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.

-------------------------------------------

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.

Apoca-watch - a semi regular series keeping tabs on civilisation's inevitable descent into screaming, raping chaos.

...and three weeks later everyone was fucking dead.

Who likes pigs? Everyone. Ahh, Babe - ain't he sweet. Bacon - ain't it tasty. But not so fast, Speedy Gonzalez - it turns out that the the pigs have got it in for us. The news that Birmingham has recorded its first case of swine flu has Pete barricaded inside the house, mainlining lemsip and wearing fourteen pairs of thermal pants. Word has it that swine flu is a hellish chimaera of human, bird and pig illnesses, hatched in the burning mexican heat and out to nick your car and feel up your nan. Terrifying stuff indeed. Now without wanting to cause unfounded panic or hysteria, I can confidently predict that swine flu will devastate the populace, lay waste to our cities and leave the earth a scorched and burning ruin.

Of course, we won't notice because we'll all be watching this.

Fun extra activity - place your bets on how long it'll be before I'm forced to remove the heavily copyrighted image from this week's fun episode of IHIH!

Day of Rest.

Sunday: an official deity-sanctioned day of rest. It's written into the Bible that nobody is doing shit on a Sunday. How generous is that? A whole day off. Lovely. Maybe I'll wash the car.

But let's not forget the small print because if you're following the rule to the letter you won't be picking up anything bigger than an olive - that is verboten. Anything bigger than that counts as work and The Lord will be really shitty with you for working on his specially allotted day off. So no going to the pub - that pint of Guinness is far too heavy for that - no watching TV - ditto the remote control - and no food, unless you're eating olives. One at a time. Fair enough, you can lie in bed all day but what's the point if you can't even make a fucking cuppa? It's fairly typical of religion to give with one hand whilst flicking your balls with the other but as conditions go that one is a right cocksuck.

I'm having a lovely Sunday, as it happens. I picked up a whole egg earlier. God will just have to bill me for it.

Britain's Got Patronising Cunts.

Britain, you do not disappoint. I've only been back a fortnight and this happens. First a video that I couldn't embed because the good people at Youtube wouldn't let me, the shits:

To be fair, she does look like she's been beaten by a tramp with a golf club.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luRmM1J1sfg

I mean, where do you start with this? The teenage girls in the audience, wrinkling their nose and making snide comments about the mad old bat in the charity shop dress? Pier's Morgan arse-clenchingly smug grin? That blonde wench, all quivering lip and hand-to-breast clasping? I haven't seen anything so sickening since, well.... the last time I was like, really sick.

Making fun of freaks and weirdoes has been good clean fun since the Victorians had it and there's nowt wrong with that. It's woven into the very fabric of British life - the only difference these days is that the freaks volunteer, which saves having to corral them into special pens and is generally a handy timesaver. So when a single, 47 year old, unemployed Scottish lady rocks up and claims that she can sing like Elaine Page (whoever the fuck she is), looking as she does, the brutal mathematics of televisual cruelty kicks in. She's going to make a fool of herself, and we're all going to enjoy it.

But of course, she's amazing, and we are all chastened by the way this plucky underdog has subverted our cynical expectations regarding the relationship between talent and ugly. It's so Disney I could kick myself in my own bollock. Don't stress now: I'm not here to deliver a sermon on the generally accepted belief that good looks equals ability because it's a perfectly natural human reaction and we all do it every day. Let's face it - no one with eyebrows that hefty has any right having a voice like that. That's a given. What really squeezes my lemons is the sight of thousands of people publicly Learning A Lesson, spunking themselves into a big frothy mass of self congratulation. No one is going to go away from this a better person, less quick to judge and more likely to give people a chance before they cut them to fucking shreds - give it five minutes and they'll be back to snickering at borderline retarded people who think they're the next Mariah Carey. But for that couple of minutes they were apparently all tender, kind hearted folk, generous to a fault and blind to the physical imperfections of others. Ahhh. Unassuming ugly person, you have shown us the way - now will everyone please undo the fly of the person next to them and join us in one big communal hand shandy? The most genuine thing in that video is the sight of Simon Cowell nursing a semi at the thought of the amount of money he'll make off this woman's back.

Altogether now: fuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.

