Schatz - Treasure

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. If this old axiom is true, there’s some very odd people out there. Going through my trash - no, rubbish - there’s nothing remotely valuable or even vaguely collectable. It’s mostly crisp packets, biscuit wrappers and currently, due to my massively annoying cold, lots and lots of soggy, used tissues. If there really is someone out there who’d be ecstatic at the prospect of finding my snotty rags, I suppose I should be flattered. The only ‘treasure’ I possibly discard on a regular basis is stuff that might possibly be recyclable, and thus a source of income for some extremely poor and impoverished sod. Now a ludicrously rich idiot might throw away something more like it, such as a wristwatch or grand piano, in which case the trash/treasure thing could hold, but generally it’s a motto for the averagely weird, the sort of people who go on Cash in the Attic and eagerly scan the newspaper for free items. Let’s face it though, almost everything featured on Cash in the Attic is complete tat, and is only valuable because some cretin with far too much money takes a shine to it. Or just sees it as an investment, a chance to profit from another similarly cretinous oaf in a few years time. So in conclusion, we should adapt the adage in question to something akin to “One man’s trash is thoroughly unlikely to be another man’s treasure.” Anyway, that’s this topic thoroughly exhausted, so I’m off to make more soggy tissues for strange people to poke through. Oh, and it’s mucus. Sickos.

Ein|leiten - To Start

It’s quite easy to start on someone in a pub or nightclub without even realising it. An accidental shoulder bump, toe-stepping or even an ill-timed glance in some guy’s direction while laughing at a private joke can get you into serious anti-social difficulties. The problem is that alcohol, especially when combined with a ton of other less legal mind-altering substances generally make people who are already complete pricks, infinitely more prickish. So much so that even a friendly smile at the bar can result in an aggressively twatty “You fucking starting mate? You fucking starting?!” To which there really is no appropriate response. There’s quite a high probability that you’re going to leave with some kind of fist or bottle related injury, no matter what you reply. The gut reaction of “No, mate, not at all!” is just asking for a “You calling me a fucking liar?!” comeback, while an even vaguely witty retort just cries out please smash my face in! Turning away an ignoring them is an option, given the attention span of such horribly Neanderthalic man isn’t renown, however, if there’s no big-breasted females, or non-white foreigners around to distract them, it’s a dangerous move. Essentially until alcohol is banned for all citizens who are complete bell-ends, you have to be prepared for a bottling or fisting (in the face) every time you go out drinking. If you leave the house expecting to return with a black eye or bloodied nose, you can never really lose, unless that’s what you actually want. But if that’s the case, just walk into a Wetherspoons on a packed Saturday night and call everyone a massively prickish prick. You won’t go home disappointed. In fact, you might not even go home at all, and instead leave in an ambulance for an all expenses trip to A&E. Whatever floats your boat.

Brett - Board

Not the first boring topic I’ve had to address in this ill-conceived writing project thus far -but this time I may as well take this opportunity to address the issue of boredom itself. In an age of seemingly infinite choice when it comes to entertainment, the chronically lazy suffer the most. Back in the 1990’s when we had a mere four channels, unless you were ludicrously rich or just enough of an idiot to fork out oodles of cash for a gigantic analogue Sky dish and subscription, content was completely varied. If you couldn’t be arsed to search for the remote, or, if you had such a shitty old TV you had to turn over manually, chances are something vaguely watchable would come on soon enough, or at least a completely different cock-boring programme to mix things up a bit. However, now, as everyone has about 30 channels by default, hundreds if you pay a monthly fee, almost every channel is specialised and plays nothing but the same crap all day long. So, if like me this very second, you find yourself typing on a computer, the TV on the BBC News Channel and the remote just out of stretching distance, you’re essentially trapped listening to the same stories again and again and again. Hence less variety, increased boredom and more stress. Lots of channels are great if you can be bothered to change them. Worst of all is when your remote’s batteries are running low and you find yourself having to jab the buttons with finger-bruising force in order to have any effect on the TV. Of course you’ve already tried the classic battery-twisting motion to give them an extra burst of life, but it’s just not working any more. You’ve got one or two AAA spares lying around, but you’re not sure where. Heading to the shop especially is out of the question, as is actually remembering to pick them up next time you get your groceries. You’re in dying remote limbo, and there’s no way out without some amount of effort - the very thing it was design to eliminate. But anyway, I think I just crossed the boredom threshold with this piece - in fact I’m certain it’s junk, but it’s the only entry I can be bothered to write as I’m feeling particularly lazy too. So, it’s an evening of injured fingers and an almost inevitable four-hour tango with rolling news. I love my life.

