Improvised German to English Writings

Leben - Live

2011-01-30T07:10:00.006Z

I’m alive! I’m still live-ing! Yeah, I’m aware it’s spelt ‘living’, but saw the wordplay opportunity and went for it, like a dingo stealing a baby or a mental woman (or man)…stealing a baby. But in fairness, more likely a woman. Guys don’t give enough of a shit about children to steal them. I certainly wouldn’t, even after watching Raising Arizona. If I had to, I’d nick a bar of Dairy Milk or a pack of Post-it notes. Both are surprisingly useful in a brainstorming situation. An infant’s screams and poos are not. Unless you’re working on ideas for baby monitors, nappies or reasons not to steal babies.

So, it’s the question on nobody’s lips: where’ve you been?! Well, after the colossal number of entries here in 2010 (two), a thirteen-month break to rest and recuperate was inevitable. While there’s a list longer than a midget’s walking stick of great and interesting things I‘ve done since, it’ll be more fun to point out the shit and ridiculous instead. For you anyway. For me it’s just digging up old, semi-repressed memories that’ll probably give me nightmares tonight. We don’t get Crimewatch in New Zealand, so it’s the next best thing. Speaking of things, the first stupid thing of 2010 was setting myself on fire in far north NZ in a place called Paihia. Distracted by the smugness of quipping that fat people flock to the town because there’s pie here, I didn’t spot the candle I was backing into. Calmly leaning into a friend’s ear and quietly uttering “I think I’m on fire,” is funny, but the memories of specially ironing that shirt just hours before left a lasting depression. The pills help.

Now, purely for the sake of mentioning it (and to nicely pad out this piece), one of Paihia’s leading tourist attractions is HOLE IN THE ROCK. You might be tempted to make a mock-assumption that it is literally just a rock with a hole in it. But you’d be completely right. Go on, Google image search it now. Buying stamps in the tourist office I joked “That there Hole in the Rock….it’s quite amazing that’s considered a big attraction,” - actually not even a joke, just a bit of a mean-spirited observation. The lady, completely obliviously to my scepticism, said something like “Ooooh yes, it’s wonderful. You know if you go under it on a boat and water drips on you, it’s good luck!” Now if it held some historical significance involving savage executions, the betrayal of Maori chiefs or being the location of New Zealand’s first Redbull Flugtag, its tourism credentials would be warranted. But no, it’s a hole in a rock that happens to be permeable enough for rainwater to seep through, bringing good fortune to gullible tourists. Nothing else.

Well as that meaningless rant fizzles out, so does my time for this entry. Apologies for the lack of additional ‘shit and ridiculous’ happenings I implied in the second paragraph, but I’ll attempt to shoehorn more into later pieces this year. If I write any.

Tötungsdelikt - Homicide

2010-01-06T06:04:00.002Z

I’m not really a fan of murder. Not that I’ve ever had a go, but it seems most people who turn their hand to it aren’t that nice. Or have much of a sense of humour. Unpleasant and deadly serious makes for a boring person, and if by offing someone there was a chance I’d turn into one of those, it’s just not worth the risk. Oh, also the idea of ending someone’s life doesn’t appeal either - call me a lefty-liberal-peacenik-hippy, but even killing in the name of a respectable Christmas number-one wouldn‘t sit right. In actual fact, at the thought of bumping off anything from the hugely irritating flies in my kitchen to big game in the East African savannah (if you misread, that’s game, not gay - that would be…wait for it... this’ll be so worth it…. homocide! Urgh. It really wasn’t), my conscience kicks in and won’t allow even the smallest amount of fly-swatting or rhino poaching.

Now, as a meat eater, I understand I’m indirectly responsible for the slaughter of millions of animals each year, but somehow, like 99% of all other human carnivores, I’m mostly able to keep that thought well out of mind. We’re so well conditioned that images of cramped-up, light-deprived calves and rivers of mooey abattoir blood rarely, if ever, show themselves when we’re scoffing a Double Whopper or a posh veal steak in a nob’s restaurant. In this meataphile’s opinion, the reason most of us munch on bits of animal is flimsily similar to why religion is still so popular and widespread. The vast majority of kids are raised on meat and so accept its consumption as the norm once they can think for themselves. Likewise, the offspring of god-fearing parents are force-fed Christianity, Islam, Judaism or whatever, and so end up believing in an all-powerful being by default. Vegetarians are the atheists of the dietary world, considered freaky by the masses because they’ve had the balls to question one of the thousands of things humans accept purely on the basis of tradition. Not that I can talk. Recognising this and still eating meat probably makes me even worse than those who couldn’t give a shit. And this piece has just slammed into a comically-devoid brick wall faster than…well it‘s devoid of comedy, so there‘s no hilarious simile to make. No spray-painted penises or filthy slogans, no homeless man slumped against it in a sleeping bag quaffing white cider. Only a stack of Adam Sandler DVDs, the crumpled remains of this article and an A2 promo poster for cancer. That’ll do pig. I’ll just try to keep it off the barbecue.

Zeitung - Newspaper

2010-01-03T01:50:00.003Z

Welcome to the first edition of Improvised German to English Writings in 2010! Don’t worry, it’s not going to be a piece full of horrid newspaper-related punnery - all that’s been forced into the next sentence more awkwardly than a morbidly obese chick into the back of a 1960’s Mini. Amazingly, it’s already generated some cross words from this blog’s sole observer: a Sue Dooku from Boston heralds this entry as “Broad sheeeit,” and goes on to state “where I from, tha’ how you pronounce tha’ brown stuff you push out of yo’ fanny.” Although being American she probably meant ‘bum’, but still, what a bitch. Anyway, you should be thankful that today’s first randomly selected German word ’Guttenberg’ was a proper noun and so wasn’t allowed, otherwise you’d be sifting your way through a textual mountain (via a similarly mixed metaphor) of Police Academy references until I’d have Motormouth-Jonesed your head in with a barrage of even worse stupid puns. Hightower.

Now long-term readers (if any exist besides Miss Dooku - I say ‘Miss’ as I’m certain no one could put up with her sheeeit long enough to put a ring on it) may recall Tageszeitung, (24/8/08) or Daily Newspaper, where I mentioned my pitiful reading record. Well, regretfully, not much has changed since then. In the past sixteen months I’ve probably finished about seven books and maybe half-read a further five. My friend Suze managed a thoroughly impressive 52 last year AND wrote really good, detailed reviews for each (Fenland Tales And Beyond) putting me thoroughly to shame. A New Year’s resolution to read more won‘t help, as ‘Stop binging on cookies’, ‘Curb the cynicism’ and ‘Fart less’ from last year actually had an adverse effect. In 2009 I stuffed more cookies in my mouth (and ate them), became even more nauseatingly cynical and managed to pass stronger and more frequent farts than ever before. So rather than risk a complete shutdown of book-based input by forming a doomed resolution, instead whenever idleness strikes I’ll simply keep repeating the mantra: 2 Hours Of The Jeremy Kyle Show Bad, 4 Hours Of George Orwell Novels Good. If that doesn’t sort me out, no other half-arsed way of ending today’s entry possibly will.

Feuerwehr - Fire Brigade

2009-12-27T02:58:00.000Z

As there’s not a huge amount of hilarity related to burning stuff or the people paid to put burning stuff out, this time (a bit lamely, yes) I sought inspiration from Google. Beyond the default top results of almost any internet search (Wikipedia fascinating my face off with the precise military definition of the word ‘brigade’, and MySpace pointing me to the page of some soulless pap-metal act) I thankfully found a couple more comically viable options. When a website labelled simply ‘Girls Brigade’ appeared sixth on the list, the prospect of using something like ’fiery hot chicks’ and it not being overly tenuous got me quite excited. Expecting an Are You Over 18? banner to pop-up before entering a site dedicated to filthy army-clad (or unclad) ladies of the night, it was thoroughly gutting to discover that the Girls Brigade was in fact a Christian youth organisation. It was the downscaled web-based linguistic equivalent of Blue Balls Syndrome. A bit like unwrapping what you were certain was the Girls of The Playboy Mansion DVD on Christmas Day and finding sodding Bambi. Or a Famous Five triple feature. Anyway, unless you enjoy the music of Gary Glitter, there’s nothing remotely appealing about today’s youth, or in fact any demographic brought together by religion. The idea of a militarily-structured religious organisation makes me cringe, even if it is for kids. With their ranks and perceived god-serving, they’re basically Hamas. Minus the guns. Plus some rock climbing. And maybe a little canoeing. Still, based in the Middle East and substituting their motto of “Seek, Serve and Follow Christ” for “Seek, Serve and Follow Mohammed”, they’d have been bombed the fuck out of by NATO years ago. Actually, ragging on Christianity this time of year is like kicking someone when they’re down. Or more like stamping on their face until it looks like a Pound Stretcher Halloween mask. What with their most significant annual celebration being hijacked by several billion people who couldn’t give a shit about Jesus, wise men or donkeys. Unless they’re sharing a stage in Tijuana with a naked, oiled-up slut called Chantico. So no, the subject will instead be changed abruptly to inform you of an incredible site I stumbled across called Sprinkle Brigade. I say ‘incredible’ because I’ve matured to a point I where find the idea of decorating dog faeces in the street very funny indeed. Check it out. Now. The rest of this can wait.

That’s probably it for 2009. Another odd, stupendously fast year full of experiences great and not so great, but all allegedly character-building and all that shit. See ya’ll in 2010 - or possibly sooner if I get time for another entry…if so, prepare for a painful textually-awkward double-goodbye. Ta ta!

Übernachten - Stay Overnight

2009-12-20T11:57:00.002Z

Yesterday I had to stay overnight at a mate’s place after drinking myself into an embarrassing babbling stupor, somehow reasoning it was a good idea to down a bottle of wine after the beer ran out. It really wasn’t. I recall very little of the wankered pre-passed-out stage, but remember repeating “Beer before wine, you’ll feel fine…what the fuck?” - much to the amusement of several onlookers. It was so confusing, I felt betrayed by the rhyme. How could something that rhymed be so wrong? To my monged brain, the adage suggested two or even three bottles sauvignon on top of the beer couldn’t touch me. This was just one! “But the rhyme… it said I’d be fine…” More laughter. Fade out. I woke up at 8am this morning on a couch, wrapped in a dubiously-stained duvet, with a well-positioned sick bucket on the floor next to my puke hole. Thankfully its services were not required. I needed to walk 2.7 miles (I Google-Mapped it) back home in order to leave for work a few hours later. With a throbbing headache, neither were especially fun prospects. But missing a shift would leave even less money to piss away on other Christmas and new year booze-ups. Unthinkable. Fortunately, about forty seconds from where I flog video games to spoilt, hateful children and chronically virginal males, there’s a KFC. The idea of binging on chicken quickly became an obsession, making the journey home a far less eventful version Harold and Kumar Get The Munchies. Although it was a bit exciting when the guy gave me an extra large chips for no reason. Anyway, it did the job, so I could do mine, despite feeling more spaced out than Jas Mann from Babylon Zoo.

It’s now 11pm and things are getting hazy again. Nausea has returned and draws its power from the scrolling text and blinking cursor. That means it’s time to wrap this piece up more clumsily than a blind, one-armed midget would a mountain bike, but not before mentioning it’s apparently “Beer after wine and you’ll feel fine.” So swapping them round next time absolutely guarantees a state of eternal fineness. One last thing: you’d do good to prepare for more boozer‘s-remorse drivel over the next couple of weeks. You’ve been warned.

Ansprüche - Requirements

2009-12-15T22:39:00.002Z

The requirements for a New Zealand Working Holiday Visa differ vastly depending on the geographical location you happened to leave your mum’s lady parts. Or in some cases, the geographical location of a parent when they said goodbye to their intrauterine crib. Essentially if a couple of hundred years back your country was rich, had smart leaders, or, more likely ones that were massively belligerent tossers, you get a good deal. Otherwise you might as well not bother. Unless you’re loaded. For example, to live and work in New Zealand for up to twelve months, a Thai passport holder must have a minimum of $7000 in their account, as well as a return ticket or extra funds to purchase one; ‘have medical and comprehensive hospitalization insurance’ for the length of their stay, AND, amazingly have a university degree. Plus there’s only a hundred places available each year. A UK citizen, on the other hand, can get away with having a meagre $350 (about £150) for each month of the intended stay - even if that’s just available credit on a Mastercard. If you are short (on cash, not in stature), the ’intended stay’ for the sake of Immigration could be easily curtailed. Besides the same return ticket stipulation that’s about it. There’s no competition as the number of places is unlimited, and there’s the bonus option of extending it to 23 months if you like. So Britain’s thick and poor have a far better chance of getting approved than Thailand’s relative rich and educated.

