To Do List (for people needing stuff to do)

• Email everyone you ever intend cooking with and ask them what foods they don’t like (saves asking them nearer the time)
• Start dropping hints about having a new hobby (judo/bricklaying/interpretive dance – something that suits you) so you can use it as an excuse to get out of stuff in the future. NB. Don’t waste your time if you have a child/children, you’re fixed for excuses for years.
• Look up Duran Duran on the internet (Wikipedia most likely) and find out if they ever split up or just carried on relentlessly despite universal indifference to their music for 20 years.
• Read the menu of everywhere you might ever eat out and decide what you fancy, keep the list in a notebook and keep it with you (saves doing it at the restaurant and you can enjoy the time to study what people’s faces look like while reading menus – something many of us have little opportunity to do).
• Make friends with someone named either Kevin or Wendy – NOT BOTH, but if you must NEVER LET THEM MEET.

50 Greys of Shades

I know you’re meant to criticise 50 Shades of Grey after you read some of it for being some tawdry erotica or being really badly written but I read Chapter 1 last night and all I have to criticise is the poor use of physics terminology:

Something reaches terminal velocity when it is in free fall and can accelerate no more. An elevator (lift in the UK) is not an example of this. Certainly when it is traveling up to the 2oth floor – presumably using some kind of motorised pulley system. Admittedly there is no description of the mechanics of the elevator (lift in the UK) in the text – nor in any appendix. But I feel we can summise the lift does travel upwards under some kind of mechanics system, and indeed downwards as Christian Grey has to obey Physics and health & safety regulations like anyone else. The elevator (lift in the UK) certainly woudln’t be reaching a terminal velocity on this – or any other journey; even if it were to be cut from its suspending wires (terrorist plot?) at the top of a very large building and managed to fall directly down it woudln’t reach its terminal velocity.

Other than that I would say the first chapter was OK. A solid 4/10.

Chicken Shit

It’s fucking mad America isn’t it? Absolutely shit house crazy.

I’m not saying we don’t have our fair share of nut jobs over here – and I’m not saying some of them don’t use god/religion as an excuse to spread hate. This guy is a fairly big deal openly spewing hate. I suppose it’s a bit much to suggest we don’t have this level of homophobia over here, we’re just a bit more refined about the whole thing. The ‘trick’, played on both sides of the Atlantic, is wrapping up anti-homosexual propaganda inside pro-family dogmatic rhetoric (try saying that give times after you’ve been on a waltzer).

“I think we are inviting God’s judgment on our nation when we shake our fist at Him and say ‘we know better than you as to what constitutes a marriage’ and I pray God’s mercy on our generation that has such a prideful, arrogant attitude to think that we have the audacity to define what marriage is about” 

This is what this chicken magnate said. I think the thing to remember here is that God doesn’t exist. Religion is a tool of control (fucking hell, Gervais was right) – important to add here that is, in concept, a brilliant way of spreading positive messages on how people should behave towards each other. It (religion) is a set of values set hundreds of years ago by man. The only people in danger of judging people are the people themselves. I think, as a species, we should be proud and arrogant to recognise that people should be able to marry (fuck) whoever they want with the consent of all those involved in the marriages (fucking). The notion that two men/two women/a man and a horse/a woman and a travel iron are disrespecting some traditional notion of marriage is ridiculous and doesn’t say much for the institution.

You’ve gotta pick a pocket or two

Foreign thieves coming over here stealing out stealing? Is this what we have spent over FIVE HUNDRED POUNDS bringing the Olympics to England for?

My favourite part of the video is about ten seconds in when one of them says “Barcelona very good.” And then another one, the sharpest dressed one (probably the leader, most successful with the ladies – or men, bloody hell maybe both – whatever floats his boat) says, “very good at pick-pocket”. I’m not sure whether he is saying Barcelona is very good at pick-pocketing or that Barcelona is a very good place to be a pick-pocket. Barcelona is a city – pick-pockets are people, or at least animals, I can imagine a chimpanzee doing a job, or a well trained parrot.  So, I think he means the latter. Which means he is just making a really poor joke, stating what was implicit in his mate’s suggestion.

That said he’s a Romanian pick-pocket and not a regular panel member on a panel show. I’d like to see Russell Howard steal wallets/phones/e-readers from unsuspecting tourists in a large European metropolis (If Russell Howard Pick-Pockets His Way Through Europe ends up on BBC3 I’m suing).