Some of that good safe lovin'.

Google Image search result for 'JLS Durex'.

So it seems that popular teen beat combo JLS have teamed up with Durex to release their own brand of JLS-themed condoms. Yes, that's right; you, I, we are living in a society where you can walk into Superdrug and exchange actual money for boy-band branded prophylactics. I'm past the point of surprise over this sort of thing - other products with unlikely celebrity endorsements include David Beckham and fish fingers, Jackie Chan for Woolworths and, most damningly of all, Iggy Pop hawking car insurance. That last one made want to lie down and weep for the world that once was; by comparison JLS rubbers are a walk in the metaphorical park. It is a bit strange though, wandering along the aisles and seeing the lads staring out at you from the front of a packet of three.

I was secretly hoping that each condom would have a picture of the relevant JLSer's face on the end for comedy effect. Or, even better, a full body shot along the entire length - with a bit of practice and a degree of muscle control you could have the little fella grooving and body popping like nobody's business. Then you could get together with three mates and re-enact one of the band's signature dance routines while your mum films it for Youtube. Best. Tuesday evening. Ever.

Alas, it is not to be. The condoms themselves are pretty standard, described on the Durex website as 'slightly thicker' (a prime example of a joke writing itself) with 'extra lubrication' (and I've already drawn a couple of slightly grotty conclusions from that that I'll be keeping quiet for now). The main point of difference is that each condom comes in the chosen colour of the relevant band member - blue, yellow, red or green. I'm not a fan of coloured condoms; the male member looks ridiculous enough at the best of times without it being green. So what criteria would you use for picking your JLS johnny? Would you pick your favourite band member? That's a bit of a weird tribute. Would you pick her favourite band member, in the hope that some of their life force, their JLessence if you will, rubs off and makes you more like him in the sack? You know she's probably thinking of him the whole time anyway, so why not try to make her happy? You do want to make her happy, don't you? Of course you do. So put on the green condom and pretend you're in JLS.

I've been trying to come up with other cross-promotional musician/birth control link ups, with little success. My best one so far is 'Pulling out and jizzing all over her boobs - in association with Motley Crue!', which is pretty distasteful. And that, my friends, is why I'm not in advertising.

Vertigo

Quick, find something to hang on to immediately. Lash yourself to a lamppost. Smash the passenger window of a parked car and seatbelt yourself in. Crawl on to the floor and wedge yourself into the gap under the sofa, which shouldn't be too hard with the size of arse you're dragging around after you - you look like you've got a dead armadillo stuffed into each back pocket. Do something, anything, and do it now because the whole chuffin' world is made of mist and fairy piss. It's flimsy and insubstantial and approximately 99.9999999% not there. Turn your back for a second and you'll find that it's changed beyond reckoning, and not in a good way. It'll likely have gone evil.

Evil is sexy.

I'm acting like this because Christmas scared the living shit out of me. Or rather, my parent's house did. In retrospect it was just a touch of culture shock. Coming from London, where I live a spartan, hand-to-mouth existence here in my cold damp flat, reusing teabags and wiping my arse on an spring/summer 2006 Argos catalogue, to the relative luxury of the parental semi, where it's all new ipods and 4-ply Andrex, left me in a bit of a tizz. My Mum and Dad are not, in the grand scheme of things, particularly wealthy. They're certainly comfortable but they're hardly Flava Flav and one of his bitches.

Worse luck.

Still, the jump, small as it was, left me feeling dizzy and uncomfortable. A walk around the Williams homestead is a tour through a ridiculous level of luxury. An antique oak table here, a massive flatscreen telly there. Enough food to feed the Chinese army and a shiny new Virgin HD box. Scented, disposable toilet wipes instead of a foetid, stinking turd flecked bog brush. An insane level of affluence, unimaginable riches unheard of for most of the span of human history.

And good for them. They've worked hard for it, they deserve it and they are, as I said, not especially rich people. There's no Lamborghini on the driveway, no heated swimming pool nestling in the grounds. There aren't even any grounds. My problem came thanks to one of those sudden moments of clarity, like when you're out and about and abruptly realise that you're standing on a planet rather than just walking around on the ground, and you become aware of the whole dancing, whirling majesty of the universe and so on. Mum and Dad's place became like the Total Perspective Vortex in Hitchhiker's Guide:

When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here".