It’s almost embarrassing to be so privileged because of something I had absolutely no control over. It’s the international travelling equivalent of being born into the royal family and enjoying a world of unearned benefits. We, the citizens of rich, western countries seemingly have the divine right to go wherever we want, whenever we please. Meanwhile surfs of the undeveloped world can sod right off. That’s unless they flash their cash upfront, because of course that proves their intentions are entirely wholesome.

I propose a new, more succinct set of requirements that don’t give a shit about where you or your parents are from, set funds or specific levels of education. In fact it’s simply two things that should be displayed in huge lettering above passport control: No Wankers and Don’t Take The Piss. Sorted.

Geschützt - Protected

2009-12-13T22:38:00.001Z

It’s December. It’s 26 degrees centigrade. It’s summer in the southern hemisphere! While they’re freezing their nuts (and whatever the lady equivalent is) off back in England, I’m enjoying Auckland’s bright, ozone-hole-enhanced, skin-crispening sunshine. If you’re not adequately protected here you will, much like an unattended car on a Manchester council estate, burn inside ten minutes. While 26 degrees may not sound that hot, the sun here is so intense it feels way above 30. Sorry, thirty. No, actually 30. Mental note: a pointless internal argument is possibly the least novel of word count-extending methods. As is the transcription of ‘mental notes’. A more interesting mental note would be meeeeeelllllarph. Or a J on the major scale. But neither would be in any way related to today’s strained subject of sun protection, and so shouldn‘t make the edit. Mental note: remember to cut this paragraph before publication. Done.

I’ve always had some ability to place where people are from based on their looks. While this may sound prejudice and a bit racist, I assure you there’s no slurs or swastikas involved, so labelling me ignorant is the worst you could do. I don’t find determining between Japanese, Korean, Thai, Vietnamese and Filipino that hard. Likewise between Indians, Pakistanis and those of the generic Middle East to their west. Europeans are more difficult, but fortunately it’s made tons easier this time of year when all Scottish and Irish nationals are conveniently highlighted with an intense lobster-red sheen. Either they don’t wear sunscreen, or their skin is simply too translucent for it to work. I’m not exactly Mr Tan (and thankfully so - he was a strutting fuckwit in my year at school) but comparatively I’m almost skin-tonally Zimbabwean. And not the bludgeoned white farmer kind either. (Although they probably have quite good tans.) Now I’m not having a go - merely pointing out that the Scots and Irish in this country are living dangerously. Skin cancer kills more people annually in New Zealand than traffic accidents, depression, small children with guns, spaceships and Santa Claus. Combined. So for them, covering up is a must this summer, much the same as me ending this god-awful drivel at the next full stop. Or this one.

Befand - Found

2009-12-05T04:22:00.004Z

I was shocked and disturbed last week when I found a lump. In my mashed potatoes. As a guy, besides in porridge or on your balls, there are few worse places you can unexpectedly discover a lump. One on your head, for example, would be an expected consequence of nutting a brick wall or Mike Tyson. You’d know it‘s on its way. Similarly, it’d come as no surprise to find Jerry Lumpe in a collection of 1950’s New York Yankees baseball cards, or the best-of album Lump in amongst the illegal downloads of any true Presidents of the United States of America fan. However, testicular cancer is no joke, unless of course the afflicted ball belongs to comedian. In that case the tumour is born of laughing stock and so is inherently at least a little bit funny - funnier still (for cathartic reasons) if it belongs to Dane Cook or Adam Sandler. As for porridge: it simply shouldn’t be lumpy. It comes in the form of dry, separated oats that’ll smoothly bind together provided there’s adequate milk, it’s stirred once in a while and you’re not a complete cretin. Lumps are therefore most unexpected and most unpleasant.

Now, with mash you are in complete control. If you’re happy doing a half-arsed job, you can reasonably anticipate the odd or (even) frequent lumpy bit. I, however, spend an average of five to ten minutes decimating my potatoes, not before adding an abundance of milk and Olivio spread. (If you’re wondering, New Zealanders voted a resounding NO! in last year’s Olivio to Bertolli referendum. An important victory indeed for the Keep New Zealand A 90’s Great Britain party.) This combination creates the lushest, creamiest, (non-sexual) goop you’ll ever taste. In my mash I believed there was zero possibility of any chunky bits slipping through to the dinner plate. Until last week. After the initial panic, I had decided to just ignore it. Keep it a secret - what harm could such a small lump do? Fear for loss of mashing reputation clouded my judgement and brought about a full-blown denial. But luckily, and inexplicably (as I’m running out of time) after a few days I came to my senses and sought professional advice. Within minutes, the reanimated corpse of Keith Floyd had some good news. Being soft and squishy, the lump turned out to be benign - apparently it’s the hard (undercooked) ones that can cause the serious problems. Phew. Bottom line: always check your mash, and food-based cancer parodies aren’t funny.

Eigene - Own

2009-12-04T02:34:00.002Z

I arrived in Auckland two months ago with three bags: a small to medium-sized Berghaus backpack, an average-sized Columbia rucksack, and a Cole’s supermarket plastic carrier containing a half-eaten, full-sized foot-long sandwich. The contents of the latter had to be scoffed down within minutes of landing before New Zealand’s bio-security agents busted me. I envisaged them slapping on the cuffs and renditioning me to Morocco for some ugly snack-based questioning. They couldn’t give a shit about an impending anthrax attack, but if you’re bringing in plant matter - even in the form of salad leaves - you’d better watch your back. You should see the Kiwi version of 24 where Jeck Biwwer (my worst ever textual interpretation of the local accent) spends the day chasing a French tourist who didn’t declare his recent hiking in Switzerland! Nightmare! Jeck soon catches up with him, but only after snapping his neck like a rustic baguette does he find the tainted boots are gone! And so on. Grippingly convoluted stuff. Anyway, to get back on point, everything I had this side of the planet was inside those three bags, approximately 18kgs in total. That’s maybe three stones. Or forty-two pounds. Or three hundred spazloobs. Now after almost nine weeks and feeling relatively settled here, I’ve begun to build up a collection of stuff that’ll almost certainly have to be ditched in ten months when my visa‘s up. A speaker system for my iPod, a printer, books, DVDs, clothes and of course my amazing Egyptian cotton bedding with 500 threads per 10cm squared. It’s sad to think an increasing amount of the stuff I own is destined to part company in less than a year. It’s like a lonely soul buying a terminally ill Labrador retriever. Up to its death/my departure, it/the things will make life a lot more bearable, the joys and comfort brought hopefully exceeding the inevitable sadness and sorrow of saying goodbye. Especially to those Egyptian cotton sheets. Jesus, (it is December so it’s far less blasphemous) nothing can rescue this piece from the shroud of doggy-death downer I just evoked. More depressing still is that god awful (Christmas - not blasphemous) Owen Wilson film Marley and Me is now lodged firmly in my immediate conscious. But I’ve ranted to death about that previously (Mit Dem Schwanz Wedeln - 28/4/09) so will instead simply do the happy dance. Along with plotting when, where and how.

Geltenden - Valid

2009-11-30T22:49:00.000Z

Forgetting to validate your Oyster card on London’s transport network will cost you an arm and a leg. At the current arm/leg mid-market rate, £4 is approximately one baboon forearm and a fluffy kitten’s femur. So if you care in the slightest about animal welfare, you’ll do good to remember. Such a high tech system - the Oyster fare card, not the creature limb-based fining - is vastly removed from what happens aboard Auckland’s trains and busses. To use a needlessly porn-based comparison, it’s the crude, primitive whacks-works of Victorian times vs. the imminent six-dimensional hyper-sexploitation flicks of the 2100’s. My (often flawed, if I’m honest) logic dictates the more automated a ticketing system, the less staff are required, thus making the fares sort of cheaper. So you’d think that by having an average of three ticket agents on every single suburban train in Auckland, it’d make getting anywhere more expensive than a cashmere sweater where the wool’s been substituted for actual cash, merely for a terrible pun. Not the case! Like the direction of draining water swirling around local plugholes, so many things are backwards here it can get quite confusing. A twenty-minute train journey from my suburb of Morningside costs $2.80, but if I walk ten minutes up the road to the next station, the price is halved. At the current Pound/NZ Dollar mid-market rate, $1.40 is approximately 61p. It feels wrong to be paying so little for what would be over an hour’s walk and cost about four times as much in England. There’s no machines to buy your tickets in advance, so they have to be bought - cash only - onboard. They’re torn out of a book, then hole-punched; a system the Victorians would at best have considered technologically average. How exactly they manage to keep their army of ticket inspectors employed with such an inefficient system is mystifying. Also, they’re somehow able to afford several Dyson Airblade hand dryers in the toilets at Britomart, the city’s main station. These the same toilets in which they’re expecting visits from intravenous drug users - this evident through all the entrancing ultraviolet lighting. I couldn’t help but think were I a desperate thieving junkie, dangling a $1500 Airblade in my face would be asking for trouble. Especially when I couldn’t help but think were I a desperate clean-freak nutter offered a freshly wall-ripped Airblade for $300 outside the station, I’d definitely take it.

So really for none of this I have cause for complaint: valid tickets for next to nothing and the chance of scoring a state-of-the-art, hospital-grade HEPA filter-housing hand-drying revolution for a bargain basement price. I’ll take that over a bleedin’ Oyster card any day.

Notbetrieb - Emergency Operation

2009-11-23T23:42:00.003Z

Only once have I ever played Hasbro’s Operation in an emergency. A made-up friend at university one day banged on my door like a genuine mental, screaming that if I didn’t play with him he’d wrench out the tweezers and force them inside the next diminutive plastic person he saw. Unfortunately, a dwarf with fake tits called Carrie lived across the way, so I couldn’t in good conscience ignore him. Just in case. Okay, so I’ve never played Operation, but I’ve always loved board games. Ever the bastard little kid, I remember blubbing my eyes out in Toys R Us when my mum wouldn’t buy me Mouse Trap - instead (heartlessly) choosing to spend money on my brother’s birthday present. Of course she caved and cretinous little me got the goods anyway. I was a real shit, but had a game of zany action on a crazy contraption, so didn’t really care. My non-made-up friends at university were obsessed with Risk, and we’d routinely play till the wee hours, getting drunk and flippantly sending wave after wave of plastic triangles to their poorly-rolled-dice-determined deaths. When we weren’t killing thousands of people in a needless global power struggle, we’d enjoy similarly lengthy nights cheating each other out of ill-gotten gains on the London property market playing Monopoly. So essentially our evenings were spent learning that destroying lives physically and financially was not only fun, but necessary. It’s the western way - I’d hope for nothing less. Or more. This paragraph’s all too convoluted to tell.

Recently, however, I’ve hit a board game dry spell. The last time I remember was playing the deeply confusing Seattle version of Monopoly with a toff English twit called Tom and two girls from Orange County who had, somewhat ironically for girls from the land of massive houses, no interest in property. Once all the title deeds were sold, nobody had a complete set and nor did anyone else want to trade anything. This resulted in a meaningless hour spent swapping pittances for landing on each other’s undeveloped inner city greenbelts sites before the girls got distracted by hair, makeup and other sexist stereotypes.

Anyway, I’m thoroughly out of time and this piece has nowhere else to go. I’ve bored (ha!) myself silly and so risk (ha!) needing an emergency operation (ha!) to remove the chronic pun-secreting gland from my brain. Monopoly. Urgh.