It's good to be home.

The I Hate It Here Guide To Surviving The Credit Crunch

Pictured above: You, next Thursday.

We're going through some dark times, people. The financial world is teeter-tottering on the brink of appalling collapse, for reasons that are far to boring and complicated for the likes of me to comprehend (although I suppose you'll claim to be totally au fait with the whole thing, won't you? You condescending sack of shit.). So here, for your reading pleasure, is a brief guide to the options available to you once Western civilisation has imploded like a tin of beans at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

1.Deny, Deny, Deny.
A popular choice, this, and one that's long beloved of humankind the world over. Its popularity rests on its staggering simplicity: you just carry on with your life as if nothing is happening at all. Apply for credit cards, take long foreign holidays (and to heck with the carbon emissions!) , fit granite worksurfaces in your specially designed kitchen - because hey, you deserve it, right? - and generally continue to exist in a state of luxury and opulence unheard of by pretty much every other generation to ever walk the Earth. Those of a more philosophical bent might like to argue that since money doesn't, in fact, exist - being as it is just a bunch of numbers on a computer somewhere - then they can't actually take it away from you. That's like, logic. Although please bear in mind that logic can't fill up a sandwich or prevent you from dying of hypothermia.

2. Blame Someone Else.
I hear Iceland makes a convenient scapegoat.

3.Stockpile.
In the very near future cash will be most likely be worthless. In such a scenario what you need is stuff. Real, actual stuff. I won't presume to tell you what possessions you should be amassing because, frankly, I'm not your bleeding mother and I've got my own problems to be dealing with. But I will say this: do your research. You need to be looking at things like clean drinking water, petrol, shotgun shells and kendal mint cake. If it all goes tits up and you're wandering around with a wheelbarrow full of wetsuits and Bee Gees records then you've only got yourself to blame.

4.Retreat!
This goes hand in hand with item three. Mass rioting in every city on every continent will make beating a hasty retreat a top priority. Plan your escape route and leg it as soon as possible before you're raped and butchered for your last bottle of Evian. You could come round to my place, if you like. I'll have plenty of work for you on my methane farm.

Pictured above: Me, in a joke that will be meaningless to anyone who hasn't seen Mad Max 3.

4.Retrain.
With the resultant change in the job markets that will inevitably come with our new global situation you might want to consider retraining and brushing up on skills that will be more useful during the coming apocalypse. But Pete, I hear you piteously whine, my relatively sheltered childhood and pointless university degree have only prepared me for a life of soul sapping low-grade admin work. What skills do I have that will see me through the hard times ahead? And my answer is this: don't do yourself down, my friend. You have many assets that will always be in demand, regardless of prevailing global trends. Those lily-white buttocks of yours, for example, will fetch a pretty penny in the souks and casbahs of the new radioactive wasteland. My advice would be to cultivate that tiny secret deadness that we all have inside. Nurture it, feed it, and soon you'll be choking down the profits like an old pro. It really won't be that different from life now, when you think about it.

A Fairly Triumphant Return.

As the Wildhearts once opined in the sleeve notes to Fishing For Luckies - I think, although if I'm wrong I'm sure someone will correct me - 'Self expression is like sex. The less you do it the more you find that you don't want to'. And how right they were. Visit a foreign country, I thought. Expand your horizons. Gain valuable life experiences. Work on your (pretty fucking limited) writing skills. Start a new, cheerier blog and maybe prove that you're not a completely miserable cunt.

And it has been very sweet indeed. I've had fun. I met people, and seen things, and been places I never thought I would. I've even fallen in love. But the problem with people and things and places and love is that they take up a lot of time, time that in previous stages of my life would have been spent trawling the internet for inspiration and banging my head against a keyboard until the blood pooled into a joke about cocks that I could then post. I've been too busy for that kind of carry on, and the lack of a net connection hasn't helped at all. Seriously, how did people gather information before the internet? It's beyond me. Just a lot of library time, I suppose, when they weren't chasing mammoths over cliffs or unlocking the secret of fire.