Except with more in the way of doilies and kitchenware fashioned to look like chickens, obviously. But the maths are brutal and unyielding - six billion people, all in desperate need of shoes and granite work surfaces. One planet with a finite and dwindling amount of resources. So where's all the stuff coming from? Who's watching the stuff? Is there a Council of Stuff? A department? A board? Anything?

It seems the unfortunate conclusion is that, in the very near future, the only way to secure that new espresso machine will be to literally kill a man to get it. Admit it - you'd be more than prepared to suffocate a stranger with a rolled up magazine if you thought there was an ice cream maker in it for you. You'd happily stomp on someone's trachea, feeling it rupture and pop beneath your boot heel, leaving them boggle eyed and purple and expiring on the floor, before you laugh in their dying face and make off with their Sopranos DVD box set. I know what you're like. I see you.

Stickin' It To The Man.

Pictured above: a completely irrelevant photo. But still, I feel, worth posting.

I've remained fairly ambivalent about the whole Simon Cowell/RATM festive bitchfight that has trundled across the public consciousness over the last week or so. As has been pointed out, Cowell is a major shareholder in Sony - Rage's record label - so the original intention of pissing Cowell off and depriving him of cash money sort of fell apart. Not to worry; we'll sling some of the money to charity and hopefully distract attention away from the fact that this is one of the most ineffectual, teenage, paint-my-bedroom-black-and-strop-about-with-a-face-on pisspoor acts of rebellion ever conceived. And that is fine by me. Really, it is. I like RATM, the X-Factor song is complete jank (obviously), Shelter gets some money to help the less fortunate at a cold and snowy time of year. Everyone's a winner except Joe McElderry. That'll teach him to try and achieve a lifelong dream, the prick. But this letter, printed in this morning's Metro, tickled my anger glands and made me shouty. Here it is:

This was about showing that we are sick of the stale state of British music and demanding something spontaneous, exciting and real. I stood up and made a difference this Christmas, to the charts and to the lives of homeless people. What did you do?

Upon reading this, I stood up in the tube carriage. Then I sat down. Then I got up again and began to wander aimlessly about, opening and closing my mouth and making little 'buh-buh-buh' sounds. I may have spent some time making a strangled keening noise, like a fox caught in a gin trap. I think I blacked out for a while and when I came to I was lying a puddle of my own fluids, my shoes had disappeared and my underwear was on backwards. I mean, honestly: pleased with yourself much?

You may indeed be sick of the stale state of British music and you may well yearn for something spontaneous, exciting and real - but how does an eighteen (eighteen!) year old song by an American band even remotely qualify under those criteria? Maybe I'm becoming jaded and cynical in my old age but I'm starting to have serious doubts about the capacity of any musician to act as a catalyst for sweeping social change, or even low grade rebellion. Look at the way the sixties flower children morphed from naked, drug-addled free lovers into grasping, middle-aged baby-boomer fuckheads. Bob Dylan released an album through Starbuck's. Starbuck's, for Christ's sake! Or take Hip Hop; once the authentic voice of a disaffected minority, now largely a vehicle for Fifty Cent's line of personal aftershaves and testicle balms. And as for Rage who, God bless 'em, are really little more than a bunch of swearwords in T-shirts...don't make me laugh my own fucking spine out. Fair do's, they have done a lot of valuable work raising awareness of... stuff, like that thing with those Mexican rebels, the details of which escape me, but their single most famous naughty act to date remains the occasion when Bruno Brooks played the uncensored version of 'Killing In The Name' on Sunday teatime radio. And they weren't even there.

Mr Letter up there reckons he stood up and made a difference. I would respectfully suggest that, in fact, all he did was download a song off the internet. That's all. He clicked 'purchase' and downloaded a song. Not an enormous personal sacrifice. Not a strident act of cultural terrorism. I chucked 10p in a charity bucket the other day purely, I freely admit, because said bucket was being toted by three of the most atonal carol singers I have ever encountered. Three West Indian ladies dressed as Santa, singing off-key carols with the grinding relentlessness of the big lorry from Duel. They were great. But does that act qualify me to write snooty, back-patting letters to newspapers, spunking off about how damn fandabidosie I bloomin' well am?

