Hinzu - In Addition

In addition, you add something (often a number) to something else (usually another number) to make something new (generally another, bigger number - unless you’re dealing with a negative number, in which case you may well be adding, but could somehow end up with a smaller one. It doesn‘t even have to be a one. Twos, threes, sevens and sixty-fours are all common too.) Giant bracketed nonsensical asides aside, maths is great. It gives us a mechanism for understanding a multitude of massively important things, like how to work out what time it is in different countries, counting how many red, blue or yellow cars are parked on your street, and even how to divide equally your cut from that cigar heist in Rotherham last week, Steven. I saw it, even if the police didn’t. You and your two little midget helpers. Kept on dropping the boxes? Short arms in a heist scenario? Good idea was it? Why don’t we say it’s twenty thousand split three ways? What? You don‘t count them as halves? Okay then, four ways. No, I can’t work that out either. Let’s just call it three grand.

The trouble is I’m just awful at maths, and can’t remember how to do the most rudimentary pre-GCSE stuff. The ability to perform long multiplication and division ran away over ten years ago. It’s too easy to not bother when a calculator can do it for you in a fraction of the time. What precise fraction I couldn’t say, because that ability is also long gone. I really should try to pick up an old text book and do some maths to exercise my brain at least a little, because I can feel that impeding idiocy starting to kick my door in like an angry estate-based ex demanding child support. Just a few simultaneous equations a day, a couple of mean, medians and modes, a handful of highest common factors! I’d be up to (or equalling) speed in no (distance over) time. On the downside, it would probably open the floodgates to a whole host of similarly awful maths-based jokes within these writings. But I’ve forgotten how to work out probabilities too, so chances are it won’t happen. Thankfully I’m completely out of ideas, so it’s time to end, utterly out of steam and on a definite negative. Death. Ha! Now it’s positive, so there.

Deinstallieren - To Uninstall

It’s about time I got my teeth stuck into something good and relevant to my degree! Software! How exciting! The thrill of uninstalling a program to free up space on your hard disk. Your hard disk. I spent three years studying computing at university and where’s it got me? Making rubbish smutty PC-related jokes on a readerless blog. I don’t see that student loan getting paid off any time soon, do you? So anyway, when was the last time you cleared your hard disk of unnecessary stuff? And not in a Chris Langham or Gary Glitter kind of way? You could make your computer run tons faster - getting rid of those old files (not in a Chris Langham or Gary Glitter kind of way) will definitely increase the likelihood of mechanical legs sprouting out of your CPU and it winning a track-based medal in the 2012 Olympics. Perhaps. No matter how hard I try, there’s very little in the way of hilarity when it comes to circuit boards and software. Web pervs are only funny to a point - then you realise they’re really just creeps who don’t have the balls to be public masturbators or flashers in the park. Hmm. Piracy is a pseudo-necessary evil. I don’t ever download movies, although if I did it wouldn’t make a difference, as working in a cinema I don’t pay to watch films anyway. But as I’m never in to catch the latest episode of 24, and for lack of Sky Plus or even an ancient VCR to grainily capture Jack Bauer‘s ludicrous antics on magnetic tape, I download it every week. I’ll even pretend to delete it after I’ve watched it too, so is that a bad thing? I don’t know, but again it isn’t that amusing. There’s not a huge amount of other material to cover. No wonder most computer science students are humourless and lame. But eventually very rich. Oh well, at least I still have my…..actually I got nothing. Except 24.S07E20.HDTV. So I’m out of here.

