Standort - Position

So, what’s your favourite position? Hmm, tough question, and a bit personal. Suppose it depends who I’m shooting at. The classic church tower sniper nest works quite well for city centre killings, but chances are you won’t get that many shots off before you’re spotted. Personally, were I carry out such an attack, I’d fire Greggs pastries instead of bullets, and it’d have to be from a suitably humorous location. It’d be great to be out on bail (probably not so likely if you’ve gone and used live rounds) right in time to see Jon Snow struggling to keep a straight face as he reads that a twenty-five year old male has been apprehended for shooting high-density sausage rolls on terrified shoppers. From the sperm bank‘s roof. Or steak bakes from the incontinence studies centre. Or Belgian Buns from the Discount Book Depository. Anything that ludicrous would have the tabloid newspapers slashing each other’s faces for those big-money exclusive interviews. A ton of broadcasting jobs would open up too - Channel Four are always clambering for the freshest mentalist hosts to present their latest (of several thousand) Big Brother ask-thick-viewers-what-they-think shows. Not to mention…and I’ve just realised that’s not what you meant at all! Favourite pos-it-ion. What an idiot. I blame the lack of intonation you get with a textually-posed question. Now this is definitely a bit uncomfortable to answer, mainly because I don‘t practice as much as I used to. But if pushed I’d have to say defender because you get to charge into someone who’s far more skilful, teaching them that all their fancy show-off shit with the ball isn’t anywhere near as easy with a smashed-in hoof. That’s what people get for being good at football. Of course the added bonus of playing with your mates is there’s no fines, bans or criminal charges when you cause a serious injury. A few pints ’a Best’ll sort ’em out. Plus that lengthy reconstructive surgery. But then what’s a mild crippling between friends? Anyway, hope that answered your question, I’m off to find a cowgirl to reverse over. Heard that was quite the pleasurable five seconds.

Koalition - Coalition

Not a week passes without at least one or two coalition soldiers being killed by attention-seeking tossers in Iraq or Afghanistan. That’s what they are, because they know with every extra death reported on western media, every additional bit of sombre footage featuring flag-draped coffins being ceremoniously loaded off planes, the more attention and kudos they‘ll get. Coalition forces could destroy a Taleban stronghold in Afghanistan, wiping out a thousand wannabe-Ladens, but news-wise that’s easily trumped by some twat in a Vauxhall Nova packed with explosives and nails going off in a Royal Marine’s face. Actually, they probably don’t have Novas in Hellmand Province, but I‘d happily pay shipping costs to send them some of ours. With the owners gagged and strapped inside, of course. Our idiots modify their cars with dickish stereos, spoilers and alloy wheels, while the militants do up theirs with bombs and, well more bombs. Both are driven by misguided, arrogant pricks with a god complex, and neither give a shit about any sort of civilised human existence. It‘s a tough call as to which I‘d prefer being parked outside my house. At least the suicide bomber causes just one noisy disturbance, rather than the sustained banging chunes and fighting Gaz/Kev/Daz and his fuckwit friends are guaranteed to provide. But I digress. The problem is soldier deaths have got to be such a regular occurrence, I‘m totally desensitised. It doesn’t shock me any more to hear the most gruesome details of an improvised explosive device lodging shrapnel in skulls, severing body parts or disrupting Jenga games - it’s all be done before. As twisted as it sounds, to get my attention now, the militants would have to take it to a whole new level. If media attention is what they’re after, they should know that western audiences quickly get bored of the same crap and always need something original. I’m not about to make a load of horrific scenario suggestions - partly because I don’t fancy being put on government watch list, but mostly because it’s always a bit more exciting to be surprised. Before you get all uppity, I’m not suggesting it has to be all about killing. If the whole conflict could be sorted out via a cheery Gladiators-come-It’s A Knockout romp on Sky 1, that’d be brilliant. Shadow would definitely come back for a few bags of Afghan smack, and when was the last time you saw Keith Chegwin on the telly? Two media careers revived and a seemingly endless bloody conflict resolved through a piss-poor ninety minutes of low-budget family fun. Nobel Peace Prize, here I come!

Bonbon - Sweet

Sweets are great for your teeth. Toothpaste corporations lie, dentists lie, your parents lie - everyone lies. Except me. All those shock tactics back in school showing some poor sod’s mouth rotting itself to a soupy dentine-enamel goop were nothing more than anti-sweet propaganda circulated by faceless people, without faces. Somewhere. Conspiring to bring down all that is good, chocolaty and the opposite of sour - except of course Haribo Sour Mix - to some confusing, yet clearly sinister goal. It’s a plot so intricate even CTU don’t know what’s going on. And they’ve been trying to figure it out for decades - that’s why it always took so long to deal with the relentless threat to Los Angeles; fifty extra agents were out back working to unravel the confectioniracy, and bring the perpetrators to a sticky (probably toffee-based) end. Given half the time was spent coming up with the name confectionircy - such a triumph of punnery it had to be written again. No, scratch all that, I’m lying. In fact I’m sitting, but the point is you didn’t hear anything about any confectionircy, because it doesn’t exist. Shhhh. Sweets are terrible for you. Not only will they make your smile worse than being repeatedly bashed round chops with a garden strimmer, but they’ll make you hideously fat too. So fat you can’t even leave the house to get your fill discerning looks and insults that might actually make you think twice before shovelling sixteen kilos of pick ’n’ mix through your facehole in a single sitting. Anyway, I’m being told via megaphone my house is surrounded and that they’re gonna burst through the window in thirty seconds. So I’ll post this now, but by the time you read it it’ll have almost certainly been re-edited to be far shitter than it originally was. Bottom line: it’s not my fault and, most importantly, there is no confectionircy.