More pertinently, I have an evil, evil job. Not just because it's a bank job, although that would qualify it for at least a special merit badge from the Great Beast, but because it's stolen my words. I spend all day leaving notes on a computer system and these notes require me to use - at most - thirty different words in various combinations. If there's anything that'll murder your ability to write more effectively than spending 40 hours a week writing the same thirty words over and over and over again then I don't want to know about it. Taking a header off a high dive into an empty swimming pool would do it, and at least afterwards you'd get a special helper to come round and wipe your arse for you.

I've got nothing. I'm dry. Bereft. There is a whole world of interest just outside my window, with fascinating characters and ideas and locales, and beauty and misery and ease and hardship, and all I can do is stare at a blank computer screen and obsess about how badly I suck. I'm having a great time right now, but it's killing me.

So I've come back here, where I started. I'm wrapping myself in the oily black cloak of I Hate It Here, a name I stole, to maybe rediscover the little bit of me that knew how to put the words in the right order to make the few people who listened smile for a minute. For the record, I don't Hate It Here. I'm actually, believe it or not, happy. Is it possible to spew toxic rants at the shitty state of the shitty world whilst still feeling an overall contentment, the like of which I haven't felt in literally years? I don't know. But we might as well find out. Fuck knows, it's not like we're up to much else, eh?

One final warning: you people are going to have to sit through some tedious, self-obsessed wank before I hit anything resembling a good patch. Like, for example, the article you've just graciously sat through. Waste of fucking time that was.

Mr Here He Was, Where's He Gone.

Where? I'll tell you where. He's gone over here.

One More Time.

I nicked this from some other gullible fool's blog. Ha! And ho!

Well, shit. Looks like it's time for me to be moving the smeg on. Tomorrow I leave for New Zealand, not to return for an undisclosed number of months, which means that dear old I Hate It Here serves no further purpose. I started this blog as a means to stop me from losing my mind while I was trapped here in Stourbridge, a function it has performed admirably. One brain, intact. Job done. And it seems to me that this last installment should be given over to appreciating the people, things and institutions that have also helped fend off screaming collapse. So:

Mum and Dad, for letting me move back home when they were probably sure they'd got shot of me. Best. Parenting. Ever.

Glyn, for being an all round top quality little brother. And he can gut a fish like nobody's business.

Stella, for being the iron fist in Glyn's velvet glove.

Denyer, long-time bestest buddy, web-wizard and big noise in the rarefied world of transformers fandom. In a crazy and changeable universe you are a valued and necessary constant.

The Aberystwyth massive. Scattered to the four winds we may be, but I don't think 'family' is too strong a word to describe what we've got. I'll will return. Promise.

Little Dan, for being the best goldfish a boy could have. Ditto the snails.

Robert Green, Ad Connop et al, for the drinks.

The fine people at Stourbridge Housing Office, for the job.

Crystal Leisure Centre, Stourbridge, for use of the facilities.

Bill Hicks (for the laughs), Atmosphere (for the beats and rhymes) and Chuck Palahniuk (for the words). Because, no matter how bad I feel, they always cheer me up.

Warren Ellis, for writing Transmetropolitan and thus inspiring this blog's title. And for writing Nextwave, which is also fucking ace. Seriously, you should buy it.

All those who suggested ideas for and voted in the penis competition. I needed humouring and you humoured me but good. Thanks. Am-Heh, Devourer of millions? I have to say I never saw that one coming. Hey! I punned! Arf!

And to everyone who read the words that farted out of my brain-anus and splattered on to the internet. I'm sure you had better things to getting on with.

So that's it. Finito. End of. There'll be a new, more cheerful blog detailing my wacky misadventures on the other side of the planet. Think of it as an extending showing of someone's holiday snaps, except possibly more boring. Now....

Bugger off!

Democracy in Action.

I'm going to use it to intimidate you at the polling station. Like in Iraq.

I'll keep this brief because we all know why we're here - voting on my nom de cock is now officially begun. Since opening a big can of pester on your collective asses I've been inundated with suggestions of varying quality and appropriatenes; Glyn and I went through them and the pick of the bunch can be found above, so look to your right and vote ye. Multiple votes are permitted.

I'm dimly aware that a prize was mentioned but unfortunately I have no clue what form said prize will take - possibly a guest of honour spot at the celebrity gala unveiling where I wipe it down the red carpet. Maybe. I'm working on it. But heartfelt, gushing thanks to all those who suggested names; if yours hasn't been shortlisted then you can take consolation in the knowledge that it's probably because it was rubbish. Power to the people!