Tatowieren - To Tattoo

I’ve got a great idea. I’ll go see a guy who’ll stick in a needle and stab me a pretty picture under an exposed patch of skin somewhere on my body. And it’ll be permanent too. Oh, and chances are I’m only going through with it because my friends have them too and I want to fit in. Just as well the same Chinese symbol or barbwire arm ring are on offer. Yippee! I’m like so expressing my individuality. Are you fuck. Not to be too judgemental, but people who get inked are generally complete idiots whose primary objective is fitting in with their equally idiotic friends or making a rebellious statement, sticking two fingers up at their oh-so-shitty parents. I accept that some people get significant icons, pictures or symbols - genuinely individual artwork, and to those people I’m quite indifferent. Sure, go for it. At least you’re thinking about it and not just eternally staining yourself for a thumbs-up from your mates or an up-yours to your mum. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not objecting on moral or spiritual grounds, it just offends me when daft pricks take inky pricks without thinking of how it might turn out in the future. A drooping, bingo-wing-warped chain, circumventing a saggy bicep isn’t that attractive. Neither is the logo of that latest hip and happening pop band tattooed on your navel. Chances are they’ll have disappeared before the skin’s healed and next time you get naked with someone you’ll be ridiculed out of the bedroom. I’m not against living in the here and now, but you have to cast at least a fleeting glance toward the years to come, especially with body-altering procedures. Otherwise you could well end up rueing the day you got ‘I’m a massive twat’ in Chinese inscribed down your massively twatty back.

Vergeuden - To Squander

It’s far too easy to squander what you have before you realise how lucky you really were to have it in the first place. While this is true of most of life’s supposed key constituents - love, money and respect to name a few - such topics are far too serious to form the central theme for this, theoretically a humorous and light-hearted piece. So instead, I’ll tackle something far closer to people’s hearts: their hearts. In a country where now, as in the USA, over a third of the population is overweight, individuals squander their health like there’s no tomorrow. And for many there won’t be. We all know the main causes, namely over-eating, too much cheap, fatty food, not enough exercise and so on - they’ve been hammered into us a million times by patronising government officials and annoying TV chefs - but the right people aren’t taking note and as a result we‘re fatter than ever. If our leaders really want to lessen the NHS burden all the blobbies cause, they should start offering obese people physical and monetary rewards for losing weight. Lose a stone, you get a comically apt DVD - Big Momma‘s House or The Nutty Professor would do. Lose another, you get some sort of small electronic device that, as an incentive to keep shedding the pounds, chubby fingers have difficulty operating. Lose five stones and you win a small crystal statuette of Scottish snooker legend Steven Hendry. A ten stone loss and you actually get to meet Steven Hendry. Of course, this ought to work both ways and a penalty should be enforced on those who gain weight. Gain a stone and you get a finger broken. Put on another and you’re thrown into a ring of playground bullies all taunting you with offensive anti-fat chants. Gain five stones and you’ll be forced to take a small crystal statuette of English snooker legend Steve Davis. A ten stone gain and you’ll actually have to meet and hang out with Steve Davis. If that doesn’t begin to sort out our nation’s health problems, I’ll eat my hat. Which incidentally has next to no sugars or trans-fats, or in fact anything except cotton, and the blood, sweat and tears of those hard-working children somewhere in South-East Asia.

Missverstehen - To Misunderstand

When conversing in a foreign language, it’s very easy to both misunderstand and be misunderstood. Brits abroad probably have the hardest time of it, given as a nation we are ludicrously unilingual. I feel quite embarrassed when I can’t even conduct the simplest of conversations in a local language, and thoroughly mortified if I can’t remember the words for at least hello, goodbye, please and thank you. Yet so many of my fellow countrymen and women positively revel in their linguistic ignorance. Flicking through the channels after getting in from work late one night, I ended up watching a horrible programme following a group of boozy Englishmen abroad and their odious, thoroughly gimpish antics in an unfortunate eastern European capital. One ‘ex Marine’ whips his cock out in the street and starts pissing into his own mouth, then kisses one of his mates, slash-juice dripping down his cheeks. What a laugh. Another top geezer spends all his time learning how to say ‘I love your tits’ to every indigenous female in the bar. Another swaggering bunch of dipshits chant football songs and smash beer bottles on their thick fucking heads. They might as well have called the programme Reasons to Hate the English, Even if You’re English Too. I just don’t understand the mentality of these absolute wankers who could, instead of spending all that money on flights and accommodation simply pool their cash and buy a truck full of Stella and simulate the experience in their own home. They go purely to get completely trashed and remember nothing about it, so why bother travelling at all? But perhaps I am the one misunderstanding them. I could be totally out of touch with what it means to be British. I could well be the complete dickhead in all this. One of them could be writing a similarly angry piece about how pathetic someone who travels to, I don’t know, see other countries and take in their art, sights and cuisine, to embrace their customs and learn about their people‘s history. Yeah they‘re right, I’m gonna hang my head in shame and think about how much an embarrassment I am to our great nation. I’m sorry.