Vergesslich - Forgetful

My memory works in mysterious ways - a bit like God but far less full of love for humankind. See, midway through that sentence I forgot my opening statement, making the end bit make hardly any sense. I’ll often forget things said or done literally seconds before, yet I’ll remember the most uninteresting details of a conversation that took place back when I was twelve. Something that needs Googling will pop in my head, but by the time the web browser loads, whatever it was has buggered off. It’s like my memory is a transport hub in a bad area for travelling thoughts and ideas - they get off and change busses as quickly as possible. The aim is of course to say “Woah, wait a minute man!” and proceed to trick them into staying in the vaults of my memory bank on a long-term basis, being instantly accessible for a hilarious dinner party anecdote or police interview. Ha! Like I’d ever get a dinner party invite. Focus Andrew, focus! Okay. Perhaps the problem is the lack of desirable accommodation inside my head. If I made my brain more attractive to all thoughts and ideas, they might actually want to settle in more permanently. All this bottled-up anger, frustration, cynicism and bitterness toward my fellow man, justifiable as I’m convinced it is, probably makes it as appealing a residence as Wormwood Scrubs or 25 Cromwell Street. It’s possible the more happy, nice, loving feelings I have, the more a utopian paradise my mind will become. I’ve seen it. Meadows, trees, flowers, butterflies, rabbits, beautiful women, massive food surpluses and free Xbox Live! for everyone! Within days I’d have more memory than ever before, as bus and trainloads of transient thoughts rush to set up home. I’d wow everyone with my superior knowledge on every topic imaginable and, self-confidence sky-high, I’d be genuinely content. Until of course that eerie siren goes off and I simultaneous shit myself and curse my reckless forgetfulness. Bloody Morlocks! The council told me they’d approved planning permission for an underground lair-come-thought-buffet, but it just slipped my mind. No excuse. So they come out all whips-a-cracking and angry roars-a-roaring. The ideas and notions they don’t round up and scoff down just retreat full-pelt back to their trains and busses, leaving me even more cognitively inept than before. So based on that strained futuristic vision, it’s far safer to not mess with anything and just accept my memory is as rubbish as something else that’s very rubbish. Like my thesaurus. Oh, and endings.

Na Bitte! - There You Are!

So, there you are at the roadside weighing up your chances of death or serious injury should you attempt a Frogger-style dash across oncoming traffic, when you start to wonder why. Of course! It’s all about saving those crucial few seconds that could make the difference between, well, actually nothing and nothing. For me, walking quickly and saving every possible second is just what I do. Commuting to work on foot means every extra minute between leaving the house and clocking in is effectively diluting my pay. While it may only be fifteen minutes each day were I to ease up a bit, over a week that’s more than an hour that could be better spent watching rolling news or sitting. Or both. Or even standing and just staring at the wall. Whatever you’re doing it doesn’t matter because it’s your time before you set out, after which every step taken is one working for the man. Or woman in my case. I’m really not a very patient walker, especially when other pavement-users are completely ignorant of general pedestrian etiquette. Or they are aware and just choose to be dickheads. For example, two people walking side-by-side should always yield to an approaching single walker. It really angers me when I have to step into the road for the sake of a pair of loved-up, hand-in-hand tosswits. The same goes for groups of slowbies who amble along at crippled-snail pace, taking up the entire sodding pavement. I get the urge to kick them to the ground and cave their faces in with a big yellow fire extinguisher a la Irreversible. But then that’d only delay me and theoretically end up costing more money than the resulting bloody mess and murder conviction is worth. Other foot-based offenders include wankers that gormlessly step out of shops without looking and wonder why they’re being trampled to death, and those absolute dipshits who stop suddenly and then have the audacity to get annoyed with you for clipping their heels or touching their penis. There’s so much irritating bipedian behaviour that TV channels should drop programmes featuring bad drivers and just get Sheriff John Burnell or Tony from the Bill to narrate pictures of dangerous walking practices on city streets across the globe. “Hold your breath as a careless teenager exits McDonalds without due care, forcing passers-by to tut loudly, adjusting their paths in the nick 'o time to avoid a bone-crunching pileup. Their quick thinking averts certain disaster…” And so on. If nothing else it might help convince the government that all people should require a licence to walk in public, clocking up points for any irresponsible legwork. For serious offenders, instead of being banned, they’d just get kneecapped. Or have their feet sawn off. No joke, it needs to happen now before it gets any worse. Remember: good walking saves lives. Actually it doesn’t, it just sounds good. Actually it doesn’t, it sounds shit. Like every other idea I had for ending this piece. Oh well.

Raubfisch - Predatory Fish

Forget Alien Vs Predator and its lacklustre sequel Requiem. We’ve seen both fight it out far too many times already to stomach another tedious encounter conveniently taking place on earth, and always amongst a community of actors falling miserably short of the Hollywood A-list. The Alien and Predator hybrid was far too predictable, so what’s needed is something a bit different. If they must see earth as the MGM Grand of galactic battle venues, both species need to cease their boring hostilities for a minute to check out some of the interesting earthling creatures as potential mates, both strategically and sexually. Sharks, for example, would make friends instantly with the Predators - they’ve been made to look like complete bastards by humans on film since the 70’s. Roy Schneider might be dead, but it can’t take much to convince them Rob Schneider was really behind Jaws’ death. Personally I can’t think of anyone more deserving of a vicious and leg-ingesting revenge chomp attack. The sharks also have a legitimate beef with all those cocky surfer pricks who’ve had the audacity to masquerade as seals over the years. The great white community loved Kiss From a Rose and don’t take kindly to smug little shits imitating such a revered British soul legend. Incidentally, they didn’t so much like Batman Forever - after reading Jonathan Ross touted it as “One of the greatest films ever made”, their high hopes were thoroughly dashed. It’s also a little-known fact that as a result, a large proportion of those complaints to the BBC about Ross and Brand’s prank phone calls came from both coastal and off shore waters with temperatures between 12 and 24°C. But anyway, if the shark-Predator alliance didn’t work out, I’m sure some great white DNA extraction could be arranged by those clever aliens (the Predators that is, not the Aliens) to fashion some kind of weaponised predatory fish to throw at those more evil aliens (the actual Aliens). Tenuous linkage and poor language constructs aside, that would make more for a far more interesting film. The Alien queen could also do the dirty with a blue whale or an entire pod of up-for-it, cocksure dolphins to spawn an army of half-Alien water-based predatory mammals, who’ll also happily kill all humans for equally demeaning and offensive shit committed to celluloid. The more I think about it, the better it sounds. AVP: Ocean Madness. Give me twenty minutes to write the script, another thirty to get it green-lit and come July, cinemas will be packed with brainless twerps paying to see it, happily scoffing down their sea-salty popcorn and slurping gallon after gallon of their revolting, yet cleverly marketed Tango Brineblast. It could possibly be the most magical moment in cinema since Space Chimps.