Look, just think of some names or the puppy gets it.

Bonzo is saddened by your continued antipathy toward my penis and its lack of a name. Look at him. Just you look at him. You did this. His misery is on your head, you unspeakable cunt.

Well, you've had nearly a week and the response to my competition has been nothing short of completely underwhelming. I've had a grand total of two suggestions, which will be dissected in further detail below. It's almost as if you don't care about my penis, as if you had better things to think about. I know that's not true, so what's the freakin' problem, people? This just makes me glad that I didn't go with my original penis competition idea, which was to have you all try to come up with a theme tune for it. Anyway, here are the nominations so far. You bastards.

1: Clive. Suggested by: Stella.
As far as I can tell, Stella came up with this one off the top of her head. The big drawback from my point of view is that I have an uncle Clive and I believe that in some cultures naming your wang after a relative can get you stoned to death. Calling my penis Clive would make it difficult for me to look either of them in the eye again. Sir Clive, on the other hand... now that's a different matter.

2. Mr In-My-Pants. Suggested by: Kim's flatmate.
Now this one I quite like. Kim's flatmate (I don't know your name, but thanks for taking the time) has come up with a cheeky little number that doubles as a pun on Mr Splashy Pants, the Greenpeace whale. Actually, Mr Splashy Pants wouldn't be a bad name itself, if only it wasn't taken. Eerily accurate, too. But Mr In-My-Pants has a nice Red Indian ring to it that I find appealing... like 'Gets-Caught-In-Gussett' or 'Pokes-Woman-In-Small-Of-Back-As-Sun-Rises'. Although, as to that last one, chance would be a fine bloody thing.

All I'll say is this: there's a little girl out there who loves Bonzo very much and if I don't see some co-operation very soon he'll be going back to her in a fucking jam jar. I'll even include my email address so you don't have to dick about with the comments thing:

blackcountrybloke@hotmail.com

You dig?

Competition Time!

How about 'Optimus Wang'? That's not bad.

The premise is simple - it's just occurred to me that, despite the commonly-received wisdom that all men have a pet name for their penis, my own member remains nameless. Anonymous. I think that's a shame so I'm throwing it open to you, the general public, to decide on a moniker. Submit your ideas and the winner will win.. something, I haven't decided what yet.

'The Defoliator', perhaps... or is that just unnerving?

Some of you might think that this is a bit weird. IT IS NOT WEIRD. I'm genuinely interested in hearing what you come up with. This is what happens when you haven't updated for a while and feel like you really should but can't think of anything.

Err... let's just back slowly away from that idea. Although it might, alas, be closest to the truth.

I mean it. I know there's only four of you out there but I'm deadly serious. If you're on facebook or something then get all your 'friends' to join in. It'll be put to a vote, which I will abide by. Forever. So get creative. My cock is, metaphorically, in your hands.

Just to reiterate: NOT WEIRD.

Malingering Bastards.

You're fooling nobody but your bloody selves.

I might be straying into controversial territory here but I've got to say this lest I burst like a blood and pus filled balloon. You know those people you see trundling around on those plastic mobility scooters, taking up the whole pavement and blocking the aisles in supermarkets? Well I reckon that about 80% of them are putting it on. They're fakers. They just can't be arsed to walk.

If you're in a wheelchair and you're wheeling yourself about, using the only limbs available to you to mobilise yourself, then fair enough. Good on you, in fact. Equally, if you're paralysed from the neck down and have to use your chin to press the go button then you get a pass (how generous of me!) But whenever I see some fat bastard tooling about on one of those things I have a sudden urge to push them into oncoming traffic. 'Oh, but I'm too heavy to walk and I get so tiiiired', they might say, to which I would reply: well, you ain't gonna lose any weight rolling around on that thing, are you? Eh? EH?

In Las Vegas they rent mobility scooters out to the deserving, the only problem being that fat idle fuckers keep bagging them all so they don't have to heave their bloated, doughnut-stuffed carcasses between casinos. Shameful. But here's my solution: a little device of my own invention called the bee-zooka. It's a gun that fires laser guided, exploding bees. One blast from that baby and we'll see who can walk and who can't.

