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.

Life and Death on Teh Internets.

Oh, calm down - it was dead when I found it.

Death: there's a lot of it about. Seven Welsh kids commit suicide and Bebo gets the blame. Heath Ledger swallows enough pills to give Keith Richards pause and promptly shuffles off, his passing marked by ten thousand tasteless Brokeback Mountain jokes. Aged chess champion Bobby Fischer dies of being old and mad and gets the same treatment. All life can be found on the web including, apparently, that uncomfortable bit at the end.

Which I reckon is fair enough. People live their whole lives through the net these days so it makes sense that they'll die there as well. I'm less sure that, as has been stated in the press, the internet can make you spontaneously want to kill yourself but I suppose 'Internet Death Cult' makes for better copy than a sober, reasoned analysis of why seven perfectly normal, perfectly healthy teenagers would decide to take their own lives.

(Incidentally - six boys kill themselves with nary a peep from anyone; one girl joins them and suddenly it's all over the press, a national fucking tragedy. It's almost like society doesn't care what happens to young men. Oh, hang on... it doesn't, unless there's a war going on that we need some corpses for. Sorry about that, the memo has only just reached me.)

The net seems to be to be just another aspect of this huge, gigantic mess we call life, one that reflects stuff that's already there. If you're going to top yourself then you'll have found the reasons and rationalisations elsewhere; the only thing the internet will do is confirm or deny what you're already thinking. Possibly the realisation that, despite Myspace's claims that you have 250 friends, you have not one single person to go to the pub with might do it, although it seems unlikely. But if you are thinking of killing yourself (and, frankly, I'd rather you didn't) then you should read this. It might help.

Paint nothing.

Get thee behind me, Satan.

I've just spent an hour wrestling with colour charts on the Dulux website and I hereby declare it to be one of the most boring ways to waste a perfectly good Sunday afternoon I've yet found. You lose your grip on time and space, lost in endless shades of white and off-white and near-white and anti-white. And the names! Bracken salts. Labrador sands. Volcanic splash. It was a nightmare.

But I'm glad because the moment you start to care about this stuff, the day you find yourself fretting over the miniscule differences between Sundrenched Saffron and Desert Island, the day your stack of colour swatches is bigger than your stack of Batman back issues, is the day that you are officially a lost cause. It's all over. Life has broken you.

Luckily, it bores the arse off me. So I ain't dead yet.

World = Scary.

So I went into the Spar to buy some tobacco, as is my habit, and wouldn't you know it but there's an attractive lady at the till. Lovely, she was. Good hair, pretty eyes. Boobs. So, plastering on my nicest smile, I got ready to use my best and most effective opening line ('12.5 grammes of Cutter's Choice, please.' Never fails) when she beat me to it, saying 'Hello. What can I get you?'...

...in the deepest, bassiest voice I've ever heard issue from a female mouth. She sounded like Ray Winstone. Suitably freaked out, I grabbed my baccy and scuttled out into the night.

It's shit like this that makes me want to not leave the house.

Jingle Balls

If you check your calendar you'll see that Christmas is but a week away, with all its attendant horrors and turpitudes. I (surprise surprise) hate the whole bastard festive period, and can usually be relied upon to spout curmudgeonly bullshit at the slightest provocation. This year, however, I'm almost looking forward to it, although God knows why; maybe I'm pregnant. The fact that I've got all my shopping done already might have something to do with it. That's never happened before.

Anyway, it turns out that Santa (or at least one of the legion of under-employed middle aged men who stand in for him in dingy shopping centres) has decided to buck tradition and forgo the fat suit this year. This health conscious St Nick reckons that being trimmer and leaner will set a better example for the kiddies, and the shopping centre concurs.

"It is time for a change and as Santa is a role model for children, then his body shape is where it should start."

Hang on a second. Back up a bit. Santa? A role model? For children? Really? Leaving aside the fact that he's Western culture's most well-liked trespasser, and the fact that his famous red suit is made from inverted, bloodied deer skin, and that Amnesty's report on the working conditions for elves at his North Pole retreat famously made Kofi Annan shit himself... leaving all that aside, can you think of a single child who actually wants to be Father Christmas? In the same way that other kids want to be, say, astronauts, or ballerinas? Is this conversation likely to occur?

Adult: 'And what do you want to be when you're grown, little man?'
Child: 'Please mister, I want to be Santa!'
Adult: 'A fine profession, young sir, and a growth industry at that. Have a florin, you apple-cheeked rapscallion, and be off before I have you horse whipped and summarily fingered.'

No. Personally, if I had a kid and it expressed a desire to be Santa I'd have it on Ritalin before you could say 'secure unit'. Luckily, kids couldn't give two craps about who Santa is or what he looks like; it's the presents that they're after, the cut-throat little mercenaries. As far as they're concerned Santa could be an eight foot tranny circus performer who farts mustard gas and dances the Lambada so long as he makes with the goodies, and that's all fine and healthy. It's the magic of childhood, and any child who looks up to Santa as some kind of aspirational role model is off their fucking rocker.

Movie Review: The Octagon, starring Chuck Norris.

