning about how they like to stalk things, I devised a very simple 'bird on a string' toy/lure which was literally string and some newspaper. This didn't work yesterday.

Tonight, I saw a cat peeking out from behind the sofa, so I casually found out the stringy toy and let the cat fall for it. It ripped it off the string and ran away, destroying the 'bird' with vigor. I threw the string in frustration, but the cat thought that the 'bird' was still alive and went for it again. After 10 minutes of Machiavellian-orchestrated playing, I closed the windows and bagged my first cat.

Felis catus thinks 'Bugger, I've been comprehensively out thought. How to get out?' 

Felis catus resigned to being out-thought, but still protecting it's hard earned snake/lure/string, becomes Felis domesticus.

Needless to say, I let it go shortly afterwards, after giving it some milk and some friendly tickles.

Welcome To Birmingham, 1

I have some lovely pictures of Birmingham, I really do.

I also have some ghastly examples of this fine city. Starting with these...

Snapped on the way in to work recently, we see the work of a Thursday night pavement Picasso. As you can also see, the work is being inspected by representatives of the Pigeon Arts Trust to see if it can be saved or permanently displayed in the Tate Modern. 

I am impressed with the attention to detail of deliberately adding cigarette ends to the regurgitated lager and curry, as if to say "there was a third factor involved in this vomit...you need to appreciate the depth and other textures involved".

A triumph all round, for the artists, and the cleaners at Flares who let this stay on their steps overnight. 

Here is the sign which as of today was still on the Livery Street (car park) exit of Snow Hill station. I have deliberately left on the phone number, I dare you to phone up and ask what exactly a "Chef Highway Engineer" does. Out of shot is the detail saying "Completion January 2008".

Thanks to W.W Design for this clanger. I thought that this would be a one off, or it would be changed as soon as someone commented. But no, this has been re-used throughout the renovations of 'Paradise Place', a.k.a. that bit with the shops in under the library.

"Would like to apologies"? What? I admit that occasionally might spell a word incorrectly, but THIS IS A SIGN IN A PUBLIC PLACE. Who proofreads this? I can imagine the conversation, "Shall we check it for spelling Lance?" "Nah, they'll have done that upstairs." Whilst upstairs are thinking "Did we spell check that? Ah, bugger it. It'll be spotted."

Some one is being paid to produce this crap.

Grr.

Anyhow, many thanks to Sam Sparro for keeping me entertained whilst I write today, check out "Black and Gold". 

Something A Little Pretentious

Evening,

I have been taking time from running on the spot and eating apocolyptically minging out of date mackrel (more on that later) to look through some old photos. Here's one of me trying to look casual, refined and intelligent, whilst having a rucksack and what appears to be a XXXL rain jacket on. Outside Broadcasting House, in London. In (possibly) April 1998. Love that hair.

Minging Mackerel update: I thought I'd have a light dinner of smoked mackerel and some leafy salad. It seems that both were off. But not just off, but rank. Full on "Poo!" on opening rank.

They are now both in the bin, which combined with the other food I chucked out at the start of the diet is causing a spectacular pong.

That word again, "Poo".