Remember that you're an individual... just like everybody else.

Go out now and buy a copy of Bizarre magazine. Actually, don't; it's a bit of a waste of money. Just take my word for it that there's a regular section where people (women) send in a sexy picture of themselves and a brief description of their preferred sex practice/fetish. There's a bit for men as well, only smaller. Every month, dozens of them. Probably hundreds by now. And they're all pretty much identical.

'Demonika wants to be tied up and eaten out by a naughty nurse and to have a threesome with Alan Rickman and Marilyn Manson. The strangest place she ever had sex was in a shopping trolley behind the Tunbridge Wells branch of Costcutter.'

Accompanied by a picture of a girl with the same pink hair, same pseudo-goth rubber get-up and same tattoos as all the others who thought that their fiercely boring sexual peccadilloes somehow merited inclusion in a nationally circulated magazine. What winds me up is that Bizarre caters for the 'alternative' crowd, who look down their pierced noses at normal, everyday people; people who dress conservatively and just have sex without feeling the need to honk on about it all the fucking time... and yet here they are, all exactly alike within their carefully described boundaries - the same clothes, the same opinions, the same tawdry little fantasies. Read one and you've read them all.

(And before you say anything: yes, I know I have tattoos, and used to have a piercing or two. I'm including myself in this rant. Why do you think I'm so pissed off?)

But it's the same all over. Derren Brown, the famous television hypnotist/mind control guy, has a book called 'Tricks of the Mind'. It's a cracking read and I heartily recommend it. There's a bit where he gives a group of students an envelope each and tells them that it contains a personal 'psychic' reading that will describe their personality and innermost thoughts in great detail. Upon opening it (surprise surprise) they're all shocked and amazed at the reading's accuracy. One stupid bitch even accused him of looking at her diary, such was the eerie precision of what he'd put down.

The thing is, there was only the one reading. All the envelopes were exactly the same. The trick worked because people are, basically, quite unoriginal creatures. We all go through similar stages in our lives, where we worry about similar things at similar times, and have similar experiences and similar wants and needs and goals. All Mr Brown had to do was play the percentages, and it didn't steer him far wrong. I'm desperately trying find this comforting, like we're all in the same boat or some such fucking thing, because it depresses the hell out of me if I dwell on it too long.

So thank God, says I, for the internet, where you can stake out your own little piece on Facebook and do it up how you like, or amass reams of personal information on strangers and make out like they're your 'friends', or maybe even start your own blog where you rant to a world that's not listening about things people already know as if you were a real person who actually exists.

Ahem. Anyway, that's how life is. Your ideas are meaningless, your dreams are ridiculous and you are an idiot. And that's fine, I suppose - we're all in the same boat, after all. But please, Bizarre women: don't make out like you're some spirited free thinker because you own a rubber basque and have maybe thought about having a woman eat your snatch. I mean, it's your life, so do what you like and good luck to you. I, however, am not fucking interested. I've got my own tedious non-life to be getting on with, thanks all the same. Just take your nipple clamps and your Hello Kitty butt plug and fuck off.

She will be mine. Oh yes. She will be mine.

Big news, everyone; I've fallen head over buttocks in love with singer songwriter KT Tunstall. She was on Later With Jools Holland the other week and thanks to her lovely face, quirky specs and the lubricating effect of a bottle of red wine I was completely smitten.


She's Scottish, you know.

And has been known to wear interesting hats.

Here she is doing the guitar thing. Perhaps now might be an opportune time for me to re-evaluate her musical oeuvre; I wouldn't like to embarrass myself in front of her by admitting that I couldn't name one of her songs if my entire comic collection depended on it.

This is her speaking at Live 8 about the need to be kind to animals and poor people. The woman is an angel. I'm sure if I actually did meet her she'd be nothing but nice to me, and would ask her security people not to mark my face when they dragged me away to give me a quality kicking.

I'd have mentioned this earlier but I've been caught in the grip of post-Christmas malaise for the last couple of weeks. By which I mean I've mostly been staying in, reflecting on my own worthlessness and wanking too much.

Form an orderly queue, ladies.