Mit Dem Schwanz Wedeln - To Wag Its Tail

It doesn’t take much for a dog to wag its tail. Give it a disgustingly low quality snack with less meat content than the average Chinese man’s undergarments and it’ll get almost as, if not tons more, excited than the racists among you did at that hee-larious joke. Which is ‘very‘ at the least. Stroke a dog’s head and it’ll lick your face, provided it isn’t a pit-bull and you’re a toddler. Chances are though, while administering a bloody mauling, it’ll be wagging its tail like mad, enjoying proceedings right up until the police shoot it’s head off. Working in a cinema, I’ve seen the ending of Marley and Me several times, and it did make me shed a tear. If you’re unfamiliar with the film or preceding book, it’s about a guy, his dog and his worthless-by-comparison wife and kids. The most tragic thing for me was not Marley (the Labrador) dying at the end, but having to look at Owen Wilson’s head in extreme close-up, his nauseating 5ft smashed-to-shit nose in my face as he rattled off some wanky crap about how dogs don’t care if you’re rich or poor, thick or clever, Owen Wilson or not a prick, and so on. How many people do you know like that? While such a cynical view would be in keeping with my general outlook on life, the fact the words are coming out of that face makes me want to instantly disagree. He could be speaking out against child-molesting Nazis, but again I’d still struggle to openly be on his side. It’s like how Bono has turned me off giving anything to charity just because he’s such a massive tit. I’m quite aware of how utterly immature that is, but then I am only 26, and this piece, struggling to go anywhere, needs a new stream of mind-turd to dump and run with. So there. I’d say of all the adverts on TV begging for money, the Dog’s Trust tugs at my unusually tort heart strings the most. They give the narrator mutt a cheeky-and-slightly-scally northern accent as he talks about his dear friend Patches, who was kicked, beaten and abandoned in a gold mine. Roger was also abused - sexually. And poor Spot! He got his legs smashed off by a plastic surgeon. Awful stuff you can’t help but almost donate money toward preventing. But you don’t. Because you’re - sorry, I’m - a bastard. Don’t let that stop you though. In fact, give to charity just to rub it in my selfish, but at least nasally-sound, little face. Take that, Wilson!

Disqualifizieren - to Disqualify

The threat of disqualification from sporting events is enough to make most competitors stick to the rules like Loctite Superglue did my little finger to a door handle. False story. And bonus points if you got the 90’s product reference. Although according to their website, they’re still around. Not quite the giants of the industrial adhesive market they were fifteen years ago, but, well, I suppose domestically people are choosing to break faces over picture frames and china - the NHS is free, after all. So why isn’t the threat of disqualification from society enough to make us, or more specifically, scummy people, stick to the rules like Loctite Superglue did my index finger to a Tasmanian devil? Also false. Well for one, sporting events are watched by thousands, if not millions of spectators both in the stadium (the thousands) and on TV screens around the world (the millions), let alone scrutinized by scores of score-keeping officials. So using, for example, a car in the 200 metres, or a catapult in the shot put wouldn’t be that easy to get away with. Gary from Chelmsford nicking a car from the high street or catapult from some local museum (assuming they have them in Essex) on the other hand, would be, at best, watched by one or two twitchy-curtain pensioners and a grainy CCTV camera. Hardly a global audience. Plus if they were caught, Usain ‘Catch Me In My Subaru’ Bolt would probably be suspended from athletics far longer than Gary would spend behind bars. So either we need to make being busted for crime massively more likely, or introduce much stricter penalties if they get caught. Increasing the number of adjudicators watching criminal proceedings would be one idea. But police cost a lot money and one of them has a tendency to kill one innocent person at one protest, so they’re all bad. A better option would be to get thousands and millions of spectators by making the entire country into one gigantic stadium where we can all sit and gawp at crime as it happens everywhere. Unfortunately that’d end up costing even more than the extra police, so an even better idea would be to install CCTV everywhere and grant free access via the web and digital TV to an enormous global audience. If Gary thought Mr Wang in Beijing could be watching as he heaves his medieval rock-chucking device down the road to his fence (the bloke buying his stolen goods, not the wooden wally thing in his garden), I’m sure he’d think twice. Assuming he had the cognitive capacity to do so.
If these methods don’t work, the other possibility is harshening our punishment of criminals. Extending sentence years isn’t going to help - it just ends up costing tons more in the long run. The death penalty is just too harsh, as cretinous as Gary and his scumbag peers are. Mild torture and humiliation is the route I’d take. My main issue with Guantanamo Bay was the inmates weren’t, on the whole, tried or convicted of anything. Being held without charge and forced to listen to Eminem in a darkened room for weeks on end is simply despicable. Being held, charged with car theft, drug dealing, burglary or rape, with a mountain of supporting evidence, forced to listen to Eminem in a darkened room for weeks on end is simply hilarious. Although we ought to substitute the CD for something a bit less Gary-friendly. Captain Beefheart or My Bloody Valentine would do the trick. If straight humiliation is more your thing, strip them naked, paint ‘I’m a massive bummer’ all over their body and parade them around town in an open-top bus. It’d work and be brilliant, I’m sure of it. Oh, and it was thumb to Loctite bottle lid, in case you were wondering.