Geburtstag! - Happy Birthday!

With each passing year my cynicism for celebrating the day you happened to pop out of your mum’s lady parts gets ever stronger. At home, surrounded by family, it’s impossible to let the occasion pass undetected. Chances are you’ll get a cake complete with candles and a woefully out-of-tune rendition of that Michael Jackson song - possibly followed by Happy Birthday. Of course as a kid this is brilliant. Blowing out candles and shovelling icing-covered buns and chocolate roll in your face while you get a ton of extra toys for simply existing is the tits. But after the age of about ten, the cake and all that is just the mandatory parent-humouring procedure you have to follow in order to collect your increasingly expensive and hand-picked presents guilt-free. This goes on till you leave home and suddenly start to realise the value of money. You think back all those years where your mum spent a ludicrous proportion of her meagre wage to buy you a Sega Megadrive, and yet you still had the temerity to turn around and ask where all the other games were. But personal stories of shame and remorse aside, I get that for adults birthdays can make you feel special. The big day, in addition to Christmas, Easter, and several bank holidays, is another break from the humdrum monotony of working life. But it’s extra special because it’s all about YOU. People will be extra nice and maybe even offer up a selection of side-splittingly ironic gifts (that aren’t, despite their spirited claims, actually ironic at all) but you have to just smile and give enthusiastic thanks for that life-sized inflatable sheep or latex replica of a porn star‘s love grotto.
No, I sound like an ungrateful bastard. It really is nice to be thought about, and I’m sure people do have the best intentions when it comes to birthday gift-buying, but for all that nicety and good will to be exhibited on one single day, just to dissipate the next is probably more depressing than uplifting. I don’t make a big deal of my birthday because I don’t see the big deal. I’m not going to organise a big night out, inviting anyone and everyone to stroke and massage my ego like it‘s a goat in a Yarmouth petting zoo. What’s the point? I’m quite secure in my own insecurities, so can live without a parade of well-wishers having fun while I just sit there wondering who actually really gives a shit. Apologies for conjuring such a bleak image, but this week was supposed to be the most downbeat of the year, so I’ve got an excuse. And an entire coconut sponge cake to comfort-eat my way through. But alas, my Sega Megadrive broke and is long since gone. As is any time, desire or skill to finish this drivel in any decent or funny way. Boohoo to me.

WC-Reiniger - Toilet Cleaner

If only I gave enough of a crap to care about making my toilet cleaner. The problem is I live with two other guys, who, being guys are mostly forgiving of our place’s general untidiness. Unlike most girls, who are generally about as tolerant of mess as Enoch Powell was of New Commonwealth immigrants back in the 60’s. It’s not that I live in squalor, just that stuff round the house get straightened up when it needs to - we choose not to chase the infinite-cleanliness dream because, well, what’s the point? I find whenever I do a massive cleanup, by the next day it’s looking shoddy again, and within a week it’s back to the way it was. In my experience, tidiness over time is a negatively exponential curve. On a scale of one to ten, ten being spotlessly clean beyond all imported Polish maid-slavery, one being a crack den even the addicts are ashamed of, my house would currently be about a five or six. The decline from there takes significantly longer than the dramatic fall from an eight directly after a big cleanup. At a wild guess, the gap increases by about twenty-eight days each time between the levels below five, so four weeks between five and four, eight between four and three, and so on. It’s therefore less about being lazy and more about having smart time management. Now if you’ve read my previous nonsense, you might have noticed a slight contradiction. While I admit I’m a hygiene-freak, this only really comes out in public places - for some reason I trust the filth of two guys I know over several thousand I don’t. Silly, I know. The only thing that makes me cringe a little is our toilet. Someone - I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me - took a massively explosive shit in there well over a month ago, the remnants of which still endure, decoratively plastered to the back of the bowl. I’ve been trying to get rid of it for weeks with varying strengths (both power and concentration) of pee shot directly at undulating poo ridges. It’s had the urinary equivalent of a sustained NATO carpet bombing, but like similarly targeted Taleban forces in Afghanistan, it’s still there, slightly reduced, but what‘s left seems even more steadfast and determined than ever. I’m not suggesting our troops are pissing on militant forces, but now I mention it, it’s might be worth a shot. A golden shower from a tough, brute marine might be just enough to make one or two of them realise their closeted homosexuality, thereby invalidating their Islamic faith, instantly ending their jihad and forcing their immediate surrender. They’d of course also emphasise to their captors they could still have weapons stashed anywhere, and that a full cavity search would be the only way to insure everyone’s safety. But borderline racism and homophobia aside, I’ve just made a big decision: it’s time to end that smeary faecal blob’s bog-tenure once and for all. Writing about it has angered me into action. If I don’t return, just carry on as normal.