Verstärken - Strengthened

2009-11-19T11:39:00.002Z

Well here I am once again: sat in front of my keyboard, staring at a randomly selected German word and a blinking cursor. After three and a half months without an entry, it’s high time I strengthened my linguistic resolve and devised a less blatant way to shoehorn in today’s word. Another day at work spent with a thousand chronically thick customers irritating my face off (more irritatingly than Nick Cage in Face Off) finally forced me into action. I felt compelled to acquire a German to English dictionary, reasoning it’d help me release some of my frustrations textually before they manifested themselves in a far uglier, but likely far funnier way. While drawing cocks on computer screens or being sick on a plasma telly might not be as extreme or cool as a bloody workplace massacre, it’d still end up costing me money and friends I don’t have. Outputting even a smidgen of cynicism here through the telling of events bearing no relevance to the given German word should help keep that Samsung 42” puke-free a few extra days anyway. So after work I sped over to the languages section of the nearest bookshop, and some frantic searching later relaxed as I found my prize. The only one they had. Phew! Unfortunately though when I spied the $30 price tag, my dictionary-purchase-urge was killed faster than an outed paedo on a Leeds council estate. Fifteen quid for something I could get for three back home. And to clarify, that‘s the number three, not a lispy textprunciation of free. And that doesn’t even make sense, but I like the term textprunciation so much it’s guaranteed to survive the edit. So there. Anyway, not wanting to shell out good money that could have been given to charity, (but ninety-nine [plus one] percent more likely given to the supermarket for booze and cookies) some improvisation was required. I decided to (firstly construct this awfully clunky sentence, but then) head to German Google, click on news, load the top story, and with closed eyes arbitrarily jab the screen to find my word. The only problem was the first time I got ‘Karzai‘, the second ‘Afghanistan‘, the third ‘Karzai’ again. While it’d have been terribly easy to write a piece comprising of hee-larious Helmand Province/Helmann’s Mayonnaise puns and quips about dead soldiers, it wouldn’t have felt right. Thankfully, fourth time lucky threw up a word that strengthened my linguistic resol… no, that’s just awful. I’ll keep trying. Bear with me.

That’s the story so far. Hopefully this entry will serve as a half-solid foundation onto which a flurry of new, largely meaningless writings based on random words can settle. It’s almost possible that the ailing health of this blog could be bolstered, or, sigh, even strengthened by these new Antipodean ramblings. We’ll see. And that’s the best I can do. Pretty weak, huh?

Kommilitone - Fellow Student

2009-08-06T11:21:00.002+01:00

I’m so glad I went to university when I did. Seeing so many students around town, on the streets (walking, not so much in a prostitution capacity) and in my workplace, I’m truly grateful I wasn’t stuck living and studying with their kind. Almost all the guys prance around with their ultra-stylish, perfectly messy haircuts, clad in their ridiculous sixty-quid (cun)T-shirts, while their middle-England accents fail to mask their general thick-twatedness. I’ve overheard the most retarded of arguments between two parties, both clearly wrong from the outset, finally agree on an even more wrong common ground. Like most universities, UEA flogs department-branded hoodies, so you can, as I have, snicker loudly as a group of politics students fight over… actually all examples I’ve since typed and deleted were even less funny than Dane Cook, so I’ll simply say they were very stupid indeed.

While the guys seem a million times more irritating than they were in 2001, a much higher proportion of female students are looking dangerously vacant. Of course being a flagrant misogynist, I’m not against the idea of pretty girls learning stuff, but so many look and sound incapable of opening a packet of Farley’s Rusks, let alone shaking a baby and getting away with it. (It is possible the popular child care course syllabus has changed since I last constructed a topical joke about it, so apologies if the previous non-gag isn’t relevant anymore.) So the main point is if these girls were any more vacant, they’d be condemned and boarded up by the council for our safety. (I’ll add, in the spirit of parenthesis-bound real-time commentary that the previous sentence seemed the only way of shoe-horning in that non-joke - attempting to liken vacuous girls to empty properties. So apologies if it didn‘t seem forced.)

Anyway, unfairly ripping on today’s youthful idiots is just further proof that your own academic year is always the best there is. The preceding year groups are full of whinging moaners, constantly complaining they had it tougher without the Internet, Ipods and Hollyoaks, while the young’uns have it so much bloody easier with their faster Internet, better Ipods and Hollyoaks in HD. Oh, and jealously has nothing to do with it - it’s just they’re all bastards for being under twenty and having a real excuse for not having a proper job.

Vor|haben - To Plan

2009-08-01T18:12:00.001+01:00

As I’ve only got about five more weeks to plan my departure from life here in Colman’s Mustard-Land (Norwich), you’d think I might try to use that as an excuse for the obvious recent drop off in these entries. And actually I did try for the first five minutes of writing, but it far too accurately portrayed me as a whiny, responsibility-shirking dickhead - totally unbefitting of someone running off to New Zealand for a year. Or two. Looking back at the archive, in previous months I’ve churned out up to thirty pieces, while I managed just four this
May, three in June, and a dismal two in July. On that form, this should be August’s only post. Why? Well the apparent laziness is one of the driving forces behind my exit from Norfolk - I’ve done tons more writing while travelling, and that’s the stuff that, unlike this compendium of triviality, can be sort-of relevant to other people. As much as I love writing pointless bollocks, I understand there’s not a gigantic market for it. Or even a small one. Not that I’m seeking to make a ton of money - just enough to feed, clothe, shelter and frequently inebriate myself. Integrating elements of random bollocks into a reasonably solid travel-narrative seems to be my best bet in the I dunno-term. Where I am right now is making me want to write less and less, which is genuinely scary for me. So, in order to stem any further decline in drive and (sort-of) creativity, I took the decision to give up my income, home and most of my worldly possessions in order to bugger off to the other side of the planet. I’ve been (quite foolishly) approved to work by Immigration New Zealand, so almost any job is a option. Except sales and marketing or surrogacy. Of course something writing-based would be great, but I’m not naïve enough to think it’d be easy to land anything like that. I’ll just see where opportunity takes me, all the while producing as much textual, and as little booze-based output as possible. Maybe that’s somewhere close to an acceptable explanation, if not, tough. I’m out of time and must hurry along with my vital leaving-prep procrastination. See you next month!

Eisenbahn - Railway

2009-07-25T18:48:00.000+01:00

Everyone complains about Britain’s trains. They’re never on time. They’re far too expensive. They’re far too crowded. Too hot. Too cold. Too smelly. Noisy, dirty, slow. Full of gays, foreigners and paedos. I should mention that these made-up opinions were gathered outside my local National Front disco, so the margin of bigot-error may be a little above average. I feel it’s my duty (or rather what I‘ve been made to do by default for lack of any other ideas) to rebuke each of these gripes one by one. Or maybe two by one, but certainly not three by two.
So never on time, eh? I blame these people’s watches. They’ve probably just all broken. Next, too expensive? Well if you’re a chump and choose to travel during commuter hours, of course it’s gonna be a couple of hundred thousand per journey. If you have to get to work in a morning and the train is your only option, just call in sick. That or walk. Or even get a cheaper ticket to a different destination. A return ticket from Norwich to Great Yarmouth during peak times only costs £7.80, while Norwich to London is a whopping £82! Why bother working for that poncy law firm when you could be sipping icy margaritas in a deprived coast town? Now, too crowded. The easiest solution would be to buy more tickets. If you’re a moaning space-whore who really cares that much, book out an entire carriage or shut your face. Too hot? Get naked. If you’re worried about sex pests perving their load off, just start murmuring mental-sounding gibberish about your love for rice cookers, cactuses (or cacti) and chomping off cocks. Too cold? Everyone knows the first thing to pack before a train journey is kindling and firewood. If you’re feeling chilly between Norwich and Cromer, getting a small blaze on the go is a basic human right. Exercise it! Too smelly? Making an equally bad smell will cancel out the original one - so stuff your face with pickled eggs, chilli and beans the night before to freshen the air instead of bitching about it. Noisy? Well people just suck, and you can’t blame National Express for that. Even in the quiet coach they’ll shout into their phones about those untapped markets, target demographics, and who got bummed on Big Brother the previous night - you just have to grin and bear it. Or murder everyone onboard operating above twenty decibels. But then that could get tedious five days a week, even if you are partial to a bit of inconsiderate prick-slaying. Another option would be to simply contribute to fuck-irritating sound mix with your own banging Ipod tunes, but of course you’d be running the risk of being caught in someone else’s bloody noise-rage massacre. Dirtiness is next to slowliness, which both have a simple, wordcount-saving solution: drugs. Finally, those troublesome gays, foreigners and paedos. Personally, and rather boringly, I don’t feel in the least bit threatened by homosexuals or immigrants, and as for the naughty men, I’m secure enough in my own age to not give the slightest of shits.

An|weisen - To Instruct

2009-07-09T14:38:00.005+01:00

I’m possibly the worst person to instruct anyone in doing pretty much anything. If I had a special power, it’d be Super-Inept Verbal Communication, with a minor in unjustified mid-sentence first-letter capitalisation. I find it difficult to explain anything, from that hilarious exchange with a Peter Sutcliffe look-alike in Tesco Metro, to the plot of that really clever Jonathan Creek episode where the killer time-shifted his murder by cuing up a CD recording of a struggle taking place to play two hours later, but somehow (Mr Creek deduces precisely why when she answers “yes” to the “Do you buy your fish food at the market?” question) an old woman hears the CD in her sleep the night before the offing and convinces herself she can see the future. If that made any sort of sense textually, then hooray! But to get a feel for my spoken-word account, just divide that written comprehension factor by about thirty two. Then down eight pints of Best and a bottle of Cilit Bang. I’m not kidding. Well maybe a little - I am aiming for slightly funny after all. So don’t try drinking Cilit Bang - instead ask yourself, What Would Barry Scott Do? and you’ll be fine, if not still very drunk and confused. So anyway, getting back on tenuous point, even the simplest of descriptive or explanatory things I struggle to get out, like a fat kid from a swimming pool. I’ll open my mouth to comment on a situation without thinking of the inarticulate mess that’ll inevitably follow. After committing to a story I shit myself and usually look for an easy out, like “Actually it’s really uninteresting,” or “Look out! There’s a massive fucking spider!” This works less effectively when there are no spiders or I’ve introduced it enthusiastically by saying “Oooh! An even more crazy thing happened to me this time…” Balls. A Chronologically muddled and disordered heap of monologued turd almost always results, casting an awkward silence someone will invariably break with talk of last night’s TV or girls with big tits.

So (and I’m getting closer to the point of this piece than ever before), when it came to showing the newbie projectionist at work our basic operational procedures and explaining why we do certain things, I felt the same uneasy awkwardness I get with any public speaking. Even though I was talking about a subject I knew very well, I sounded like a bumbling, incompetent idiot. Boohoo. Super-Inept Verbal Communication with a minor in unjustified mid-sentence first-letter capitalisation really isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Now, as I’ve reached a particularly sorry and depressing conclusion, there’s clearly no way of ending this entry on an even slightly funny note. Instead I’ll simply say Tits To It All and be done with it.

Während - During

2009-06-21T14:29:00.003+01:00

During these tough economic times, it’s important to be incessantly reminded quite how tough these economic times are. Constantly. They’re tough. They’re economic. It‘s economic toughness gone mad! On a scale of one to old boots, it’s a Lidl mutton steak prepared by chimps. Special chimps in special motorised chimp chairs. Actually, that’s probably less tough, more a day round Mary Chipperfield’s house. But hilarious images of animal cruelty aside, these tough economic times have had practically zero perceivable impact on my life (Sooft - 7/10/08 is still quite relevant) - in fact I’ve disposed of more disposable income in the last twelve months than ever before. Well done Andy! You’re helping the UK through these tough economic times with your reckless spending! Well, not quite - most of it has ended up in the hands of foreigners. Before you get all judgemental, I‘ve not been on a trafficked prostitute binge, no! It’s mostly been blown travelling, notching up a healthy carbon footprint with thirteen flights taken in a single six-month period. Ooops. Sorry environment. But contributions to climate change aside, it is a global economic crisis, so spreading my cash across borders can’t be considered that irresponsible, can it? In this country, these tough economic times aren’t nearly so bad as those of Latvia or Mexico, so injecting some foreign currency into their systems can’t be a bad thing. Even if it is just a few nights, a few meals and a (good) few beers, it all helps. Mostly though I think I’ve aided Chinese finances by splashing out on tons of place-branded tat they always seem to have manufactured. Decorative wooden spoon from Tallinn, Estonia - China. Lithuanian flag from Vilnius, Lithuania - China. Novelty Seattle crab from Seattle, USA - China. Fridge magnet from Cromer, north Norfolk - China. I really hope that in the markets of Beijing, alongside the vegetables and tiger penises, they’re selling “I Luv da Great Wall” T-shirts made in Bradford. Or maybe a range of Terracotta Army figurines lovingly hand-crafted in Diss. Think of the people in this country they’d be helping during these tough economic times! It’s about time both the Chinese gave something back, and I abruptly ended this piece without explaining why.