I'll leave it up to you to decide. But really, if downloading a track by an aging metal band is your supreme act of unbridled defiance, and you're futhermore clueless enough to actually feel smug about it.... then you're probably a bit of a prick. Aren't you?

I bet that bloke hasn't even downloaded 'Killing In The Name' once. Fucking sheep.

A Problem Of Tone.

I'm probably lagging behind the rest of the internet here, as per usual, but has anyone else heard of a blog called Chase No Face? It's the heartwarming, life-affirming, deeply unsettling tale of Chase, a cat who (wait for it).... has no face. It did have one but it fell off due to a traumatic road accident. Chase now maintains a blog (inevitably written in the first person), has its own facebook page (3,642 fans and counting) and even tours round schools helping people come to terms with disfigurements. I am, I freely admit, struggling with this. I cannot get my head around it at all. I mean, here's a pic of Chase - you might want to brace yourself.

Feel free to take a moment to wipe that dribble of fear-piss off your inside thigh if you like.

It's OK to be scared. We're all scared. Chase's appearance is bizarre and upsetting and the natural reaction is to hit it between its googly, twisted eyes with a lump hammer before running off to find a table to cower under. As a contrast we must also consider the good work that Chase apparently does for charidee and public awareness and what have you; both blog and Facebook page are stuffed with testimonials from people who have used Chase's fine example to help them overcome prejudice in their own blah blah etc etc. So on the one hand: monster. On the other hand: community spirit and goodwill ambassador for the really fucking ugly. The tension between the two is unbearable, and compulsive in that car crash kind of way. I am bemused.

Actually, I know what the problem is. It's the fact that Chase's blog is written in the first person. It's the comments purportedly left by other cats, cats with facebook pages. It's the references to 'mommy'. It's the utterly shameless use of the word 'furmommy' to describe cat ownership. It's comments like this:

i always felt that cats were aliens/gods that were sent to earth to observe and snuggle humans. now i know what they look like under those adorable, fuzzy masks! i am in love with chase and i want to know all her secrets!

Yes, we do now know what they look like under their furry masks - like Seth Brundle's beef curtains. When I hit the comments I was expecting a hundred posts along the lines of 'Why has this animal not been put down, are you fucking mental?' Or: 'Whenever I close my eyes I will see your cat's misshapen wreck of a muzzle and I will never sleep soundly again. Thanks a bunch, shitbirds'. But no. The general feeling was one of support, positivity and sickly, overweening cutesiness. It seemed like I was the only person who was having difficulty. Perplexed? I was, somewhat.

People who treat their pets like surrogate children weird me out anyway but when the pet looks like it's escaped from one of David Lynch's cheese dreams the weirdness is increased a millionfold. It's a problem of tone. Chase ain't your average pussy, no matter how many halloween costumes you staple it in to, so the usual saccharine lolcat treatment is just going to come across as inappropriate and fucking odd. Does no one else notice the incongruity? Am I all alone out here?

Where's my little man? There he is! There's my little Lovecraftian fucking abomination!

Having said that: I still recommend a tour around the blog. It'll make your Christmas, it really will. Then, go to Google images, type in 'disfigured people' and meditate for a while on how many of them poor fuckers have their own Facebook pages. Then do what I'm going to do now: crack open your second bottle of wine and stare at the walls for an hour or two. Peace.

Misguided attempts at creative writing, for your disgusted perusal.

This is going to start happening every so often. I will write things in the manner of a stroppy fifteen year old crapping out criminally shite love poetry for the benefit of a girl who will never (never!) let him put his hand up her bra. These literary gems will then be posted here, to the mutual embarrassment of all. My recommendation: pretend it isn't happening, as you would if you saw two dogs screwing mere feet away from where your nan was being lowered into her grave. Although please feel free to call me gay in the comments section.