Verlangen - to Want

To want to travel, write and do comedy, making some kind of living doing any combination of the three is my current, hopefully not-that-distant goal. I pine for it, dreaming of a time where I might actually get some sort of currency for any of what I’ve sacrilegiously dubbed my Holy Trinity of, well, stuff. Seeing other cities and places even within my own country is a real buzz, and the thought of being stuck in the same place for years on end is offensively grim. The excitement of exploring somewhere new, meeting and sharing stories with interesting people and simply having no commitments or humdrum crap to deal with for even just a few days is fabulous. So that’s the travel. The writing, well, I’m hardly classically trained, as these pieces show, commas are severely over-used, as are hyphenated words and phrases. But despite the holes that can and probably will be readily picked in my output (textual, not faecal - cocktail sticks work quite well for the latter), I feel the English skills of most native speakers are shite, getting progressively more poo and turdy as years chug by. And that’s four synonyms for excrement in one sentence - you can’t fault such linguistic aptitude! No, this is a terrible advert for my writing. If I’m sounding like a smug prick it’s just I’m too rubbish to make it sound self-deprecating. The point being that with less people being able to express themselves in the written form, the less competition for jobs I’ll have. Yep, that’s what I’m going with. Anyway, the comedy. I’ve perform a mammoth two, that’s right, TWO sets in front of no more than thirty people over the last - has it really been that long? - three months. Not the best strike rate, but I’ve had fun doing it. My reception was surprisingly good and made me want to do it some more. Stylistically, it’s more a case of I find this funny, I think you might too, rather than the smug arrogance of I’m a funny man, listen to me and laugh. Or you’re a cock. Essentially, attempting to be funny makes me laugh, and laughing makes me feel good, and feeling good makes me feel not that bad, so it’s as much a method of staying relatively un-mental as it is a desire to make other people smile. Just a little bit. So, each of the Trinity individually would be a great start, and merging two would be brilliant. Travel writing, comedy writing or performing comedy while travelling - that’s in actual places, not literally while travelling on a plane or in a nightmarish cruise-ship cabaret situation. The realisation of the Trinity would be a monumental and miraculous happening. I’m not interested in being rich, just creative and happy. Subsistence even at the full Trinity level would be incredible and definitely something I’m glad to want to want to do. Good job I do then.

Klinke - Handle

Well, it’s official. Barak Obama is now the most powerful man on earth. I’m always interested when a new US president gets inaugurated, and today watched him take office in the staff room at work with a bunch of gleeful co-workers. Alas no, as the ambiguity of that sentence may not have made clear, the ceremony wasn’t taking place at my cinema, rather the pictures were being beamed live from Washington to our Freeview box. But anyway, during his speech I noticed something. I’m not sure if anyone else has picked up on this, but I squinted at the TV and, well, not quite sure how to say this as it could be too much to handle, but the guy’s not white. You might even go so far as to say he’s black. It’s quite shocking that it’s not been mentioned once by any of the reporters or news anchors covering the day’s (you might even say historic) events. It seems a waste that the news agencies didn’t get all their black reporters to roam the streets asking other black people what it meant to be ethnically similar to the new US president. Or scramble for interviews with any famous African-American movie stars for their views on Obama’s skin colour. Okay, I can’t take this sarcasm lark any further. Mainly because it’s not that funny. Well it’s about to get a whole lot less funny anyway. So there. But ever since President #44’s election victory back in November, it seems all most people can talk about his race, not character. The fact he’s well educated, highly eloquent and politically inspiring seems to be nothing compared to the fact that his black dad shagged his white mum. Truly I’m not attempting to belittle the plight of generations of horribly hard-done-by African slaves and their descendents, or the bitter civil rights struggles of the twentieth century. As well as being proof that yes you can achieve anything even if you’re not white and middle class, it’s an important fuck you to the cockends who still harbour idiotic views of racial supremacy. But wasn’t it Martin Luther King whose dream it was, and I paraphrase slightly because my Internet is down, that people be judged not by the colour of their skin, but the content of their character. When people harp on and on and on about him being the first black president rather than being the first president (in a long time) with radical ideas about healthcare and social reform, and all the other stuff I can’t even begin to list (because my Internet is down) it seems patronising and, well, a bit racist. Or whatever the opposite of racism is. Forget it, this piece has taken a nosedive and only used the word handle once and in a totally lame way. I just await the day when the first underwhelming writer-come-stand-up comic runs for office. I’d have instant employment with any news agency, being sent to scour the streets for other likeminded, miserably delusional sods who probably wouldn’t have anything funny to say either. I could definitely handle that.

Slowakisch - Slovakian

Readers of my previous entries may recall my utter contempt for almost every fellow countryman featured in Boozed Up Brits Abroad, a show on Bravo about the UK’s least popular export since Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy. Were I one of millions of Estonians, Latvians and Slovakians who have the misfortune of experiencing these belligerent, loutish fucks and their piss-embarrassing antics first hand, BSE wouldn’t seem so bad. At least it takes eighteen years to turn you into a quivering, death-begging vegetable instead of the eighteen seconds it takes Gary from Chelmsford after you’ve spilt his pint. Okay, so they aren’t ever that violent, but still look well up for a manslaughter charge if the locals were ever to rise to their drunken mouthing and kicking off. Now these are the same people you see on other such Bravo offerings as Street Crime UK, scrapping and fighting on the British high street, but at least we’re only showing ourselves up… to ourselves. In economically less developed countries, there’s a repulsive, baseless swagger in the step of so many UK travellers, who seem to think their comparatively high earnings mean they can own the place and its people. You hear them everywhere in eastern Europe and Asia, complaining their smug little faces off about everything and making snide remarks about the locals inability to understand their often regionally-accented English. And they‘re not even drunk. Now I can’t quite tell if Boozed Up Brits Abroad is taking the piss or not - it’s never that judgemental of the strutting cretins who feature on the show, but nor does it really praise their unpleasant conduct either. Whichever way, the presence of a camera crew probably makes them act even more dickishly to impress their grinning, equally repugnant ilk back home. But if there’s one thing to be thankful of, it’s that the programme seems to follow only groups of British guys on their weekends spent further devaluing the country’s international credibility. Committing hen nights to film would be truly horrid, as they’d just feature flock after flock of the sort of mutton-dressed-as-mutton you’d usually see in a TV darts crowd, or sagging miserably out of a Primark top on any Chicago Rock Café dance floor. I’d much rather spill Gary from Chelmsford’s pint than be exposed to any such mad cows. Or woefully mixed metaphors.