Infarkt - Heart Attack

It’s a dark night. You’re walking home from the pub on your own. There’s that quiet part of the city you’ve got to get through before it’s nothing but rape-deterring busy, well-lit roads the rest of the way. Just six minutes of potential danger. That’s it. Be on guard and you’ll be fine. Heavy footsteps some distance behind. Shit. You accelerate. Is that music you can hear too? Footsteps and music. Specifically crappy, soulless, insipid music. Don’t panic. But you’re already at maximum leg-speed. Now you can hear two pairs of feet backed by an embarrassing Enrique Iglasias soundtrack. There’s nobody else anywhere. They can’t be more than ten metres behind now. You’d better start running. NO! Calm it down. Stop being irrational. Pretend to tie your shoe and let them pass. They’re about to be on top of you so you look back. They’ve got fucking balaclavas on, and it’s actually Chico blaring out of their shoulder-mounted, 80‘s-style boombox. Possibly the worst soundtrack to any sexual assault ever. They shove you against the wall and put a knife to your throat. Suddenly it’s me in this situation, so all references to you are gone forever. In hushed tones they argue, presumably over whose going first and whether I‘m worth suiting up over or not. Oddly their voices are familiar, but in an early ’90’s TV kind of way. Anyway, just get on with it you bastards. “Do what you gotta do. I need to get home in time for Louis Theroux. This week he’s meeting sex offending criminals.”
“Can’t you just BBC IPlayer it later?” Clearly the irony was lost on them.
“Actually yeah. Thanks. Any chance you could turn that music off, ‘cos as much as it might attract the attention of a passing good Samaritan, I‘d rather not be getting defiled to the lyrics ‘You can‘t do nothing wrong, In front of the mirror like there‘s a party going on.’ Seriously.”
“Shut the fuck up.” Hmmm interesting, he’s got an Aussie accent. Should I ask him what part he’s from?
“You know, I lived in Melbourne for six months.”
“Charming. Now pull your goddamn pants down.” The other one’s got a pronounced lisp. He’s definitely the lipstick. Wow, if they don’t kill me I‘ll be awesome in the police interview. Chico fades out to be replaced by Luther Vandross in a xylophonically-heavy number. It’ll all be over soon.
“What’s your name, boy?” Really? Rapists wanting to know the names of their victims? That’s dark. Give them a fake one. That’ll teach ‘em.
“Errrr, And.. Andrea.” Real smooth. [internal argument] Yeah, because I’m very concerned about how cool I sound in front of guys who want to non-consensually nudge my fudge.
“Well Andrea, guess what?” This guy’s starting to sound more DJ than night-buggerer.
“What?” Where’s this possibly going?
“You’ve just won a copy of every single we’ve played this evening on HEART FM!”
“That’s right, you’ve been pursued by Jason Donovan and me Toby Anstis on your way home tonight for The Midnight Lurking here, live on Heart 102.4 FM! You really gave it some Heart, congratulations!” They pull off their balaclavas to reveal their tired, once-popular-but-now-strictly-radio-only faces.
“Was the knife and the pants-down, and the heavy sexual overtones really necessary?”
“Of course! Or it wouldn’t have been anywhere near as thrilling for you, our listeners and most importantly - us, would it?”
I guess he had a point.

Sich Den Arm Brechen - To Break One’s Arm

I’ve never broken anything. Bone-wise anyway. In terms of designs, ideas, scripts, improvised German to English writings, go-karts, projectors, beds (and not in a fun way), carrots and guitar strings - we’re into the several thousands. Although arms are one of the most common and non-serious bodily breakages, I’d hate it happening to me. This honestly not being an attempt at lamely crude masturbatory humour, losing my right arm function along with its attached hand would severely disrupt my life, even if it was just for four weeks. I’m guessing that’s how long it might take to magically fix. I don’t know, could be four months or two years. I am certain, however, that everything would get a trillion (or at least ten or eleven) times more difficult. My typing would be severely impeded as would writing by hand, making outputting this type of nonsense almost impossible. Lifting and page-turning a hardback would take even more effort, helping me stay consistently, yet somewhat aptly, unwell read. My working as a projectionist just wouldn’t work either. Dextrous fingers are a must when you’re dealing with small moving parts. So much so I’m avoiding another awful wannabe funny. Not quite sure how sexy ‘small moving parts’ could ever get. If anything it sounds far closer to Gary Glitter territory than anything even barely legal. I’m staying well clear. So not having a job, or being able to read or write very much, I’d fit the profile of a Jeremy Kyle guest within days. And that’s before I’ve even mentioned my inability to wipe myself. Yes, I’m claiming they’re all filthy, disgusting human beings. They should all be thoroughly sterilized in every possible way. Anyway, before this piece gives way to a downward spiral of misanthropy, it’d be rubbish not playing XBox either. Cooking would be limited to stuff on a tray in the oven, and changing channels on TV would have to be done lefty, which just wouldn’t feel right. No guitar, no arm wrestles, no laughing at the physically impaired. When a fully chair-bound quadrasod could potentially retort with a snippy and well-timed “Shut ya face, brokey-army boy!” it’d almost certainly put your initial “Oi! Wheelies suck!” comment to shame. In conclusion, breaking an arm = not much fun.