Bereiten - To Prepare

2009-06-19T13:49:00.000+01:00

Although I’ve had a good few months to prepare for my impeding homelessness, I still haven’t got anything sorted - and my lease is up in less than two weeks. Piss artistry is one of my strengths, but this is extreme even for me. It’s tough looking for a place by yourself. A flat on your own is out of the question, unless you want to spend most of your wages (if you work in a cinema) on rent and bills. So some kind of house or flat-share is the only sensible option, but finding a place as a single guy isn’t that easy. Girls want other girls to live with so they can do each other’s hair and not get raped, while guys want girls to live with because there’s a slim chance of accidentally-on-purpose seeing them naked. That’s what I read on the internet anyway. But seriously, looking at online room ads, most of the decent-looking places state ‘females preferred’ or (not seriously at all) ‘blokes: piss off’. The rest are either situated in the most ghetto of areas or look like they belong to guests of the Jeremy Kyle show. It’s amazing that for an advert picture the owners don’t even pretend their home isn’t hovel. You’d spend five or ten minutes making it look a bit less council-house sheik if only for the purposes of the photo. They should at least invest in a piece of Ikea furniture and a decorative fruit bowl. Adding to the background a cardboard cut-out of an Aga adorned with flowers and James Morrison albums would show such utter and irresistible class, they’d be beating potential tenants away with a baseball bat and their barely-legal cross-bred terrier. Okay, so not all the places that accept guys look that awful, but the others are almost always populated with the morbidly middle-aged. It’d be like living with my mum again but without the cooked meals and cups of coffee every eight minutes. Moving in with anyone over 40 who isn’t related would just feel weird. But then with eleven days to go it might end up happening anyway. Stuck in a house with a 10pm curfew and a constant Spandau Ballet/Status Quo soundtrack would be hell. That verses a box outside the train station with fleas and a bag of glue is a contest simply too close to call.

Mittwoch Morgan - Wednesday Morning

2009-06-03T17:08:00.001+01:00

Check your calendars, I‘m not lying! It is, most aptly, an actual, genuine, bona fide, non-made-up Wednesday morning. Oversleeping as usual, a bleary-eyed me turned on the TV around 10:30 to see the usual selection of daytime turd across the four and a half channels my aerial deems worthy of Andy viewing. Channel Five is mostly static, like a freak snowstorm has blown into the studio, invisible and undetectable by Matthew Wright’s Wright Stuff panel, audience and crew. A bit like a cruddy horror film where everyone else is carrying on as normal, oblivious to the dangerous stab-crazy mental who’s right bloody there. I felt like calling in saying “Get out! You’re all going to die! Hypothermia‘s a silent killer!” But no doubt before I got that last bit out they’d have evacuated the building, rounded up any suspicious people nearby (read: non-white), and called Sky News so they can scare the shit out of the entire country with talk of hyper-mega-terrorism. Within seconds they’d be smashing through my window to treat me to a lovely piece of 45-days-without-charge detention. All because the digital signal to my TV is so diluted I constantly get the psychedelic multicoloured squares with stuttering bits of speech more suited to an early Cronenberg flick than The Jeremy Kyle Show. So the trusty analogue signal has to suffice, causing the constant blizzards on Five, meanwhile sending the other four channels back to the late 80’s, creating an odd futuristic-past feel - al la The Matrix - as grainy presenters talk about high-speed broadband and super-hi-def TVs. Instead of watching BBC News by default, these days I end up catching a medley of Homes Under the Hammer, This Morning, and Loose Women, the latter featuring less eye-candy, more eye-cancer as host and panel guests alike are routinely ugly and annoying. If they weren’t so rich and famous, the only screen time they’d get would be doing ASDA or B&Q ads, being well and truly part of the haggard underclass that I’d assume (most sweepingly) watch Loose Women every day. Except for me. I’m still not nearly irritating, overweight or unemployed enough. Ouch. Yep, I’m a horrid person. Oh well, not enough time to re-edit now, as an evening of cleaning up after Terminator 4-viewing idiots awaits. I’m sure that’ll make me feel less jaded. Or just want to kill all humans. Yeah, probably just wanting kill all humans.

Zufriedenheit - Satisfaction

2009-05-29T16:15:00.000+01:00

After selecting this entry and staring blankly at the screen for five minutes, I felt a poo was imminent and so took the opportunity to sit and ponder exactly what I’d write about. The only thing in my head was that Rolling Stones song, but given (quite embarrassingly) I know almost nothing about the band, it’d be a difficult five hundred words to blag. Sure Mick Jagger’s a strutting, womanising, narcissist, but there’s something about him you can’t help but admire. Probably the womanising actually. And of course Keith Richards swaggers around like he’s Jack Sparrow’s father and has a face more wrinkled than a hypothermic ball sack, but he’s still cool as fuck. There’s not much you can joke about without feeling like a bit of a jealous prick. So anyway, I was just about finished on the bog, still struggling to think of anything worth committing to keyboard, when it hit me how completely satisfying my shit had been. Apologies for lowering the tone, but you should have seen where this was going from that opening sentence. You’ve only got yourself to blame. Oh, and me. But it is true: that sense of euphoric relief you get after clearing out yesterday’s cereal, yoghurt, crisps and chocolate fingers (the biscuity variety, not human) is almost unrivalled. It does smell though, and not always pleasantly. Especially if you’ve got a terrible diet consisting of tray-in-the-oven food and sugary snack foods. Although veggies stink horribly too, so you can’t win. Not that there’s much of a game in it - only once have I awarded the Best In Shit trophy after both my housemates made particularly fetid deposits on the same day. One had definitely been eating a Fray Bentos pie, while the winner’s entry smelt more of cheap Asda sausage rolls and burger sauce. A worthy victor indeed.

So while we’re down in the lower echelons of taste, I might as well mention the worst thing about pooing at work. For me, my uniform seems to create what I can only describe as a shit-chimney, where the offending odours rise from the bowl and enter my loose-fitting shirt around the belly area. Then, travelling up the half-flesh, half-fabric vent, they exit by my top button, treating my face to a concentrated faecal gas-cloud. It’s not much fun, and it also makes me stupidly paranoid that my whole upper body smells that way for the rest of the shift. Anyway, the good news for you is I need to leave for work in ten minutes so this is ending right here. I just hope I’m sufficiently emptied for the night ahead.

Sausen - To Buzz

2009-05-28T15:42:00.000+01:00

To buzz your tits off sniffing butane gas and glue-based products wasn’t too unusual for a Bradford kid when I was growing up. Fortunately solvents never appealed to me, so I never experienced the joys of a lung-freezing premature death. Although it’d make this entry tons more impressive if I had. However, one girl in my school did suffer such an end, prompting wave-after-wave of insincere pricks everywhere cashing in an extra day or two off, being bullshittingly too upset to concentrate on schoolwork. While I was unduly harsh at the time, liberally spreading my hardcore “Well she sort of got what she deserved,” spiel about the place - risking a severe beating from several of her former vaj-tenants - I never used her death to get an extra day off to play Resident Evil on my Playstation. Now I can’t quite claim the same moral high ground for when Princess Diana died, but in my defence I was on the last level and had a geography project to finish. You’d have done the same. Anyway, solvent abuse: it’s not just a cheap toddler/kiddy high, no! A couple of years back I lived in St Kilda, a suburb of Melbourne with a bit of a dodgy drug and hooker-heavy past. The main pub, restaurant and club area there is Fitzroy Street - a place that still retains much of its quaint, vice-laden character. I worked in a greasy burger and burrito joint at its epicentre and was often treated to the delightful company of the paint-sniffing locals in need of change or freebies. One in particular used to zoom up and down the street on his mountain bike, cigarette in one hand, his silvery plastic huffing sack in the other. It was hilarious. One time he was even getting high on the tram, filling the carriage with his distinctive fumes and, as a result, my immature laughter. There was just something about his complete disregard for where he was and who he pissing off, coupled with his ever-present cheeky grin, you couldn’t help but smile. I think his name was Chris and he lived in a place across the road called The Gatwick Hotel. Not quite as two-star as it sounds, more sort of a one-fifth-of-a-fifth-of-a-two-star place, a fraction so confusing it must equal bad. Outside on an evening, most of his fellow inhabitants (including Mungo Jerry‘s Ray Dorset - or at least his stunt double anyway) would gather to smoke a range of fragrant substances, drink their way through gallons of fish-based boxed wine, and shout abuse at all who had the gall to walk past. It’s worth visiting Melbourne just for that really. So, as it fizzles out without any style, I’m aware this piece is lacking any sort of message other than don’t sniff solvents! Unless you’re making people laugh, in which case you might as well go for it.

Es Bewegt Sich Etwas - Things Are Beginning To Happen

2009-05-26T13:18:00.002+01:00

A reasonably appropriate entry as I make my return to these Improvised German to English Writings after posting nothing substantial for almost a month. The usual excuse of writing stand-up will have to suffice - at the risk of being branded a self-congratulatory toss piece, I performed a twenty minute set a few days ago that went reasonably well. Especially considering it was over three times longer than anything I’d previously attempted. And it was only gig-number-four on my CV. Right, this simply isn’t good reading, and I categorically feel like a self-congratulatory toss piece now, although evidently not quite enough to delete this whole ego-boosting opening section. But anyway, the point was/is that things are beginning happen in my possible semi-hobbyist/part-part-time indulgence/slightest of slight money-making prospects - my dabbling in stand-up comedy. If that fails, there must be some cash in heavily-hyphenated/overly-forward-slashed or exclamation-marked (see later) sentence creation. That’d be ace. So what other things are beginning to happen today? Glad you asked, because serious nuclear destruction is potentially on the agenda. The thing that’s really amazed us shockingly-racist westerners is it isn’t those crazy Islamic extremists with suitcase nukes! Or even India and Pakistan ready to annihilate each other over 85806 square miles of fine woollen sweaters! [Although since researching that joke I’ve discovered the spellings of the disputed territory bordering those countries, and the sheep-sourced fabric are not the same, making the gag comically defunct.] So no! It’s in fact North Korea and this time they’re serious! Not only did they detonate a device as powerful as the Hiroshima bomb, but followed it up by several short-range missile tests. This of course comes after last month’s satellite launch-come-ICBM experiment that already severely pissed off the international community. Clearly shit-scary times to be living in South Korea, unless you like your summers bright and 300,000 degrees. Oh, and dead. The extra-scary thing is you really get the feeling the UN are ball-less and powerless to do anything about it. Is anyone up for invaded a country with more than a million soldiers and a proven nuclear capability? In any case you sort of have to admire Kim Jong-il. He’s taken the classically over-compensating and aggressive short-man’s syndrome to major extremes, and it’s made him almost untouchable. He’s got the (albeit forced) adoration of his people, and no one outside North Korea can do anything except call him a tosser and say what a very naughty naughty bad bad boy he is. Definitely an inspiration to self-conscious diminutives around the world. Were I short and lacking the perceived respect I deserve, acquiring a small, east-Asian country and installing myself as supreme leadership would be the first thing I‘d do. So come on Joe Pesci, just watch those Oscar-winning film offers roll in once you start enriching your own weapons-grade plutonium. No more lacklustre Lethal Weapon sequels for you, no sir!

Ein|Planen - To Allow For

2009-05-07T14:50:00.000+01:00

To allow four people in the back of a minicab isn’t legal. Unless you get one person to either sit on someone’s knee or lie across the other three, striking an alluring pose while eating grapes the entire journey. Actually that’s illegal too. It has to be meat pies. Or a bowl of sick a la Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste. Granted, neither are that appealing, but it’s one of those ancient, unrepealed laws like killing a Yorkshireman with a wooden spoon at thirty paces on a rainy day inside a discount German supermarket - try it out in Lidl or Aldi if you‘re curious. Where is this entry going? Any suggestions? Well, were it in the back of an unlicensed minicab (without the company of four people, meat pies and sick), it could well be subjected to a serious sexual assault. And before uppity-ism forces you to stop reading with disgust, I’m not making light of that - of course it’s a grisly and abhorrent crime when done to humans (and most, but not all other animals), but we’re talking about a written, digital blog entry on the internet here. Textual assault isn‘t quite so serious. What’s the worst he could really do? Perhaps 4cing hmslf + hs txt spk into this sentence, while I struggle to beat him off (tee-hee-hee) to delete and re-edit? And yeah, all rapists must use text-speak because they‘re obviously complete pricks. Go figure. And on that non-bombshell, it’s time to leave this failed entry before it gets any worse.

Hinzu - In Addition

2009-04-30T13:52:00.004+01:00

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

2009-04-29T12:04:00.002+01:00

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

2009-04-28T14:55:00.003+01:00

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

2009-04-27T12:44:00.001+01:00

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

2009-04-23T14:50:00.005+01:00

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

2009-04-21T22:21:00.002+01:00

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

2009-04-17T13:54:00.000+01:00

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

2009-04-15T18:18:00.001+01:00

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

2009-04-11T11:29:00.000+01:00

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

2009-04-10T13:11:00.004+01:00

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.