Zahnpasta - Toothpaste

To work in toothpaste marketing must be one of the toughest jobs out there. Every year they have to come up with a new smile-destroying toothy threat for which, very luckily, they have a magical pasty treatment - a shiny re-branded, ever-so-slightly-tweaked version of what we were using last year. The toothpaste-purveying tycoons obviously do it to compete with each other, resulting in several new varieties each year, while never seeming to get rid of their older formulas. The result being an impossible choice in the supermarket between literally thirty or forty different tubes, all of which probably have the exact same ingredients and are made in the exact same factory. This year it seems to be all about acid erosion, and several brands urge us in the strongest possible terms to ask our dentists all about this, the Al Qaeda of tooth decay. Of course they then get one of their very own BDA-approved sadomasochist to profess how everyone should be using a product that tackles this new form of oral terrorism head-on, all the while caressing a tube of Colgate Pro-Enamel Plus Excel till it comes. For me, any dentist who does an advert is off the medical roll call, everything they say is suspect, you can’t trust anything that comes out of their mouths, or anything they do in yours. They make enough money charging twenty quid for a three minute check-up without pushing new designer pastes on vulnerable acid addicts. I’m not referring to blotter-acid users - although I imagine that stuff can’t be great for your teeth - but anyone who eats a lot of fruit is apparently most at risk. It’s funny how this was never an issue before the government’s big push to get everyone eating more fruit and vegetables. I don’t believe for a second that those campaigns are actually working on a grand scale, besides a few extra middle class, high-horse riding health-fad obsessive fucks forcing hundreds of apples inside their children. Yet when it’s in the news constantly, one possible but quite unlikely side effect - acid erosion - is suddenly Satan, and an instant excuse to sell their cure to an ever-gormless public. So actually, toothpaste marketing probably isn’t that difficult because you’re dealing with a mostly thick audience who’ll believe anything you tell them, provided it has some snazzy graphical representation emphasising whatever borderline science and in-house research they’re employing. But anyway, I can’t be bothered with all that, marketing has absolutely no effect on me, so I’ll just carry on picking up whichever has the most eye-catching packaging, fizzling my way out of this piece quite miserably. Oh, and ten bonus points if you got I was paying homage to Bill, not stealing his material. And minus eleven if you’ve no idea what I’m talking about.

Brullen - To Roar

In the jungle, the mighty urban jungle that is Norwich, any roar heard echoing across our sprawling metropolis is more likely to originate from a souped-up Vauxhall Nova than a lion or tiger. Which is unfortunate. I’d much prefer large, ferocious members of the cat family roaming the city streets at night than the sort of pricks who speed around in ridiculously modified cars. Of course encountering either is fraught with dangers, but at least there a chance of meaningful dialogue with the big kitties should they gear up for an attack. Carrying two pints of full cream milk and giant saucer to be deployed the instant any growling or hissing is heard would probably be met with pragmatism from the feline side. Coupled with a little soothing, but carefully uttered so as not to sound patronising, “Here, puss, puss, puss,” the chances of placating your lion or tiger assailant wouldn‘t be that bad. Supposing they could talk, they’d be all “Hmm, well thanks very much, perhaps we could reconsider our unprovoked attack,” They might even let you stroke them. Now, on the other hand, idiots inside their spoiler-topped, logo-plastered cars are impossible to talk down. Once they step out of their shiny cock-mobiles and start making enquiries as to what-the-fuck-you-looking at, you know you’re in for a rough time. The fact they put seizure-inducing lights under the floor, play ear-achingly shit music at ear-aching volumes while shouting and throwing stuff at you makes the question a little redundant. “Me? Looking at you? I’m so sorry, I barely noticed the lights, music, shouting and milkshake on my face. I was staring at the cardboard box across the road and…” at which point they interrupt with the classic “You’re taking the piss!”/punch in the face combo. I would suggest carrying around a pre-emptive two pints of vodka and a giant shot glass to pacify such a cockend, but chances are you‘d only get alcoholic shards smashed in your face. In conclusion then, even if your diplomatic efforts with our big cat friends fail, being taken to hospital for a vicious animal mauling is a hundred times more newsworthy than your average assault by a thick-as-shit boy racer. If not everyone is quite so convinced, the easiest and fairest way to settle it is to just put both groups a gladiatorial arena (the Birmingham NEC will do) and let them fight to the death. Big cat lions and tigers vs. fuckwit modified car drivers. It sort of almost rhymes. The victor wins the honour of ruling the vast urban expanse of the Fine City when the sun goes down. Go Wild cats!

Wasserwerks - Waterworks

It’s unlikely that much of the population really gets how water works in their bodies. I certainly don’t, even though I was only two marks shy of a double A in science at GCSE. Two marks out of six hundred! Double B isn’t anything. I’d have been happier with double D, as at least I could make a series of hilarious tit-related jokes in those usually quite stressful hours leading to a suicide attempt. The point is anything written beyond this sentence is guaranteed to be riddled with the scientific inaccuracies of someone who spent most of their biology and chemistry lessons smushing kidneys into people’s exercise books and burning pencil cases respectively. So there. But anyway, as far as I know, you drink, the fluid gets filtered, and the body takes the useful stuff to do useful stuff, and magically turns the rest into poo and piss. Chiefly the latter, unless you’ve got a bad case of the shits. Armed with this very basic understanding, I tend to swig mostly water because the amount crap to be strained through my liver is far less than that of most other, more heavily marketed soft drinks. Clearly I’m ignoring the fact I drink a fair bit of alcohol when I’m out, and a fair bit coffee when at work, but both can be attributed to peer pressure so conveniently don’t count. It just amazing me how much liquid turd people put in their bodies when they’re not trying to fit in. Fizzy, sugar-saturated tooth-rot juice in a can is bigger than the Beatles ever were, but why? Celebrity advertising campaigns can’t hurt, but if after another perfectly choreographed kick-about shot in full HD, David Beckham and his fellow impoverished football buddies grinned and turned to the camera quaffing a pint of ball sweat, would you leg down ASDA to get some? Actually, stupid question. Of course you would. It’s David Beckham! Whatever, the fact my food intake the last few days has consisted almost entirely of cookies, donuts and the occasional supermarket sandwich suggests I can’t judge anyone on dietary issues - solid or liquid. And I have to leave for work in a minute for another caffeine-filled whoosh of a day - I just want to be popular!