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Out the door and round the corner, to the pub for a guinness and a cigarette or three. Monday, and the first real taste of autumn - dusk at 6:30, a chill in the air and a light mist of drizzle hanging suspended in the yellow streetlights. Drops caught swirling in the headlamps of cars. So quick: get your pint, grab a chair beneath the burgundy awnings, pay your 3.50 and take your seat at the human show. The greatest show on Earth, playing tonight and every night, right outside your door. Take your first sip of stout and let your eye laze across the passers by, such as: a girl laden down with a vast and chunky picture frame. A West Indian man sporting a wry and constant grin. A youngish guy who seems to be all fashionable beard, skinny t-shirt and spiky elbows. Then more and more, too many to count, too many to follow. All shapes, all sizes. Coats, hats and scarves of every colour and style. Skin pigments of every hue. Tics and habits and a thousand different defects of character, a million secret origins. And you, fanboy, will never know them all, never even a fraction, never even a per cent of a per cent of a per cent. These people, this race, will remain forever blank and inscrutable, a mystery from beginning to untimely end. Because who has the time to get down and friendly with everyone on the planet? Who even has the inclination? If anyone did, would they find anything of benefit?

Snatches of conversation float past, providing a melody to the bass of the traffic and the drum roll rumble of the overground. The city breathes, and I breathe with it. We both spark fire, breathe smoke and take in black liquid. We're blurring at the edges. Bleeding together. We are unknown and anonymous components of each other. I plant my feet and tip my head back and I feel the hum of seven million city folk – and exponentially more as the hum extends outwards across the island, the continent, the hemisphere and the whole of the Earth. It's always there, the hum, the thrust of it, ever constant, always ceaseless, no matter how bored or distracted or beaten you may be: it persists.

So don't fret. Don't hide or mither. Lie back. Enjoy, where possible. This is life, and you are from it. This is the city, and you are of it. This is the world, and you are in it.

Then you down your pint and rejoin the flow of people. Drift back around the corner. Just another termite in the nest.

Nostalgia: It Ain't What It Used To Be.

Memory is a funny old thing. A cherished recollection can disappear for decades, seemingly buried under ever-increasing layers of memories about that time you went to that thing with that girl who might, at this point, possibly be dead, so long has it been since you communicated with her. Buried and gone until, one day, something pokes at it and a memory from pre-pubescence emerges, blinking in the harsh, annoying light of your late twenties. Such a thing happened to me today in regards to the Commodore 64 game Creatures.

As an eleven year old I wanted this game bad. I yearned for it. Commodore Format rated it high and parped on about it at every opportunity: for me, this was as cast-iron a recommendation as could be found. I loved CF and dreamed of one day working for them - almost made it too, but that's another story. I shelled out fifteen quid - an impossibly huge amount of money, given that my weekly pocket money at the time was the princely sum of 2 pounds, 50p of which was earmarked for my weekly 2000AD. But I scrimped and saved and the precious game was couriered to my house, possibly on the wings of chesty, nekkid angels. And do you know what? It was shit.

SHIT.

It was a platformer of sorts, interspersed with puzzle sections where the object was to foil a Mousetrap/Heath Robinson style machine that was on the verge of hilariously mudering one of your fellow grey furry creatures. Fail and the unfortunate creature would be chainsawed, dropped in acid, beheaded or generally killed to the accompaniment of lots of cartoonish blood. I liked cartoon blood, and indeed still do to this day, which was just as well because I saw a lot of it due my chronic ineptitude. This, remember, was the good old days when videogames saw absolutely no reason to let you win, or to make life easier for the player in any way; being frustratingly difficult was considered a legitimate way to increase a game's lifespan. I also have a vague memory of the controls being sticky and lumpen, the music being annoying and the titular creatures being pretty unloveable. After a reasonable (for an eleven year old) amount of perseverance I abandoned the game in disgust and went off to discover masturbation.

Heartwarming stuff. When I was scouring the net for information about this hellish piece of software I stumbled on to the inevitable fansite which purports to be the only one of its kind anywhere on the whole wide web, something I have no trouble believing. The retro games scene as a whole has a reputation for being a haven for the more... unconventional type of chap (let's face it - we're talking about males only here. I can't imagine that there's too many ladies out there maintaining regularly updated sites dedicated to Horace Goes Skiing. Harry Potter slash fiction, on the other hand...) and the Creatures site is a perfect and shining example of the form. In the 'about' section the author deviates wildly from his theme and launches into a spittle-flecked rant about how modern games are nothing but soulless pap, shat out by a cynical industry obsessed by the acqusition of filthy lucre. True enough, I suppose, but it's not like Ocean was a non-hierarchichal anarchist collective now was it?