Aus|buhen - To Boo

2009-03-04T23:55:00.002Z

To be booed for doing a shoddy job at making people laugh, especially if they’ve paid for the non-privilege, is an expected part of the whole stand-up comedy thing. While most people will just sit quietly, feeling the classic expressionless stare will do enough to register their lack of amusement, if some weren’t willing to vocalise their distaste, stand-ups would quickly get comedically complacent. Given, my experience is limited to two gigs thus far - admittedly a pitiful amount - but the fear of someone finding me so unfunny they’d be prepared to stand up, mid-set to boo or shout out an insult, is enough to make me work a zillion times harder on my material. Actually, the fear of those expressionless stares contributes to those zillion times only marginally less. Even more actually, the fear of silence for even a single punch line contributes to those zillions times only a bit more marginally less. Which is silly, because clearly not everyone is going to find everything funny. Still, if you know the venue, you should be able to have some idea of what to expect in the crowd. Common sense dictates you’d avoid clever jokes in the company of thick people, cancer-based quips at Jade Goody’s funeral, and of course dead, spazzed-up kid jokes at the Conservative Party conference. I’ve mentioned to several friends that during my unplanned fortnight in North America (that should be poorly documented on my blog, improvisednorthamerica.blogspot.com as of next week) I’d love to perform at least one open-mike gig in front of a foreign audience. I’ve got at least ten minutes of mildly humorous crap that could potentially be tailored to work in the US, but I’m not sure. One joke I was going to try out at my next local performance was about me being poor and my mates bragging that they’re more well off. A friend smugly says to me, “I’ve just come into some money.” I say “Man, that’s just ostentatious. I have to come into value bog roll and Nuts magazine,” Working backwards, ‘Nuts’ could be exchanged for any local low-grade tit mag, and ‘value bog roll’ to a cruddy American toilet tissue brand. The main question would be whether they’d use the expression ‘come into some money’ - if not, the joke would die completely, leaving me open to heckle and/or handgun attack. Were the whole gig to go totally balls-up, it’d still definitely be an experience! A ton of rappers make getting shot look well cool, and even when they don’t survive usually end up having distinguished posthumous careers anyway. Which would be nice. But this ought to end soon, and I just wanted to say apologies for turning this into another one of those dull talk-about-me pieces. I’ll try better next time. After all, the thought of you - one of my four readers - booing into your computer screen makes me want to cry tears of salty eye-liquid. That’s basically your standard stuff. For tears of blood you‘d need to be enraged enough to send me a strongly-worded letter bomb packed with sharp, peeper-piercing goodness. That’d certainly teach me good. Or well. Whatever.

Gameboy - Gameboy

2009-03-01T19:24:00.003Z

Well haven’t I have been awfully lazy recently? It’s been over a week since last tapping out any random German dictionary-based idiocy, which makes me feel as impotent, in textual terms, as a wrinkled, eighty-nine year old set of cock and balls. Whenever there’s been a gap in my writings this long, I’ve had the excuse of being away - either making that obligatory twice-yearly trek up north to slake my family’s relentless attention-hunger, or exploring foreign lands, mostly while drinking my face off. Even then, I usually wrote a large amount of introspective bollocks on a napkin, beer mat or spare limb. This week, however, there’s nothing. Besides watching my usual can’t-be-arsed-to-get-out-of-bed hour or three of the BBC News channel, eating cake, and sticking on the occasional film, I’ve not done much else. Oh, unless you count the several hours of XBox 360 that seems to have, with cold efficiency, stolen every other waking minute. (Not counting heading downstairs for a cakey-refill.) The bastard. (The Xbox, not the coconut sponge.) It‘s just mad how much gaming has evolved since I was a kid. The opiate, the element making today’s games so horrendously addictive is the incorporation of the internet, allowing you to have ‘friends’ who, with XBox Live! become instant piss-taking voyeurs. When you log on, it tells you what game they’re playing and precisely what it is they‘re doing. Microsoft’s villainous masterstroke was the adding of Achievements that give you points toward your Gamerscore - a number that lets everyone know how utterly shit you are at computer games. Say you kill Mr X on game Y, you’ll get an achievement. All your friends can see instantly which ones you have or don‘t have, and therefore poke fun accordingly. This means if you’ve got any shred of misplaced pride, you’ll spend fifty billion hours in a futile bid to get that bigger score, not caring that you’re drying out your contact lenses, giving yourself a painful, George Best-esque bloodshot-eye makeover. Eons ago you could make up all sorts of boastful crap about what crazy Mario or Tetris levels you’d got to on your (I sense you’ve been craving tenuous, so….taaa-daaa!) Gameboy, but now you have to put your control pad where your mouth is and actually do it. With the accompanying microphony-headset, XBox Live! players can also enjoy masses of shit-talking with thousands of more than willing opponents. “Get the fuck off my team you loser, you suck!” These people are not only displaying their base-level anti social prowess by staying indoors playing video games all day, but they’re ramping it up to new heights by being absolute wankers to everyone in a virtual world too! They should have their fingers broken, then sawn off. Then reattached in the wrong places. Fancy your smashed-up thumb as your middle finger? No? Or all ten crunched-to-fuck digits on a single hand? Well stop being such a belligerent bell-end, Mr ILoveKittens93, and maybe you’ll avoid a violent - but in no way sexual - re-fingering. Well, maybe a little bit sexual. Ten on one hand? And this has just got horrible, but thankfully my Gamerscore urgently needs raising, so that’s it.

Vergnügungspark - Amusement Park

2009-02-20T16:01:00.003Z

As lacking in amusement as such parks in East Anglia are - Suffolk’s Pleasurewood Hills sounding more like, yet being far less appealing than, a low-grade countryside brothel, and Yarmouth’s Joyland, a place that’d struggle to be more miserable were all the rides replaced with Holocaust imagery and used tampons - for me they could never be as depressing as those seedy, teenager and degenerate-ridden dens calling themselves simply, Amusements. Packed to the doors with flashing fruit machines interspersed with the occasional crane-grabbing game, they’re everywhere and always have that same smell: a mixture of stale smoke, disinfectant and futile desperation. If you go to the seaside, they’re a bit more non-addict friendly, having at least a small section of old style, mechanical penny slots and falls where you can happily spend five quid over an hour. You’ll probably win a big chunk of it back too, and, most importantly, walk away with a Liverpool FC key ring from the 2001/2 season or some Lizzie McGuire stickers. The best thing about it is trading in all those cruddy prizes for something bigger and better, like the classy Tasmanian Devil money box I fill with all my shit-small coinage. But back in city centres, it’s all about being serious. Penny falls replaced by silvery ones, 2p minimum-bet machines replaced by 20p Deal or No Deal confusingly high-tech motherfuckers, and tourists replaced by locals trying desperately to button-bash their way out of debt. Not a crappy little prize in sight either, just an abundance of bright white trainers, tracksuits, gold chains and baseball caps. And all the players are wearing them already, so what’s the point? If you’re a bit down and happen to be passing such a place, step inside for a few seconds to take in the sights, sounds and smells. If that doesn’t make you feel a trillion times better about your own life, well there’s always East Anglia’s leading wood-pleasuring site just off the A12, north of Lowestoft. Whatever turns out to be there, you can bank on riding creaky, battered stuff from the 1950’s in dire need of lubrication.

Vordersitz - Front Seat

2009-02-19T22:11:00.002Z

The front seat, or rather front row of seats on a plane is the only place you can sit to guarantee the prevention of an all-expenses-paid trip to Crampsville for your legs, or to its even less desirable neighbour, Crushedto-fuckville. It wouldn’t be the case if practically all air passengers in the world weren’t the complete selfish cockstains they are. But no, it’s apparently a basic human right to recline your seat to its extreme the second the seatbelt sign goes off, regardless of how shittily uncomfortable it makes anyone else. Now you may think this tirade is based on one or two recent bad experiences on scummy airlines, and that my seat-based luck-tank is simply running dry. Well firstly, the idea of a storage tank for seat-based luck isn’t a bad one - Theo Paphitis will snap that right up, so get working on that prototype! Secondly, and a bit more importantly, I base this on the close to thirty flights I’ve taken both within and between several different countries over the last three years. Everywhere it’s the same. Eastern and western Europe, north America, Australasia, south-east Asia - about eighty to ninety percent of the time it was the default post-takeoff action to be carried out. It’s a xenophobe’s worst nightmare: every race uniting, sharing a common dream to instinctively spread that dull, aching, leg-related pain to everyone, regardless of skin colour, ancestry or creed. In most cases too, when a polite anti-crippling request was made, it was either outright ignored or resulted in the tiniest adjustment, accompanied by a sneering “You happy now?” remark. The prevailing attitude seems to be Well I paid for my seat, I’ll put it how I damn please! It makes me really pine for the days when guns, knives, hammers and lawnmowers were allowed on planes so these conceited tossers could receive the bloody mid-flight justice they deserve. (YouTube ’Braindead lawnmower scene’ this very second if you’re confused). Actually, even if you’re not confused, look it up anyway because it’s brilliant! Okay, personally, were I to want to encroach on the already meagre space of whoever is sat behind me, I’d turn around and ask first. It’s the most basic of common courtesy, even if they’re absolute wankers. Perhaps it affects me more because of my inbuilt politeness chip that engages during any verbal interaction with strangers. It’s the same chip that forces an automatic apology whenever someone bumps into me or stands on my foot, or calls me a fanny face in the street. Fortunately, it doesn’t apply to my textual output, so I can be as openly horrible to strangers as I like. Except you. If you’re bothering to read my words you’ll get a free pass on most things, or at least get let in for student rate. However, please note that if you recline in front of me on the day I do finally snap, I’ll probably slash your face. Or if the plastic cutlery fails me, take a slash in your face. Just so we‘re clear.

Ein|sperren - To Lock Up

2009-02-17T14:49:00.002Z

Prison life doesn’t look like much fun. Besides the occasional snooker-ball-in-a-sock beating and showery bum rape, it just looks terribly dull. Unless you’ve done something horrendous, chances are your fellow inmates will mostly be a boring mix of relatively sane petty thugs, that may or may not want to subject you to an intense fist or willy-based pounding. In terms of interesting conversation potential, the psycho killers outdo the smack addicts and burglars any day. I’d much rather hear a chilling account of consuming a Fray Bentos steak and kidney pie with baked beans and a nice Lambrusco, than another humdrum tale of granny-mugging or car theft. Speaking of criminal chit chat, I was on a train to London the other week and felt I‘d lucked out with an almost empty, very quiet carriage. Running a bit late and needing to pee, I’d decided to do it on the train. In the toilet. Seconds before departure, a band of three shady guys, to whom I took an instant prejudicial dislike, decided to take the table directly across the isle from me. “They’re reserved, mate,” one said to the apparent leader, although using the correct there/their/they’re seems a bit inappropriate. So rather “There reserved mate,” to which he responded by pulling out the seat reservation markers and saying something like “Well, they’re (sorry, their) our seats now!” Within minutes they were guzzling special brews, talking about meetings with parole officers, and discussing the best weed connections in East Anglia. Being an hour and forty minutes from Liverpool Street with a bladder full of ex-orange juice and coffee, you can see my dilemma. While I’d hate to show any lack of faith in Her Majesty’s ability to reform, I didn’t quite feel like leaving all my stuff on the seat to visit the bog. The alternative would be to take everything with me, which to my over-analysing brain would light up a massive flashing I DON’T TRUST YOU SCUMBAG CONS sign - not an overly attractive option either. Moving to a different part of the train would generate the same sign, only in lowercase letters, and more a gentle blinking than flashing. I didn’t fancy losing my Ipod, jacket or chocolate bars, nor being subjected to a retaliatory we’ll-teach-you-for-not-trusting-us bashing, so did the only thing possible: risk damaging my bladder by painfully holding it in for nearly two hours. Which was made all the more difficult by some of the hilarious things they were saying. I’ve not got time to share them all, because I need a wee (and have done every fifteen minutes since that journey), but my favourite was, and I‘ve translated this into relatively proper English, “Ha! Made me laugh. This is the first time I’ve been released from prison where they’ve given me condoms. What am I supposed to do with them? I ain’t ever used one in my life. I take my chances.” I laughed out loud and had to jab my finger really obviously into the book I was fake-reading to make the outburst appear unrelated. But then started to feel awful for the hundred or so illegitimate children and fresh infections he’d almost certainly helped create. Forget giving out free condoms on release - try mandatory castration. Or even a crude, rusty scalpel-based sex change. Turn every male ex-con into an ex-man and the re-offending rate would drop off the chart. They’d be laughed out of drug deals and bank robberies with their uneven tits and hairy legs. What’s the worst that could happen? If anything it’d make crime more of a comedic spectator sport and far less scary. Well, the image of hundreds of badly botched-job transsexuals trying to be taken seriously as proper wrong’uns makes laugh anyway.