Zufrieden - Content

Most people are rarely ever content with what they have. It’s all about getting that bigger house, that more expensive car and that additional piss-irritating, spoilt child. Financial success is the only success in the eyes of most because that’s what they’ve been brought up to believe. My grandma was discussing the suitability of my eighteen year old cousin’s boyfriends based on their economic backgrounds - dumping the rich guy was of course a bad idea. When I asked why that should matter, she said something about not wanting her to suffer the hardships she’d experienced starting a family when you’re poor. So snag yourself a well-off partner for guaranteed contentment, or failing that, you can at least be miserable with plenty of fancy material goods. Personally, and I’m aware this sounds like the line any prospect-lacking pauper would give, I’d rather do what makes me happy and live a frugal existence than live a lavish one doing something uninspiring and dreary. That’s not to say if I somehow made a load of money doing something enjoyable I’d be upset, just that the pursuit of cash certainly wouldn’t have driven me to it. Aaaaanyway, It’s clear the content of this piece had taken a turn for the dull, so will attempt to rescue it by conjuring the image of two escaped gay prisoners on a camping trip, snuggled together, cosy and in high spirits inside a crude canvass shelter - their content. Okay, so they didn’t have to be homosexuals, they could have been a married couple who went on a murderous rampage because their piss-irritating spoilt child burned down their massive house and stole their most expensive car. But I watched Sean Penn in Milk last night, so I‘ve got gay on the brain. Nuff said.

Sich Fertig Machen - To Get Ready

Several months ago I wrote a bit about the outlandish practice of guys spending thirty minutes fixing their hair to achieve that just out of bed look (Gepflegt, 19/7/08), yet superficial yoinks everywhere are still sporting it in alarming numbers. It’s as if nobody’s paying any attention to my angry writings! These are the guys who’ll take several hours to get ready to go out - anywhere - even to pick up their Daily Star and Brylcreem from Tesco Metro. But I’ve been overly harsh have actually come to the realisation you can’t blame them that much. They are giving the customer what they want - most girls seem to find the bold, daring, copied-off-an-advert-to-desperately-fit-in style highly attractive and desirable. They’re the internet retailers of the dating scene - moving with the times, adapting to changing markets, and not doing too badly in the currently screwed financial climate. On the other hand, I’m more one of those small high street shops who chose to stubbornly stick with its retarded principles of honesty, sincerity and just not pretending to be something it’s not. And like most such merchants, I’m out of business. The administrators have ransacked the place, leaving a hollow shell with that white swirly stuff on the windows to mask how empty the inside truly is. Not that I’m bitter or anything. If there are prizes for horribly uncomfortable tonal shifts in literature, please just steal them for me. They’d look right good on my mantelpiece. So, was there a point to all this? I’m genuinely having to scroll up to see what the hell I was gibbering about in the first place. Right. Well, I’m not going to rant any further about people who choose to spend their hours achieving a look that takes me approximately half a second to pull off, because I end up sounding jealous. Which I am. But don’t tell anyone. They’d probably find the idea of my hours spent tapping at this keyboard NOT chatting on MSN or posting meaningless and insincere shit on Facebook walls completely ridiculous in return. So we’re probably even.

Kochplatte - Hotplate

Crockery featuring nude ladies is the only even slightly amusing image I’ve somehow conjured for this entry. Even then, it’s not so much funny as just dirty. Imagine being served steak and chips on such a hotplate. The idea of bloody meat juices being fork-mopped all over any nakedness - pictorially or in the flesh - isn’t a pretty one. And surely after a while, after so many uses, the glaze would start to scratch, resulting in the featured babes looking more like self-harmers or victims of cruel domestic abuse. Also who is that over-sexed they can‘t even eat without needing to glimpse at someone’s hair pie. Or jam donut. Or a fuzzburger. Or a haddock pastie. Or any tasteless food-related vagina synonym. Masturbation at the dinner table wasn’t the norm when I was growing up, so porn on plates seems a bit pointless. Although now as a single guy I‘d probably get away with it, but Supernoodles aren’t all that sexy, even if they were manoeuvred to drape across a heaving pair of fake tits. And before this turns into a grimy Mills and Boon novel, it should end - a shorter entry than usual probably because I’ve started putting all this nonsense online, so there’s a distinct possibility somebody - somewhere - could read this. A terrifying thought that would turn even the biggest hotplate fan hopelessly limp.

Felge - (Wheel) Rim

Hopefully the authors of my Collins German School Dictionary felt the need to specify the wheelie-nature of this word for fear of it being confused with your standard edge or perimeter, not a shady, poo-related sexual practice. But then felge does sound remarkably like felch, a not-too-distant cousin of rimming, as far as bum-related shag activities go. Shit-licking aside though, I understand from my limited car knowledge that rims on your motor are those horrid, glittering, spinney-disc penis extensions, exclusively for superficial pricks. If anyone’s concerned that’s a sweeping generalisation, please send me a picture and brief CV of any rimmed-up car owner for whom you don’t think that holds true. Their hair’ll be Tony and Guy’d to gimpish proportions, they’ll have a shiny gem poking through at least one of their ears, and their expensively twatty clothing will be covered in garish logos and brand names. Their hobbies and interests will include flexing in the mirror, listening to shit music and any pastime that involves being an obnoxious, strutting moron. Okay, that’s not necessarily true in every case - there’s an awful lot of just thick people who think they’re great by imitating the shallow idiots they see on the TV or living down the street. So only superficial pricks and thick people do that to their cars - you simply can‘t argue that point. Now, in terms of people who actively engage in rimming and felching, it’s far less clean cut. They’re a lot like the home-grown, white-boy terrorist-types who slip right under everyone’s radar. Joe Public assumes no straight people could be into rimming or felching in the same way he thinks no Caucasians could be into blowing stuff up just to shag a few posthumous virgins. It’s very possible there’s plenty in both groups who’ll, as I write, be keeping very schtum about their distasteful and harmful activities. A scary thought, but this entry needs to end right now before the idea of licking bums, ticking bombs or even tickling bums or bombs give me nightmares about Al Qaeda-themed scat orgies. I’d sooner avoid them because frankly, they just sound shit.