The author states his intention to play C64 games regularly and often, for as long as he is able. Forever, if possible. Nothing that Sony, Microsoft or Nintendo do will budge him from his belief that Commodore put together the ultimate, unbeatable gaming platform, never bettered in any subsequent generation. That, in a medium obsessed with pushing boundaries and breaking new ground (at least in the departments of tits and shiny graphics) is quite a statement. And... it's bollocks. As much as I would hugely enjoy an hour with an old Amiga and a copy of Cannon Fodder an hour is all it would be. A brief flirtation with a happy childhood memory. Then I would pack the Amiga away and go back to wanting to play the new Call of Duty, because new games are, by and large, quantifiably superior to old ones. I would rather play GTA 4 than Magicland Dizzy because, misty-eyed nostalgia aside, GTA is better. It looks better, is more involved, has a better soundtrack, is more rewarding, and contains more hours of gameplay without having to resort to being viagra boner hard.

I'm waffling so I'll cut to the chase: nostalgia, as practiced by the retro gaming community, is not healthy. Admit it - games are better these days. Tekken 6 is heaps better than Tekken. Mario Galaxy pisses all over Super Mario 2. And Creatures was shit. Shit. What you're doing is being nostalgic, not for a game, but for a time when things were simpler. When all you had to worry about was stopping the furry grey blob being dropped into the acid, as opposed to now, when you have to grapple with your crippling credit card debt, or how you're going to cover your fucking rent, or why no girl seems to want to put her hand on your wiener no matter how much you whinge and plead. It's no good. Put the C64 away and get to grips with the present. It might be scary, but at least you get to amuse yourself with this.

For some unknown reason, in Creatures YOUR MOM ran the weapon shop.

Movie Review: The Women

I'm taking revenge for what that bitch did to Parky. The man is a national treasure.

I'm a boy and as such like my movies, loud, explody and filled with armies of brain chewing undead cheerleaders. Taking that as a given I think we all know that The Women was never going to be my bag but I was pant-wettingly astounded at just how wide of the mark this piece of sheeeeit actually proved to be. Seriously, I have never seen a film in such desperate need of a good, honest car chase in my frikken' life. The plot: Meg Ryan is a well heeled society lady whose husband does the dirty on her with the not-actually-as-attractive-as-she-first-appears Eva Mendes. Boo! Meg's coven of SITC-lite girlfriends gather around and do the female support network thing for a while, then she goes back to her man. Hooray! It's awful. Below these words you will find the legendary zombie/shark fight scene from Zombie Flesh Eaters, to provide us with some small crumbs of comfort.

As well as being derivative, unfunny and lumpen this movie displays a staggering level of moral cowardice. Meg's cheating low-down rat of a husband fucks off with some strumpet and what do her assorted friends, family and comedy-relief housekeeping staff do? They spend the entire film convincing her to take him back. Not for the sake of the children, mind - Meg should abandon her last shreds of self respect and let the philanderer back into her bed because he, you know, loves her really. That and the fact that there's a formulaic happy ending to shoehorn in, come what fucking may. The message really does seem to be: sod the betrayal, ignore the humiliation and never mind the fact that he's been paying this woman's bills with the fucking family credit card - all that's needed is a cameo from Bette Midler and an impromptu fashion show and everything will be OK! It's bullshit. Here's the bit from Zombie Holocaust where Ian McCulloch kills a zombie with an outboard motor.



Now I'm not daft. I know that a film based on a 1930's Broadway musical isn't going to be plumbing the skanky, jagged depths of human emotion. People like a nice, tidy ending, which is why fairy stories finish on '...and they all lived happily ever after' instead of the more realistic '...and they were all fucking miserable until they died of cancers and brain embolisms'. But here we have a movie that presumably takes great pride in its girl-friendly, feminist credentials - one of the selling points is the all female cast, with not a male face to be seen anywhere in the whole thing - and it resolutely fails to display anything like a spine. Meg folds like origami and the status quo is blithely resumed. I've got to say, the best women I know are stronger than that. Also: it's boring.

In summation: Glyn was walking through Wordsley once and he came across what, for me, is the perfect metaphor for this movie. To whit: a fork sticking out of a human turd. I thank you.