Fremdenverkehrsamt - Tourist Information Office

2009-02-16T18:31:00.001Z

Perhaps there’s just something inherently unfunny about tourist information offices. It’s a struggle to generate anything even slightly amusing about a place you waste precious minutes of your holiday leafing through brochures and getting flogged organised tours by commission-hungry staff. Everything you could possibly need to know is available on a million websites from the second you decide to take a given trip, so unless you’re popping in for a sneaky wee, you shouldn’t really have much cause to enter. Note that’s pretty much the extent of my comic prospects for this piece, although sly slash, crafty penny-spend or stealthy pee-pee are all equally mediocre, so could have been used instead. Essentially it’s only going to get worse from here in. Or at least more dull. In truth, I enjoy looking around a city’s tourist office because I‘ve got a habit of collecting leaflets and brochures for things I‘ve no intention of doing. That and tacky place-branded pens, pencils, fridge magnets and armfuls of other useless tat. Aren’t you glad you learned that about me? Told you there was nothing funny going on in this entry, yet you had to read it anyway. Especially you, Steven. That’s on the off chance one of the four regular readers of this blog happens to be called Steven, if not, please just pretend that’s your name for a few seconds. It’ll make me feel far less guilty about using my linguistic ejector seat to escape this vile textual misadventure. With any luck I’ll land near a building full of not-to-commission-hungry people who’ll tell me a bit about the place. Yep, definitely time to bail. Bye!

Hauptbahnhof - Central Station

2009-02-14T23:32:00.001Z

Getting from Munich’s airport to the city is an incredibly frustrating experience. Especially if you’re an idiot like me. Having got off the plane and collected my bag, I was happy to find an integrated station with a regular, direct train service into the Hauptbahnhof, a mere five-minute walk from the hostel I’d booked. The queue at the manned ticket desk was huge, while the self-service machines were relatively deserted. Naturally I chose to go with the mechanised option, chuckling to myself and murmuring something like chumps walking past the people in the snaking line. Twenty minutes later, after prodding every conceivable combination of buttons, all the while glancing at the other queue to note where I would have been had I joined it in the first place, I was about to admit defeat. Until suddenly, it happened! I actually did just admit defeat. And no, the machine wasn’t all in German, nor did it have an out-of-order sign plastered across its screen. As dense as I know I can be, it wasn’t my fault. Probably. All I remember is being able to select the journey I wanted, FLUGHAFEN to HAUPTBAHNHOF and the exact time (that had to be continually bumped to the next one as each departure time passed), but that there was no ’Buy Now’ or similar option anywhere. I could even print out a detailed list of all the times and prices for the entire day! But no option to physically purchase a ticket. So seething inside with my head hung low, I shuffled over to the old and thick people’s line for a further ten minutes of foot-tapping and anger. If Hitler had to deal with such shit-useless technology every time he flew into the city, then it definitely makes sense that Munich was the birthplace of Nazism. Spending thirty minutes trying to buy a train ticket had transformed me, a reasonably sane and placid person, into an angry and irritable twat, so the effect on a genuine mental is almost guaranteed to result in awful haircuts and genocide. Anyway, to end this on a slightly lame Bavarian tourism plug, the city’s magic beer quickly placated me. It’s a really fascinating place to visit regardless - historically, architecturally and various other assorted ally-ending words, but ignoring all that, their drink is so pure, you can easily double your regular intake and still not get hung-over. As I say, magic beer. It’ll cost you though. With our current piss-poor exchange rate, for two pints you’ll be lucky to see much change from a tenner. Or a baritone for that matter. But lame jokes that don’t even work are officially legal tender in Germany, so stuff your S-Suitcases f-full of ‘em. Unless you don’t have a stutter, in which case just fuck off.

Bordell - Brothel

2009-02-13T15:53:00.002Z

Objecting to whoredom on moral grounds is undeniably a twattish thing to do. The idea that our bodies are special or sacred in some way, and that letting people stick stuff inside them for cash somehow makes you a lesser human being is plain wrong. Sure, frown on the drugs it pays for in most cases - dealers are scumbag fucks - but not on the act itself. These uptight people aren’t tutting when they’re at the height of orgasm, so how have they got the right to say shit about anyone else‘s carnal jollies? I share the late, great George Carlin’s bemusement on the issue: “Selling is legal, fucking is legal, so why isn’t selling fucking legal?” Of course there is a big issue at the moment with press-ganged prostitutes getting screwed over by absolute bastard pimps, but it seems unfair to let that taint the entire profession. Some clothing manufacturers use sweatshop child labour to make the cheap shit for Primark, but that doesn’t mean they all do. So brothels in which consenting adults fuck for cash shouldn’t be a problem. But they clearly are. Now I’m aware this sounds like the confessions of sexually frustrated, hooker-using filth cretin, but that’s not what it is. While I’ve no issue with people who choose to do it, it’s still a somewhat grimy business. When each of these girls - pretty as they may be - are getting nailed ten times a night by a cliental of mostly misfits, degenerates and leery tossers, they become as attractive a lay as Jeremy Kyle’s condescending fuck-face. No matter how high class some of these escorts are advertised as being, they’ve received the cock of hundreds, if not thousands (but probably not hundreds of thousands) of the ugliest, tiniest and likely rapiest of other men. So I’m not so much judging a book by its cover, more by who’s grubbily fingered through it in the past. Which isn’t much better really. What about all the girls you almost-sort-of-get-to-a-point-where-you-might-get-some-way-close-to-possibly-pulling on a night out? What about all the ugly, tiny rapists they’ve had sex with for free? Well clearly these girls are far cheaper; my good looks, eloquence and dry wit often succeed in getting me nowhere, so a few pints of snakebite and black‘ll do the trick. Maybe. I might know were I ever in a situation where buying a girl a drink didn‘t seem like a horrifically cynical I-just-want-in-your-pants move. Although I am sure that if it did actually work, it’d cost a lot less than a visit to someone on the street turning tricks for crack and smack.

Ich Hab’s Ihm ImVertragen Gesagt - I Told Him In Confidence

2009-02-11T13:51:00.003Z

Never tell anyone anything in confidence. Ever. No matter how impeccable their secret-keeping record may be, there comes a point where everyone has to blab to someone. The strange thing is we should have learned this from our earliest years at school, when in reception class you told a close friend you really fancied Gemma Lovell and he went and spread it faster than cholera in Zimbabwe. Actually, that‘s stupid. Cholera takes tons longer to get around than even the most tardy gossiper’s payload. Faster than, say, the time it takes to eat a bowl of soup while watching an episode of Rainbow in your lunch break. Or if I was unlucky, Rosie and Jim, which genuinely made me want to sneak aboard canal boats at night, piling up horrifically dismembered puppet effigies in the hope of scaring the freaks off air. I reasoned the presence of a canal-side marionette murderer might make them think twice about taking any further shit-boring boaty-romps down Britain’s dreary waterways. Incidentally, when telling my friends about this desire also in good faith, within days I was explaining myself to a concerned and quite disturbed child psychologist. After which you might think I’d have learned to keep my mouth shut about everything. But we never learn, and stuff always gets out. Don’t tell anyone anything in confidence. Ever. If you’re a chronic over-analyser too, paranoia always dictates that everyone knows everything already, so that every comment, wry smile or unintentional blanking is somehow related to whatever it is that’s been leaked. Anyway, given that I’m now obliged to post all these entries regardless of how shoddily they’ve turned out, as much as it pains me I can’t just hide this away and never speak of it again. Boo-sodding-hoo to me.

Vergrößerung - Enlargement

2009-02-08T14:02:00.002Z

It’s sad, yet hardly surprising that my first thoughts on this entry are body-related. Enlarged breasts, willies, lips and thumbs (in that order) popped right in, although why anyone bothers with #2 and #3 is beyond me. #4 however is a very simple procedure, taking approximately two seconds to perform. If you’re interested and want to try it for yourself, read beyond this sentence, otherwise start from the beginning again. Okay, now the boring people are stuck in an infinite reading loop, to increase your thumb size by up to one hundred percent (individual results may vary), simply take your index finger and thumb from your other hand, and place either side of your diminutive target digit, scissoring firmly both hands together like a pair of elderly lesbians. I actually have unusually dry hands, so that horrific image is probably less appropriate to everyone who isn‘t me. Anyway, working backwards through the various body augments, I‘ll continue with #3. Pumping your lips full of protein may sound like a lot of fun, but the result often ends up looking peculiar. Given, I’ve not studied a trillion before-and-after shots, but of the several bizarre human-fish hybrids I’ve seen with collagen implants, it just seems they’re paying vast sums of money to have people notice - no matter how freaky they look - that they can afford such vast sums of money. But that can’t be right, because the idea that people having such cosmetic surgery could be vain, boasting show-off-types is a bit far-fetched. Next, penis enlargement is a brilliant concept. It’s one step further than pricks that wear designer underwear in the hope it’ll help them get laid. If you’re in a situation with a lady where you’re already down to your underwear, unless she’s the type of superficial idiot who’d bulk her face out a la #3, it’s unlikely she’s going to give a shit whether Tommy Hilfiger or Calvin Klein has his name plastered across your waistline. So similarly, if you’ve got to a point where you’re already lost the undies, is she really about to cease proceedings and laugh you out of the bedroom/nightclub disabled toilet/stairwell because your manpiece isn’t up to size? If so she’s a shallow twat, which ironically would make her far more suited to a tiny-penised man than her less empty-headed counterparts. Finally, #1: breast enlargements. I understand some women without much there can feel very self-conscious, insubstantial, etc, etc, etc, blah, blah, blah. Being a guy, shockingly I don’t find breasts that unappealing, so I have an inbuilt non-beef, generally speaking. Responsible, proportional tit-jobs, cool, go for it. Even a bit bigger than looks natural, why not? But when you start going from an A to EE or B to JJ - if that size even exists - sexiness rapidly degenerates to funny, to freaky, to ugly, to plain nasty. Give me average boobs and decent conversation over giant knockers and thick-shittedness any day. Although a thumb enlargement can also increase desirability by up to ninety percent (individual results may vary), so it’s definitely worth whipping out every now again.

Wie Ist Das Neue Zimmer? - What’s The New Room Like?

2009-02-04T23:51:00.001Z

It’s not bad, thanks. After almost eight months in my new place (or rather just place now), I’ve finally started to cover my insipid lilac-coloured walls with actual stuff. The resulting mishmash of movie and music posters, maps, photos and postcards do make it feel like a new room, and certainly a lot more homely. There’s still loads of space to fill though, and working out what to stick there isn’t easy. Putting up naked ladies doesn’t interest me that much - pictures of them that is. Having live ones Blu-taked to the wall on a permanent basis wouldn’t be that much fun either. They’d need feeding, watering, and would end up making far too much noise and mess than their pleasing aesthetics were worth. Cars and football are the other major subjects of posters adorning male bedrooms, both of which interest me about as much as cheese or staplers - footballers in cars even less so than staplers in cheese. Caaaw, check out that exhaust pipe, it’s well sexy. Awww I’d well go gay for that Ronaldo, he’s wicked. No, give me pictures of brie-encased stationary any time. And I don’t even like cheese. I considered framing various types and styles of wallpaper for comic effect, but then thought if that’s the aim, why not just mount several issues of the Beano or Dandy and put them up? But it’s unlikely most people would get the understated non-comedy, and my room would just look like it belonged to an eight year old. What am I saying? The fact I have a single, rented room in a house, rather than my own place with a mortgage makes me less of a grownup than any framed Mini The Minx centrefold ever could. Owning my own home with Thomas the Tank Engine wallpaper in the kitchen, a bed wrecked by constant jumping (of the innocent kind), and having my mum round every day to wipe me after a poo would still make me more of a man than I am right now. But that’s fine with me because I’ve never been that comfortable being called one. Not due to being secretly a woman (although that is a much better excuse), but because I still feel like a kid. A deeply cynical one at that, but certainly not an adult. Being constantly asked for ID helps reinforce the perception, as shop assistants, doormen and barmaids all seem to agree I‘m just a child too. Buying a house would doubtless rid me of my perma-kid complex, but there’s too much of the world left to explore - a planet full of adventure and experiences that take precedent over tying myself to a life-long financial commitment. Call it naïve, tell me I’ll be a pauper when I hit sixty, I don’t care. It’ll be where I’ve been and what I’ve done that’ll make me a wealthy old boy. Well, that and my priceless stash of smutty Beano porn.