Now it is possible there’d be fringe benefits I’m not immediately seeing. Hiding a variety of things in your sling, for example, could be a source of both comedic and practical value. Pulling out broken go-karts, projectors, beds, carrots and guitar strings one after the other would be ace in front of an assembled, paying crowd. Not even Jesus could do that. Practical-wise, it’d make an excellent hiding place for that crudely-fashioned shank you‘re gonna use on that web-perv three cells down. Don‘t feel bad - it‘s what he deserves. But before this gets any more strange, I’ll abruptly end by not revealing how I broke that carrot.

Wechsel - Substitution

Sport in school wasn’t my strong point. Poor coordination skills + dorky glasses + bad hair = the substitute that rarely ever got substituted for anyone. Which was fine by me for the most part, until the resident dodgy PE teacher forcibly made a switch so he could empirically rate my lack-of footual prowess. In the same way he empirically rated my classmates’ porn-career potential by watching them in the shower. Seeing through the ruse and not wanting to end up in the back of his white van, I chose to stay sweaty. Which I did get from the very few occasions some form of football playing took place. So lacking any sort of proficiency, I was sent to my team’s defence and spent most of the time chatting to the goalkeeper. When an opponent headed my way, I just charged at them full-speed, often resulting in free kicks, penalties and minor injuries to their lower body. Clearly this didn’t help me get picked next time round, so chosen last and stuck on the bench was the standard routine each week. Right until we changed to having half of our year doing PE at the same time, and all of a sudden there were others like me - guys who were good at English, science and IT. Fellow nerdy and posturally-awkward little fuckers who couldn’t kick a ball for shit. We were ostracised from the main games, left to our own devices on a small patch of land at the far end of the astroturf. Although being best of the worst I’d instantly been elevated to MVP status, cleaving down semi-disabled kids and programming geeks that were even scrawnier and more socially inept than me just wasn’t as satisfying as hurting the arrogant jock-tossers who had the temerity to be good at sport. While it was fun enough running circles around guys playing on crutches and talking about computer games without fear of ridicule - unless of course you thought that Mario was better than Sonic, in which case you’d rightly be laughed off the pitch - I missed being violent to those who truly deserved it. Eventually, during the last PE lesson of the school year, I managed to get back into the bell-enders game and wasted no time wreaking some long-awaited havoc. Gunning for one guy in particular, a special kind of cretin who’d accused me of bullying him all year when it was really he who simply couldn’t take my sickening comebacks to his lame attempted-insults, I managed to perform an especially grisly sliding tackle that took him out of the game completely. Dragged in front of the head of year I just pleaded lack-of-coordination and poor judgement on everyone else’s behalf for choosing me to play in the skilful kid’s game in the first place. I had the glasses, bad hair and awkward posture to prove it. Checkmate.

Herab - Down

It’s rubbish when you’re down. Of course you don’t need me to tell you that. Sat there, miserable, not quite sure why, alone, flicking through channels, then your DVD collection and your books, not seeing anything that’ll raise even the slightest flicker of a smile and becoming increasingly certain that turning to the bottle, needle then eventually noose is the only way to go. Actually, while not meaning to trivialise those last three, they’ve never especially appealed to me or featured that heavily in my envisioned career path. A bit of a drink is fine, but there’s a definite conscious (or perhaps semi-conscious) step up from a couple of beers a few nights a week to the fourteen bottles of wine some guy I saw on BBC News was getting through every day. He was incredibly proud he’d cut back to just eight or nine. One bottle for me and I’m wrecked - see Mitglied (1/1/09), two would probably put me out of action for a few days, a third and I’d be dead. Literally. Drinking alone has terrible connotations - the image I think most people get is of a middle-aged man with a bottle of Bells in a darkened room, intermittently sobbing uncontrollably, popping a ton of paracetamol and shouting garbled non-words at people who aren’t there. My drinking alone, on the other hand, consists of laughing my arse off at comedy shows and movies that become even funnier, or possibly funny for the first once you’re sufficiently inebriated. Adam Sandler movies, for example, are less likely to make me vomit from sheer comic disgust - although luckily the increased amount of alcohol in me equally offsets this, ensuring a nicely satisfying pile of sick on the floor. It sitting there overnight is essential for teaching me never to sit through Spanglish ever again. So let’s not blame booze for anything. Whatever it is, it’s clearly all Adam Sandler’s fault.