Ruhen - To Rest

What it might sound like for a dyslexic Tourette’s sufferer with a speech impediment to state their condition. Clearly you’d have to drop the dyslexia or speech dysfunction were they expressing themselves verbally or in writing respectively, but the joke essentially works. Actually it doesn’t. This is my problem at the moment. I never know when to give it a rest with my inane observational jokes, especially now I’ve performed my first, and hopefully not last, stand-up comedy set. To actual people. Oh, it went quite well thanks. I tend to announce every little quip that comes to mind before I’ve even worked out if anyone else would find it funny. My humour almost seems like the a comedy reworking of Derren Brown’s The System, where he convinces someone they’re going to win big at the horse races by essentially having thousands of individuals, covering all possible outcomes, all thinking they’re the only one featuring in the programme. My jokes are those thousands of other people who are ultimately disappointed, but a handful do make it through, and my set is just that. Maybe that’s nothing like the Derren Brown thing at all, and this is in fact just another poorly constructed attempt at a joke or observation. I don’t know. Does it make at least a little sense? If anyone ever reads this, answers on a postcard. Well, I need to give the relentless bad joke-cooking a rest, at least for a few hours a day. That way I can be entirely boring and not stress about anything, besides feeling entirely boring. After such a rest period, I can return to making terrible puns and plays on words and laughing at sufferers of Tourettes, dyslexia and poor st-st-st-stuttering, speech-impeded sods.

Sich Ein|Shranken - To Register

We’re prompted to register almost every product we buy, regardless of how small and insignificant. The big companies want to make you feel like you’re a member of their special elite club, and that by not sending them your personal details, you’ll be missing out some truly life-changing or fortune-saving opportunities. The reality is however, and you’re basically a complete chump if you haven’t figured this out already, they’re only taking your info so they can sell you more of their shit, or sell them on to other parties who’ll attempt to sell you even more shit. Whenever you’re signing up for something or making a purchase online, almost without fail you’ll be asked if not only you wouldn’t mind their own marketing department sending you ‘very important offers’, but also their ’carefully selected partners’ too, which I translate to mean the highest fucking bidder. So many programs you have on your computer incessantly ask you whether you want to enrol in their special members club for free, ’It’ll just take a few minutes,’ that frankly are better spent not helping someone peddle shit at you. The more desperate companies will start to offer expensive prizes as bait to lure you in, but reading the small print you quickly discover that the surround-sound, massively pimped-up plasma TV audio-visual orgasm is actually the prize for several other different competitions and really your chances of winning are slimmer than an anorexic schoolgirl during Ede. Anyway, I’m ranting away and it’s getting late. The main point is that registering with a company is probably meaningless, but given I’ve never done it, I can’t say for sure. That’s not even funny. And it should be. But it isn’t. It’s time to abort. I’m using my ejector seat to get out of this literally air-disaster before this crashes to the ground leaving no linguistic survivors. Too late.

Um Etw Kampfen - To Fight For

It’s a real shame when a cause worth fighting for is championed by a bunch of complete tossers. So many of the important issues right now, such as climate change, the energy crisis, and the conflicts in the Middle East - things that I’d almost say I was passionate about - are simply being protested very publicly by absolute idiots. Some people take things to far, and, in my eyes, do more to hinder their cause than help it. When I see some screaming, antagonistic prick going mental at the riot police because they disagree with the war in Iraq, I actually begin to think of all the devil’s advocate justifications for killing a ton of Iraqis purely to disassociate myself from these complete bell ends. It’s the same with most things; books you like, films you enjoy, celebrities you’re fans of, and comedians you laugh at. No matter how cool you think you are for liking something genuinely good, and mostly overlooked by the general public, there’ll be at least one total cockend who’ll appear to love more than you and will talk about it loudly and twatilly in front of other people. Unfortunately because this person is a complete fuckwit, his audience will disregard any praise for whatever book, film, celebrity or comedian, and will probably actively put it or him/her on a shitlist of stuff to vehemently avoid. It would be so much easier if wankers just stuck to wanker issues, media and people, and only decent members of society cared about the important stuff. But as that’s never going to happen, so many important issues will become apathetically avoided by those who don’t want to be tarred by the same embarrassingly idiotic brush as those irritating fuckstarts who apparently feel the same way.