Karaoke - Karaoke

2009-02-03T23:26:00.000Z

A spine-chilling word synonymous with tacky nights out, featuring a cacophonous soundtrack so excruciating it’ll make your ears wish they could commit hari-kari. That’s according to the Oxford English Dictionary, anyway. Were I editor-in-chief. At best, it’s a bit of drunken fun. You and your friends caterwauling the night away, not giving a crap about the actual tune, words, or pitch while concurrently managing to piss off all the stupidly serious idiots surrounding you. At worst - which is most of the time - it’s an unbearably self-indulgent practice of completely unjustified vocal-strutting. Most people who think they can sing really can’t, yet they feel the need to prove to everyone they’re only working that shit job in accounts till they catch their big break. Even though they’re thirty-eight. But rest assured, they’ll still be trying out for X Factor every year, almost certainly secretly wishing terminal illness on a close friend or family member to get that all-important sympathy vote. Not so much tugging at heartstrings as wrenching them out with a pair of comically oversized pliers. X Factor's popularity gives every pea-brained, futureless cretin hope that they too can make oodles of cash for opening their mouths and making noise. I’m sure it’s this dream that’s made karaoke so much more popular over the last few years, to the point it’s now encroaching on what was once the zenith of geekdom - console gaming. Singstar on the Playstation 3 allows you to broadcast video of your auditory GBH across the Internet, turning what was once a format for the shy and nerdy into just another showboating prick-platform. Next it’ll be Games Workshop X Factor x-treme role playing, featuring replica figurines of JLS and Same-(it‘s only illegal if you catch us doing it)-Difference. Roll a 1 or 2 to get insulted to tears by Simon, a 3 to 5 is a suitably average performance, but on a 6 you nail it. You‘re through to the final! You get to sing live in front of dwarves, trolls, ogres and all the other hideous, lens-cracking members of the ITV studio audience! Actually, the idea that the outcome is somehow down to chance is a bit far-fetched. It’s more likely that the character you choose to play determines which loaded dice you get to roll. Nutcase middle-aged twins, take 1-2. Ugly-but-talented waitress from Rotherham, take a 3-5. Stunningly beautiful, highly marketable blonde from London, take a 6! Clearly I’m being far too cynical. Not everyone who takes karaoke seriously is a freak, some just enjoy listening to their own voice over a poorly balanced PA system in a dingy room surrounded by apathetic onlookers, every one of them feigning smiles and offering fake nods of encouragement as they hear the same songs they‘ve heard a million times before, a million times better. Now having never been to a karaoke bar, all this is completely speculative. But they do say speculativeness is next to godliness, and godliness is next to cleanliness, which is in turn next to OCD which is reasonably close to AJW - my initials. So how could I possibly be wrong?

Süchtig - Addicted

2009-02-02T23:28:00.003Z

Thankfully, I’m not that addicted to anything particularly pricy, harmful or socially frowned upon. Smoking is expensive and doesn’t really do much other than slake, yet simultaneously build a nicotine dependency I can’t be bothered to nurture. But just because I’m a non-smoker doesn’t make me an anti-smoker. Nonchalance is my prevailing feeling on the issue. People can do what they want to their bodies, and as for passive smoking, it’s just another of the trillion things that can lead to a painful and premature death. If not smoke it could just as easily be a speeding bus, collapsed building, a psycho killer (qu'est-ce que c'est?) or giant squid monster from space. Far too many people think living for eternity is not only possible, but a basic human right. The Oldtopians dream of a place where billions of decrepit and frail bodies live, struggling to move for fear of snapping their twig-like limbs, but are, most crucially, completely free of terminal illness! Because that’s all that matters. Well meh to them. We’re not special, and have no more right to survive as all other animals on the planet, including those we regularly mass murder to happily chow down with a spicy barbeque sauce. Anyway, before this entry veers even further off topic, booze next. Being physically addicted to alcohol doesn‘t seem like that much fun, unless of course you‘re a member of one of those little hobo cliques - you know, the cheery beardy guys who hang out in small groups necking white cider and special brew. They laugh, they joke around, they nick the occasional handbag. They’re a Robin Hood-style band of bit-too-merry men, except they steal from all socio-economic groups and give mostly to the off-licence. I do drink a fair amount, but can’t ever see myself needing to get horrendously wasted. Especially on a daily basis. It really can’t be much fun. Finally, hard drugs seem like far too much work to bother with. Hiding a heroin habit from friends and family is probably almost as much effort as nicking and flogging all of their stuff. Funding the relentless quest for dragon-chasing supplies must be even harder during a recession. I’d guess those any-purpose loans aren’t quite so any-purpose nowadays. No more ten-grand loans to buy ’a big bunch of smack’. But before this gets any sillier, I have to go. The lack of Chocolate Fingers and Tesco’s Finest Triple Chocolate Cookies in my system is starting to give me the shakes, making typing and any wittiness increasingly difficult. And before you judge me, let me say I’m skinny and can easily afford them on my wage. It’s a victimless crime. So get off my back.

Auseinander - Apart

2009-02-01T16:00:00.002Z

Apart from this very use of the word, I’m struggling to write anything for this entry. I suppose love will tear us apart could be a convenient excuse to mention Joy Division and the upcoming thirtieth anniversary of their landmark album Unknown Pleasures, released in June 1979. But I won’t, because I’d only earn your contempt as it inevitably turns into a Curtis bum-lick-fest with less gags than a made-for-ITV sitcom. And nobody wants to witness a textual account of necrophilic anilingus. Well, some people might, but I’m sure there’s plenty of subscribable websites that’ll do a far better job. So, instead I’ll do the second cheapest thing when inspiration is thin on the ground: break it down. In case you’re wondering, the first is to simply write about my inspiration being thin on the ground, followed by me questioning the point of this whole exercise and blah blah blah. It’s been done before and probably will make another tiresome appearance soon. Anyway, on with the breakdown. A part of me really wants to pick apart the Sterophonics for pretty much everything they’ve done in the last ten years. Word Gets Around is a cracking album and Performance and Cocktails has its moments too, but everything since has been so utterly and turdily dull, I’m amazed that during recording and performing they haven’t bored themselves to death. Instead of releasing Decade in the Sun: The Best of Stereophonics last year, they could have saved thousands of trees (blank CDs do grow on trees, right?) by just telling everyone to buy their first two albums again. But I suppose it’s not up to me. Anyway, all this talk of shit has suddenly made another part of me intrigued to find out who is into this whole necrophilic anilingus lark. Not necessarily to make friends or bum, rather more out of a morbid fascination as to what these people look like. Especially with a thirty year old corpse - it’d have to be pickled or mummified in some way for there to be anything left to lovingly tongue. I don’t imagine poo tastes that great inside a live shitbox, let alone one soaked in vinegar for three decades. Can’t say I’m aching to sample either any time soon, so any concerned rectums - dead or alive - can breath a collective sigh of relief. Just keep that Glade Plug-in cranked to the max.

Standort - Position

2009-01-31T23:32:00.001Z

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

2009-01-30T22:18:00.001Z

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

2009-01-29T13:25:00.000Z

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

2009-01-28T19:27:00.000Z

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!

2009-01-27T22:12:00.000Z

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

2009-01-26T22:46:00.000Z

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!

2009-01-25T14:12:00.000Z

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

2009-01-24T18:25:00.000Z

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

2009-01-23T02:32:00.000Z

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

2009-01-20T18:23:00.000Z

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

2009-01-19T03:37:00.000Z

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

2009-01-17T22:54:00.000Z

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

2009-01-13T02:12:00.000Z

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

2009-01-12T02:22:00.000Z

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

2009-01-10T20:08:00.000Z

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

2009-01-10T03:54:00.000Z

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

2009-01-09T06:04:00.000Z

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

2009-01-08T05:03:00.000Z

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

2009-01-05T06:24:00.000Z

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

2009-01-03T18:00:00.000Z

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.

2009-01-03T14:16:00.001Z

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.

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

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

2009-01-03T03:57:00.000Z

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

2009-01-02T03:46:00.000Z

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.

In Dieser Beziehen - In This Respect

2008-12-31T23:48:00.000Z

Respect, in this day and age is unmistakably lacking across the social and generational spectrum. It’s all well and good when old giffers wave walking sticks in the air at the gangs of hooded cretins smoking and swearing outside a shop, but it is terribly one-sided. The elderly don’t see it from the youngster’s point of view. Being an uppity little fuckstart is all part of growing up in most scumbag neighbourhoods and estates, and residents of such horrid places should get off their judgemental high-horses and just leave them alone. Kids are people too, and if they want to spend their days sniffing glue, nicking stereos and stealing pension money, they should be allowed to get on with it. Grannies need to respect that Britain is a festering shitbox of increasing crime and deprivation, and that them getting confidence-tricked by a gang of teenaged morons is not only inevitable, but vital to the continued breakdown of the social order. This country will implode, and it’s only a matter of time before it does in spectacular fashion. When one fifth of population tunes in to watch the X Factor final, then go out and buy the winner’s achingly point-missing Christmas single, we’re clearly surviving on borrowed time, as well as the trillions in borrowed cash. Walking down the street, there’s always some form of idiot, twit or twat who I’m certain Britain would be far better without. Every red-top tabloid reading scally fuck I see on the train, and actually, this sentence was about twelve lines long, but I’m reigning it in. You get the idea. Okay, so it’s me who is the ultimate in judgemental, high-horse-riding prick, but whatcha gonna do? Pretty much every undesirable could beat the absolute shit out of me, so I have to vent my anguish in this cowardly and lacklustre fashion. But it’s New Years, so time to be happy, positive and upbeat, so let’s drop this dystopian doom-and-gloom rubbish. Instead, we should be looking forward to 2009 - I’m quite optimistic my pessimism will increase at least a little bit, so there’s something we can all look forward to. Good bye 2008, you were at times a cruel, interesting and even fun year, but I’m glad you’re over.

Zumwohl! - Cheers!

2008-12-31T02:22:00.000Z

As contrived and hand-picked as this entry may appear, a mere thirty-seven hours from 2009, it, like all previous pieces, was selected entirely at random. Not that I can prove that, but I just don’t have the energy for lying today, so take my word for it. Now, that I’m working both Old Year’s Night and New Years day seems too convenient an excuse to not go out and get at least a little bit drunk this time round. But the truth is I just can’t find that many reasons to give even the slightest of tosses about it. Yeah, be sociable, get out there, show people you’re young, free and single and all that bollocks, but for what? The chance of an ugly one night stand or fleeting bit of tongue action on the stroke of midnight? New Years is always a disappointment, so chances are if I go and actively expect a bad night, it’ll turn out to be great, which will of course then be a let down anyway. But far better than the 99 percent of the population who’ll experience the exact reverse. I suppose it’s just another example of vague optimism through constant pessimism (see Unterschatzen, 11/10/08), but vague optimism notched down to scant sanguinity or something equally pretentious and downbeat sounding. It is just an excuse for a party at the end of the day, (and month and year for that matter) and I’ve never been a massive fan of those. For me they’re mostly uncomfortable extensions of day-to-day small-talk and chit-chat with potentially even more embarrassing consequences. It’s rare you’ll actually connect with someone and be able to converse about topics any more interesting than that new girl at work or last night’s telly. Mingling is just an exercise in negotiating a path through well-defended clique circles and pausing briefly to smiling at people who’ve absolutely no desire to reciprocate the motion. Luckily, there are certain measures as defined in the Socially Awkward’s Handbook, should an attempt to be sociable backfire horribly. My favourite is probably the talk-come-cough action, whereby ’Hi’ will morph into ’Hhh-splutter-cough-splutter’ the instant it becomes clear they’re not listening or already walking away. It never works, as anyone in the surrounding area thinks you’re an idiot or just ill and takes a few steps back regardless. But enough of me being grumpy. 2009 has lots in store at camp Andy and ought to be a fun-filled year of travel, writing, and stand-up comedy, and all possible combinations of the three. I’ve got several important aims I may choose to shoehorn into later German to English Writings, but for now, I’ll simply say bring on a terrible New Years Eve! Oh, and cheers!