Spuren - To Feel

To feel up a member of opposite sex without fear of any legal or dodgy social repercussions must be brilliant. Some people have the gift of instantly acceptable pervy behaviour, others are just considered creepy bastards. I’ve got friends who’ll hardly know a girl, yet they’ll assert themselves to such a degree that the target female will happily accept an intimate bear hug with the bonus of added crotch-thrust action. Were I to try any of that shit on people I’ve know for years, let alone minutes, I’d be swiftly kicked in the balls and branded an odious prick for life. Yet personally, I think I’m one of the least sleazy people around, approximately sixty times less shady than your average over-confident cuddle-seeking, cock-pressing tit. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but then I don’t have female genitalia, so can’t pretend to understand any of the complex logic involved in forming such opinions. I just believe that most girls would prefer an idiot with an abundance of confidence, over less of an idiot who might be a bit shy. Women want a man who can grab life by the balls and defend himself and her against any crap thrown their way, not someone who’ll just hide behind a literary shield, choosing instead to insult people with an arrogant linguistic superiority. Where does that get you in a fist fight? Or trying to complain about your poor broadband service? Nowhere. It’s awfully depressing that I always end up whining that nice guys finish not quite last, but certainly nowhere near first. Perk up! Get out there! Show everyone you mean business! Really? Is that going to help? I have a coy smile and conversation about travelling, writing and comedy, to which most people are ignorant and/or completely indifferent. And given my complete lack of touchy-feely-pervy skills, there’s not much left to go on. It’s a horrible waste of time that could be put to much better use by writing about how much of a horrible waste of time it is. Absolutely unlike now.

Ersatz - Replacement

How ever tempting it may be to select a replacement word today, it won’t happen. Whenever I can’t think of anything to write, scribbling down nonsense about not being able to write anything seems to be my stock reaction. And I get away with it. Not that anyone will or even can pull me up on that anyway, given at time of writing, approximately one fiftieth of this project has been read by a staggering one or two people. It’s two actually. Again it does call into question the point of all this. Why put so much time and effort into something that will probably never be read by anyone? Why not just create a document with thirty thousand of the same word copied and pasted and printed out, hole-punched and put in a nice little folder with bows and ribbons? Well I suppose I’m chasing a writers dream, following the fundamental rule that writing - anything - is what aspiring writers must do. Even if it’s completely irrelevant tosh, it’s still proofread, scrutinised and critiqued by myself, if nobody else right now. It’s all experience in sentence, paragraph and article composition and in this case, some degree of improvisation. There will come a time where I’ll feel compelled to put all of this online, but it’s a scary prospect. The idea of a writer being scared shitless of people reading their work seems absurd, but it’s very real. It’s the fear that what I’m producing right now is not going to be anywhere near as good as what comes out in six months, at which point everyone will have read this stuff and shrugged indifferently, noting my name as one to forget, an instant before forgetting it. Until of course they see it again six months later atop a considerably less shabby article and suddenly remember the ‘meh’ reaction they gave last time, discarding it without a second glance. Clearly a way around this would be to create several alternative identities or pseudonyms, each becoming more plausible than the last, until finally, after I’m almost certain people finally like my work, I’d unleash my actual name. There’s a danger in peaking too early though - I’d hate to become the world-famous Dick Sodsbury. Not only would it be quite undignified, but I’d detest being called Richard for long. Anyway, this has gone on far too long, and the idea of selecting that replacement word is becoming increasingly appealing. It’s therefore best to end this as quickly as possible, but as my linguistic ejector seat has still not been fixed, there’s a good chance I’ll crash land into that building down there - the one full of the world’s most bastardly editors. Well, a hellish firestorm would serve them right for not taking Richard Sodsbury seriously!

An Introduction.

About six months ago I decided I really wanted to concentrate on writing, but struggled awfully with finding stuff to write about. I’d sit for ages brainstorming article ideas or what I thought might make at least sort-of funny topical pieces, but the whole process was just too arduous. After finally selecting a subject, I’d write some bit-better-than-mediocre stuff, but get distracted or bored and end up half-arsing or abandoning it. I felt I had to spend time writing, but mostly just drew bubbles in the centre of A4 pages with the word ‘ideas’ stuck in the middle. Long story a bit shorter, I needed an instant ideas machine so I could sit down and just write. There weren’t any in the shops, so I had to get creative. Sticky tape, nails and a hole punch didn’t help, nor did building a Lego car. My eventual machine wasn’t a machine at all. It came in the form of a book - a school’s German to English dictionary I’d picked up six months previous in a lame attempt to improve my (German) vocabulary. It was decided (by me) I would randomly select a word from the German side, take its translation, then write a potentially humorous improvised piece of a few hundred words based on the result. Determined never to cheat I started small with a few entries in a word processor file and just went from there, writing whatever came into my head. Last week I reached the 30,000 word mark and for some reason felt compelled to share it with anyone who cared to read it on the Internet. My get-out-of-criticism-free card states all my entries are written quickly in a single sitting of absolutely no more than an hour, and are only crudely edited. Shit excuse actually, but it’s true. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. In fact they generally work about as well as a nifty-looking gadget from a pound shop - seemingly quite well at first, but break far too easily when submerged in dreadful metaphors. Luckily though, all my pieces are quite short, so won’t waste too much of your day. Any comments will be graciously accepted, although I’ll probably just delete the anything I disagree with. No, I actually don’t care. All criticism is good criticism. Apart from the stuff that says you’re not that good. Note that my un-German keyboard and my inability to work out how to add various uniquely German characters means there's a good few spelling errors in the entry titles - for this I apologise! Anyway, my Crispy Chicken and Chips are ready, so this isn’t going any further.