The Octagon is a low budget 1980's martial arts flick featuring Chuck Norris as Mimsy Fandango, transsexual hairdresser and wandering ex-ninja. Glyn, Denyer and I settled down with a couple of beers on a quiet Monday night to see what Chuck had to offer us. Here's the trailer.



OK; If you're looking for a movie that'll make you piss yourself laughing for all the wrong reasons then look no further, my son, for you have struck unintentional comedy gold. Chuck Norris, tired internet meme that he is, plays a fucking blinder in this one. You want chest hair? Inept ninjas? Whispered internal monologues?



Then you're in the right place. Chuck is on the trail of a international cadre of terrorist ninjas, or possibly ninja terrorists, and I'm probably not spoiling the movie for anyone by revealing that their leader is Chuck's old training partner gone bad. Really Chuck shouldn't have too much problem since this lot look like they couldn't ninge their way out of the proverbial wet paper bag.

'Hello, is that Crap Henchmen Ltd? Could you send over some more black-pyjama clad palsy victims? Oh, I dunno... 25? Yes, I'm afraid so. No. No, it was a girl with a sharp stick. No, Chuck's not even here yet. Ok. Bye.'

The general crapness displayed by the terror-ninjas is presumably why Chuck can afford to spend so much time whispering to himself inside his own head and indulging in playful banter with his lovable yet ultimately expendable pal AJ. AJ is just trying to live up to Norris' mighty legacy until he goes and gets his throat cut (but not before escaping from his captors something like twenty times. Crap ninjas!) thus providing further impetus for Chuck 's climactic organ crushing death rampage. But as AJ says: 'Come on, Scott; you saw much worse things during the war.'

The special edition comes with a free copy of another, better, movie.

Yeah Chuck. Remember that time in 'Nam when the Viet Cong made you eat your own bollock? That was way worse than this.

4/5

The rise of the machines.

My place, yesterday.

Yesterday I had to go out and buy a new mobile phone, as my previous phone had met with an unfortunate accident. We won't go into the whys and wherefores, and there's very little point in apportioning blame. In a world as cold and unfeeling as this injustices can and do occur and scapegoating individuals, while it may feel good at the time, provides scant comfort in the long term. These things happen. We need to learn acceptance, be more Zen.

All right, fine; I dropped it in the fish tank. While it was plugged into the charger, no less, so I just count myself lucky that Little Dan wasn't flash-fried into the bargain, poor misfortunate bastard that he is. That would have been unfortunate, although at least the little sod wouldn't be able to ruin another night's sleep with his barking. Barking and predicting the future.

Anyway. I went out and bought a new one, as the old one was irretrievably waterlogged and generally fucked. Here it is:

Satan's own handset.

And here's a review where it gets a handsome slagging at the hands of someone who knows what they're on about ; I, on the other hand, have not the faintest clue what I'm on about when it comes to mobile phones, a fact that I forgot in my lust for digital cameras and very small joysticks. My old phone was the telecommunications equivalent of a yoghurt pot on a bit of string. It was simple to use and easy to understand. It had Snake on it. I liked Snake, so what madness descended to make me choose this fiddly piece of shit?

I can't get it do anything. It's got the internet, but I'm never going to use it. It's got an mp3 player, but I can't find it. I tried sending a text message today and it took me the best part of half an hour. I've spent the last day staring at it like, well, like a chimpanzee that's been given an overly complicated mobile phone, scratching my arse and grunting in puzzled bewilderment. Whilst eating a banana.

It's especially pointless as nobody ever calls me, because I have (wait for it)... no social life! There are Buddhist hermits up Tibetan mountains who have more interesting Friday nights than me. It was the bloke in the shop, that's what it was. I was taken in by his sharp suit and matey patter. I got burned. I want out.

And, as if that wasn't enough, I now have this bastard to deal with:

You will not best me, doctor.

Yes folks, it's Dr Kawashima of Dr Kawashima's Brain Training, the DS phenomenon that can apparently improve your mental agility by a factor of whatever. The idea is that you perform his little mental exercises, jump through his hoops for ten minutes every day, and you will magically become smarter. Glyn came home with it yesterday and now I've been sucked in. When you start the game works out your 'brain age', which is basically a tool for the good doctor to tell you that you're stupid so you'll continue playing, lest your brain turn to mush in your skull. Last night my brain age was 46; today it's 64. If I carry on at this rate I'll have trouble retaining bladder control by Christmas.

So you do the exercises and fare really badly at them, feeling like a complete fucking idiot, and all the while the disembodied bastard offers words of patronising 'encouragement'. He let slip that he doesn't like coriander, and that if you say the word 'coriander' into the DS he'll pull a face. Which he does, so Glyn and I have taken to saying 'coriander' repeatedly and at length in an effort to gain some small measure of revenge as we watch his polygonal face screw up in distaste, over and over again. But it's a tiny victory, especially when you consider that the real Dr Kawashima is in his Japanese mansion, swimming about in his money like Scrooge McFuckingDuck and probably paying people to eat coriander for him. We, meanwhile, are spending our weekends arguing with a disembodied head on a hand-held games console, our brains becoming older and more decrepit with every minute that slips through our fingers. There's a real winner here, and I'm guessing it's not us.