Vorliebe - Preference

The American people have finally made their choice. Whatever I write is without doubt paraphrasing whatever anyone has said or will say on the US election for the last and next 24 hours, but it’s such a monumental and important event, it was going always going to be shoehorned into today’s improvised piece. I spent last night around a friend’s house with several other US politics junkies watching the coverage intently. It’s funny how something so inherently dull as tallying the various marks made on slips of paper can create such a nail-biting six hours of television. Although I suppose the sheer magnitude of the result and its ramifications probably contributed at least a little. Still, so many people have been utterly apathetic to the whole thing. Given, I wouldn’t expect everyone to show as much interest as me, but those who’d use the line “It’s America, I don’t give a shit, why do you care so much?!” are being ridiculously naïve. Like it or not, the USA is the world’s biggest economy and has not the largest, but certainly the most powerful military, making any fiscal or foreign policy decision very relevant to all citizens across the globe. So, America’s preference of Barak Obama over John McCain is massively important, given their clear difference in policy regarding the financial crisis and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ll actually stop right here before this gets far too weighty for something that’s supposed to be vaguely humorous, so I’ll lighten things up by mentioning my TV highlight of the evening: David Dimbleby Vs Gore Vidal. The BBC’s coverage is always excellent, and it can be counted on for at least one instance of hilarity during a live results show. Essentially Vidal sounded like a complete nutter who’d forgotten to take his pills that morning, having zero patience for Dimblebly’s questions or follow-ups, and ultimately shitting on him and his career by stating he had no idea who he was. A close second to their exchange was a drunken Nick Robinson, the political editor for BBC news, who was outside Downing Street at 3am all goosed up after a party at the US embassy, slurring his words and swaying ever so slightly.
As for the results, I’ll be beaming for weeks to come. I’m sure the world is a happier place today and while a great future is by no means guaranteed, it’s at least far, far more likely now the Elephant is dead. Although it must be said, all credit to McCain, whose concession speech was surprising eloquent, respectful and humbling. But then I guess he had a long time to work on it.

Ratselhaft - Mysterious

When girls say they want a mysterious man in their lives, is that just code for lying, cheating scumbag? Deep down I’m sure that’s what all ladies want. Get a nice guy and he’ll bore you senseless within the half decade and you’ll have to be a completely whorish twat to be rid of him, but get Mr Mysterious, and he’ll have shagged his way through your Facebook contacts well before you’re ready to throw in the towel, thereby giving you a feasible excuse to dump his enigmatic ass, guilt-free. Sure, it might hurt in the short term, but at least you don’t have to live with a lifetime of regret. I don’t think nice guys always finish last, just generally not in any of the podium positions, or where you’d earn points in a Formula One championship situation. The guys that finish last are complete bastards who happen to be penniless losers too. If you find yourself in that group, you might as well just castrate yourself, because the only female contact you’re getting is from the drug addled crab-nest that sleeps in the bed-sit opposite, or even worse, in the doorway of the bed-sit opposite. There’s only one type of lonely-hearts-labelled man more disturbing than Mysterious, and that’s Dangerous. There really are women out there who are looking for a dangerous man. Just what precisely does that mean? Is she looking to get beaten up, stabbed or raped on the first date? Perhaps get thoroughly boozed-up then partake in some hard drug use, ending the evening with a late-night speedy drive along that precarious rocky road by the cliff‘s edge? The only ladies who would specifically request a nice guy are most likely victims of abuse at the hands of previously dangerous partners or women who’ve had Mr Mysterious just enough times to be so emotionally scarred they simply can’t take any more rejection. Basically damaged goods. And of course nice guys, being that they are nice by nature, will take either in with open arms, being completely oblivious to the fact that they could do so much better were they to have any self-re-cocking-spect. So not last, just not anywhere close to first.