Hope you enjoy it a tiny bit, and thanks for reading!

Andrew.

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A year later...now 3/1/10.

Precisely one year ago I begun committing the entries previously saved in a Microsoft Works Word Processor file called Improvised German To English Dictionary Writings.wps (I'm far too poor for Word) to this blog. If you glance through the posts in chronological order, you'll see they've evolved (or devolved?) from smaller, hardly edited bits to slightly (slightly-slightly) more polished longer word-dumps. There's been a slow creep from my original 10 minute time limit, to one hour, to now approximately two to three per word. German word that is, not word-count word, otherwise that'd take forever. Now, whether this extra investment in time genuinely makes the output better or if it's just proof of my decreasing attention span and heightened older-age thickness levels - I'm not sure. In any case, after a huge drop-off in entries after January last year, I intend to get back on track in 2010 with more frequent useless bits of attempted humour. Thanks for reading.

Andrew.

Raumungsverkauf - Closing Down Sale

It can’t be too long before every single shop in the country initiates its grim self destruct sequence and launches its final bid to recoup any tiny fraction of cash possible before creditors send round the heavies. The only jobs that seem completely safe these days are in debt collection and administration - that’s those who take over a buggered company after it goes under, not the faxing, filing and answering the phone people; you’re just as done for as the rest of us. Although I suppose the administrators will have faxing, filing, and phone answering to do, so it’s not all bad. An admin-admin worker could earn some serious dosh. Whenever shopping in a closing down sale though, you have to weigh up the amount of money you could be saving, against dealing with the sad, bleak expressions on the faces of the soon-to-be-jobless employees. I hate people who make extra demands or get really pissy with staff whose job loss is inevitable. “Check out back for it in this colour,” and “What do you mean you’re sold out?!”, or “It takes less energy to smile than frown!” Firstly it’s harsh - they don‘t need that, but more importantly, you’re playing Russian roulette every time you do it. Any one of them could have brought an Uzi or machete into work that day, and your casual dickishness could easily push them over the edge. Personally I want to avoid shopping centre bloodbaths, so always maintain an overly nice manner whenever interacting with next week’s fresh benefit claimants. I just hope the credit crunch finally swallows up high street mobile phone shops and their odious sales staff who’ll do anything to make you sign up for an enormous monthly contract. I went in to ask about buying a new pay-and-go handset, because my battery lasts for approximately ten offensive text messages. I plainly stated my average monthly spend was about six quid. “Right, but we do have one that’s just twenty five pounds per month and you get a hundred free blah, and fifty free blah and blah, blah, blah,” Despite my reasoning that I’d be £220 worse off a year, he just wouldn’t stop. It’s impossible to get any sort of impartial advice when the sales staff get a bloated chunk of my cash in commission. Let’s burn them all to the ground and donate the charred remains to brain cancer charities and deaf people. That’ll show ‘em.

Mitglied - Member

This entry had better be good. The first of a brand-spanking-new year, it ought to be one to re-member. And one with a slightly less tenuous link to my German word. Like new year celebrations, it’ll likely be a dismal disappointment to both me and whoever is ill-fated enough to read it. Probably instantly forgettable too, much like a big chunk of last night’s troublesome proceedings. After a bad experience with a bottle of red wine a mere four or five days previous, I thought it’d be a good idea to repeat the venture at my friend’s house party and make the whole experience approximately four or five times more disorderly. On both occasions, after drinking the whole bottle I seemed moderately drunk and lucid for a good half hour. After that it just all went to hell, my memory effectively wiped clean, and a trail of destruction and odd behaviour in my wake. A good five hours is completely lost to me, sketchy details of which trickled through to me today in a series of alarming reports from several eye-witnesses. Apparently I fell into a bathroom, hopped down the stairs - tripping and falling only at the last step, talked a ludicrous amount of shit, and most disturbing of all, practically declared I was a member of a hardcore rightwing racist group, in two unrelated outbursts. Firstly, having just seen the new Frank Miller graphic novel adaptation, The Spirit, I made the observation that Scarlett Johansson looked very sexy in a Nazi uniform - innocent enough, but my friend’s parties attract a particularly lefty-liberal crowd, so eyebrows were raised. The second, I’m amazed it happened, and possibly even more amazed I’m about to write a full confession. I’ll just blurt it out quickly, so you can take it completely out of context to get the full effect before I start attempting to dig my way out. Exclaimed at an uncomfortably high volume, “I hate [offensive term for African-Amerians beginning with the letter N]s!”. Of course I don’t - that’s just nuts. According to my friend, seconds before my deplorable verbal discharge, I leaned in to her and whispered “This is going to be really funny, I’m definitely not racist, but I’m gonna go to Harlem and wear a sign that says…” a clear reference to my impending trip to New York and the hostel I’ve booked opposite the Apollo Theater in the middle of Harlem. AND most essentialy to Die Hard With a Vengeance, featuring Bruce Willis having to do exactly that for a mental Jeremy Irons. So you have to ask yourself, were I a massive racist, would I have booked a hostel in the middle of a famously very, very black neighbourhood in New York? Truth is I love a lot of people, I hate a lot of people, but skin colour has sod all to do with it. Haircuts, on the other hand - don’t get me started. So in context it’s a little more excusable, but not by that much. But given I can’t remember any of it, I don’t have that much of a guilty conscience! All I know is that red wine is definitely off limits for 2009, lest I make any further explosively slurred remarks, racial or otherwise.