Next, turning to cheap, Afghani-sourced hard drugs is something I could never do. I’d be terrible at it. Not only am I far too polite to steal for my skag, but needles terrify me too. I could stop whinging like a little girl and smoke my heroin instead, but I’ve read chasing the dragon can lead to all sorts of other physical and neurological problems that aren’t worth bothering with if you’re down enough already. Finally, suicide is just a waste. I don’t believe bodies are sacred or you shouldn’t end your life for bullshit spiritual reasons, just that it’s such a huge world and there’s so much to experience and potentially output both creatively and charitably (besides vomit) that I really do see it as a waste, especially with young people. If that sounded wanky, sorry. Don’t care. Certainly there are exceptions. If you really gotta go, you gotta go, but personally I think I’ll always have something to write about, make jokes about and have somewhere to travel about, even if it is as a penniless, occasionally down, wandering hobo.

Vorschule - Nursery School

It’s difficult to write about something you don’t really remember. The only pre-school memory I still fleetingly retain is going absolutely mental when my mum dropped me there for the first time. Onto concrete too. Ouch. No, I kid. Poorly. So being left behind. That’s the one. Oh, and pouring water into to the dry sand pit and getting a bollocking for it. It was their fault for putting the water activity thingy so close - what did they think was going to happen? It’s like putting the sugar next to the salt, cling-film dispensers in the boys toilets, or a Jewish state in the middle of the Muslim world: it‘s just facilitating the ability of humans to be massive pricks to each other. I’d love to develop this further, but work is a’calling, so thanks for reading 2009’s shortest entry! Unless I pad it out with useless sentences that go nowhere, but that would just waste both our

Barsch - Perch

I used to have a budgie. Several in fact. Not at the same time - the cage would just be restocked within a week of its previous tenant dropping off the perch. When you’re young, you don’t quite grasp how fragile an animal a small, multicoloured diminutive bird can be, so playtime with Budgie Number Three: Bluie (he was mostly blue) sometimes got a bit rough. I understood that cats and birds never got along, so was careful enough not to let them mingle too much when we let Bluie out of his home. However, I did own a classic piece of late 80’s, early 90’s plastic toy shite in the form of a Big Yellow Teapot - basically a big yellowy teapot -come- miniature home for small figurines and their uncomfortable, but handily (for them, I‘m sure) wipe-clean furniture. Looking back, I’m in total denial it was some form of doll’s house, so shhh. It really wasn’t. Okay, it might have been. The lid came off and you could, for some reason, swivel the central wall around, just in case living in a giant tea-brewing device wasn’t exciting enough. But anyway, putting little Bluie inside (the Teapot) seemed like both an interesting and hilarious thing to do. And it was for a time, until the wall-spinning feature was introduced to the playmix, ultimately resulting in a distressing freak accident that left my beloved pet with his head stuck between the inner and outer wall. Squawking like a bird close to decapitation (it‘s an all too familiar squawk), his shrieking and squirming did more to hinder than assist the rescue operation. It also didn’t help that the others inside the teapot didn’t lift a finger - they just stood there, gawping with their smug that’s-what-giant-birds-get grins plastered across their chops. Eventually, after about an hour, we managed to pull him free, but not before he’d shat almost his entire body weight on Mr and Mrs Teapot’s duvet and chaise lounge. I left it there to teach them a lesson. Given, their home was invaded by what was to them essentially a velociraptor who proceeded to scratch up and stomp all over their possessions, but by not doing anything to help poor Bluie made them just as guilty as whoever got his head jammed in the first place. Anyway, the Teapot and its Al Qaeda inhabitants have long since been pawned, and as for Bluie and his two or three successors, they’re all dead now. He did actually survive an extra year and a half after that fateful afternoon, but cervical cancer got him in the end. Turned out he was a bird.