Verlobung - Engagement

2008-12-30T05:40:00.000Z

Why anyone would active seek marriage is one of the great mysteries of life. My life anyway. Perhaps I am overly jaded after being involved in a failed six-year-plus relationship, and holding an overriding feeling that love can never work and that all couples are phoneys who stay together solely to avoid a lonely, miserable death. Except of course that all death is miserable, lonely or not. In fact having nobody means less disappointment and grieving spread about your anguished survivors. And all of a sudden this reads more like a suicide note than a quirky, upbeat slice of Andy drivel, so I’ll bring about a sharp tonal shift to beat even the most uncomfortable GMTV tragic incest rape story to win a big fuck-off telly competition link. It is very sweet when people do decide to tie the knot - the excitement, the glee, the adorning parents and the thrilling prospect of a boozed-up weekend in some eastern European capital to prove to the world we’re a nation of idiots to be justifiably despised. I’ve written about this before, but it does depress me when wave after wave of pricks descend upon Tallinn, Riga and Prague to ‘show them how the British do it!’ or ‘teach them how to parrrrtieeeeeee!’. You expect that shit in holes like Ibiza and Ayia Nappa. Anyone who isn’t a complete bell-end, who goes on holiday without requiring a numbered polo shirt complete with hilarious nickname and number iron-transferred on the back, knows to avoid anywhere that fully saturated with cocks. But in cities as historical, arty and just oozing cool as in the Baltics and more southerly eastern Europe, you shouldn’t have to encounter so many groups of ignorant stag-wankers who are only there because Ryan Air run a cheap flight from Stansted. With any luck, the continued devaluation of the pound will help increase our overseas manufacturing sales, while simultaneously curb our most embarrassing export. They’ll instead consider simulating the experience at home by grabbing twenty crates of Stella, picking up a few STI-infested prostitutes and handful of banging Ministry of Sound shit-discs.

Schwindlig - Dizzy

2008-12-29T02:56:00.000Z

‘Tis not only the season for racially provocative sweaters (see 21/12 - Du Hast Den Pulli…), but also to feel horribly dizzy, nauseous, have a splitting headache and discover a big load of mystery bruises acquired somehow the night before. According to the news, a quarter of all alcohol purchased by households in the UK is done around the festive period. I find this an unusually large amount - surely I can‘t be the only one who drinks by myself most nights throughout the year? I can’t be alone, can I? I mean on a grand scale, not the physical lack of drinking partner. Although that said, you drink enough and you gain several new friends - pillows, teddy bears, chocolate oranges. And I’m suddenly aware that list sounds more sexually sinister than the genuine talking-to-inanimate-objects angle I was going for. In truth, (which is clearly never a good way to start an actually truthful statement) for me alcohol has lost a lot of its novelty. It’s precisely the dizziness, nausea, brain-crushing headaches and the multicoloured results of the inevitable contusion I just can’t get excited about. The times I’ve gone out and drank too much I always regret. Due to the immensely shit selection of drinkeries open past midnight in Norwich, any night out with work colleagues (-which must be put in every once in a while purely to shield myself from being branded a ‘loner’ should any spree of rapes or murders occur and the e-fit look anything like me. Well, yeah, now you mention it, he didn’t go out very much, I’d say he was a bit of a loner. I don’t need that. But we’re getting off topic-) will end up somewhere hideous. A couple of weeks back, the night culminated in a festering sleaze-and-cheese pit called Liquid, which managed to successfully extract some deeply cynical feelings I usually keep well under wraps. I announced to everyone how Liquid was the ultimate advert for misanthropy, and how if you ever needed a reason to despise the human race, simply duck in there for twenty minutes. Which of course most of them already had. And seemingly quite enjoyed it. It was all a bit like preaching atheism to gormless punters outside a Sunday carol service. Only slightly less drunken. I don’t so much regret saying that, because jokingly as it may have seemed, I did mean it, it’s just that it’s probably not going to have done my Crimewatch profile any favours when that series of grim crimes occur across the city. Well yeah, now you mention it, he did talk about hating all humans a lot, so yeah, I wouldn’t say he isn’t capable. Gee, thanks.

Du Hast Den Pulli Falsch Herum Am - You’re Wearing Your Sweater Inside Out

2008-12-21T23:52:00.000Z

Well ‘tis the season for sweaters, and doubtless there’ll be many tens of thousands of hilarious inside-out-Christmas-jumper shenanigans come the big day. “You’ve got Rudolf on back to front! You‘re being a very disrespectful young man!” The obvious retort being: “Nan, this is the third year in a row you’ve knitted me sweaters featuring leading Nazi Party officials. Hitler, Goering, now Rudolf Hess, I’ll be honest, I’m just not that comfortable spending Christmas round yours anymore,” followed by an achingly racist “Well what the fuck is a hook-nosed Shylock fuck like you doing celebrating the birth of Jesus anyway?” And then visiting hours at the Elderly Anti-Semite Correctional Facility are cut short as she’s restrained and positioned in front of Adolph’s Greatest Physical Hits on the big screen for an hour or two to calm down. In truth that would be quite magical to watch. That’s the entire scene playing out, of course, not so much the images of Hitler beating the shit out of some dishevelled Jews. But I digress massively. It is almost Christmas, which means another year of pretending to like people we usually barely tolerate, and barely tolerating the people we generally despise. My gift-buying skills are horribly inconsistent - one year I’ll be amazing and get everyone brilliantly relevant stuff they seem to really enjoy and appreciate. Or at least pretend to. Other years, my cynicism is turned up a good few extra notches and I stop caring. Yet people still seem to accept my bullshit excuses of hectic-work-life-busyness, or insincere promises to drop off presents in the year, or double up gift-wise when birthday time comes around. These are all tactics I’ve learned during my childhood from the very same uncles and aunt’s I’m spouting this shit to now. Perhaps they hide their recognition, all the while secretly knowing I’ve joined their ranks, gaining the ability to be a miserable Christmas bastard whenever I so desire. What makes me feel more of an asshole this time of year is when a Christmas shopping trip results in far more stuff being bought for me than anyone else. There’s that just plain awful, but wholly inevitable, judgement that the items earmarked for friends and family just aren’t as good what’s for me. But then it really is the thought that counts, and if that thought is self-satisfied smug-fuckery, then you really are a Christmas bastard. But you can take some solace in the fact you’re not suffering the embarrassment of wearing your Rudolf Hess sweater inside out. If you had a dreadfully racist grandma, she‘d definitely take you down a peg or two.

Grapefruit - Grapefruit

2008-12-18T20:16:00.000Z

Following the blistering success of my previous fruit-based entries of Mandarine and Pfirsich, I’m struggling to find anything even slightly interesting to write about this one. Drop the first letter and the meaning is instantly more hee-larious and morally questionable. Is it possible to rape fruit? Is fruit actually alive? Or is it dead the minute it’s wrenched off its tree by an immigrant worker in southern California? I genuinely don’t know. Could performing a sex act with a banana or orange or pineapple ever be considered rape? Or if it is dead would that make it be some form of produce-necrophilia? Well I just don’t know. Either way, this is making for a truly horrendous piece of writing that is frankly a ghastly waste of time for both writer and reader. So to get back on topic, I’ll simply state that grapefruits for me are neither tastefully, nor sexually attractive and as a result never end up in my shopping basket. They’re like grapes with a devastating cancer that’s turned them yellow and grown exponentially. Grapes soft are sweet, grapefruit is sour and hard. Just like my uncle Jim. He’s a boxer, not a rapist. This is clearly going nowhere else, so it’s time to use my linguistic ejector seat. Well, it appears to be jammed, so I’m going down with ship - the ship that mixes more metaphors than a food processor stuffed with political speeches and Star Trek dialogue.

Ferien - Holidays

2008-12-17T04:29:00.000Z

It’s not often that one of these randomly selected German words is completely relevant to the moment. Although not currently on holiday, just two minutes ago I was doing a final bit of price-comparison research jazz for flights that will almost certainly be booked tomorrow. The plan is to fly into New York on March 11th, returning to Heathrow from San Francisco just over two weeks later. The rest is at this point is entirely unplanned and may well stay that way. While travelling around the Baltic states of Estonia and Lithuania back in September, I had a complete, thoroughly-planned itinerary involving hostel bookings and flights that in the end were never used. What was supposed to be four nights in Tallinn became ten, leaving Helsinki and Riga, as well as the flight between them excluded from the holiday. While there are savings to made by booking travel and accommodation in advance, I’ve learned it’s terribly constraining and can seriously impede your fun. So keeping it loose and free - besides having to be San Francisco by March 26th - will hopefully maximise my enjoyment, and should I fall in love with a certain city, hostel, or a group of people, sticking around is unlikely to have any negative financial consequences. There are so many possibilities, so many places I can’t wait to explore across the whole continent, from Vancouver to Miami and everywhere in between. Even having spent over two months in the US and Canada two years ago, North America is so huge and has so much to offer, I’m itching to get back, even if it is for just a couple of weeks. The embarrassing lack of humour in this piece is testament to how excited I truly am about returning! So here is a last-ditch attempt to shoehorn in some funnies: boob, pissflaps, cockballs, pooface, turd-toucher… actually that isn’t working at all. So I’ll simply say thank you America for electing Mr Obama, and please accept my greatly-depreciated British currency as a token of my gratitude. In three months time. At which point it’ll be about five pounds to the dollar and I’ll have to slog my way across your massive country hitching rides and performing lewd acts for cash. See you soon!

Speichel - Saliva

2008-12-14T17:28:00.000Z

Nobody likes being spat on. Or shat on. Or sat on - except maybe bad uncles at Christmas time. And actually, some people do like, or at least pretend to like being shat on. Usually for cash for internet videos that other, arguably far more ridiculous people will pleasure themselves over. But I can’t think of anything vaguely attractive - sexual or not - about gobbing saliva all over someone’s face. Then again, I am a sad, lonely single man, the very demographic most likely to get off on such subversive wrongery, so there’s a chance I’ll have a filth-epiphany in the not-too-distant future. Personally I find spitting quite revolting and cringe whenever I see people do it in the street. Given, I do get a bit OCD about hygiene (see Hygienisch - 27/8/08) but even a normal person can surely see it’s disgusting. Spreading their fetid DNA in public places might be something these odious pricks are used to - I’ve worked in a cinema long enough to scoop up ample supporting evidence - but it’s not an excuse. It’s only one step down from openly sneezing or coughing on someone’s face. Part of the problem is idiots’ idolisation of footballers who spit constantly in full HD throughout their exhibitions of smug cuntiness. This leads to the inevitable peer pressure to imitate their actions, somehow linking their obnoxious spegging to oodles of cash and pop star girlfriends. The whole thing is horrible and I just wish people weren’t so disgusting. But saying that, I couldn’t be anywhere near as self-righteous and judgemental if everyone was as stupidly uptight as me. So, whatever. I don’t care. Continue being disgusting, nauseating freaks, it’s fine.

Mitfahrzentrale - Agency For Arranging Lifts

2008-12-14T03:26:00.000Z

The idea of such a government agency existing is quite wonderful. Imagine needing to get to a dentist’s appointment ten miles away on a day the busses aren‘t running. Reschedule, you might say, and sure, that would be the easiest thing to do, but harder for me to shoehorn in a poorly constructed joke. If you could just call a national helpline that’d get you a ride when you’re in a bind, it’d be fantastically convenient. Isn’t that just a taxi? I hear you mentally scream at this page. Actually, the fact I can hear that is enough to make me stop writing this drivel and advertise my services on the internet. Not quite sure how I’d market it, but I’ll think about it passively as I attempt to get back into piece. Well, yes, a taxi would be the logical solution were you to be stuck in such a predicament. However, taxi drivers need paying, and paying costs money. Money you certainly won’t have if you’re shelling out for any kind of dental work. The Agency For Arranging Lifts would pay for everything, ensuring our free travel is provided by the UK tax payer. While some may argue that’s not particularly fair, just think of the jobs created at the Agency! Providing several new jobs as well as ensuring dental appointments are kept and dentists get paid will surely help massively in the fight to drag Britain out of our current financial crisis. And if that fails, I’ll simply sell my bizarre mind-reading skills to the highest bidder and donate a small proportion of my profits to the UK’s coffers. Everyone’s a winner. Except the taxi drivers - but screw them, they’re probably bastards anyway.

Ersatzreifen - Spare Tyre

2008-12-10T21:23:00.000Z

I lack both the literal spare tyre, on account of me not possessing a car or a bizarre wheel collection, as well as the non-literal spare tyre, or the massively attractive, overhanging fold of blubbery fat around the waist. The two aren’t related in my case, although there may well be a greater proportion of overweight drivers compared to their leg-using, walking counterparts. I use my feet to get to work and back most days - a solid twenty-five minute brisk walk, that seems to take most other people closer to forty. So perhaps this does help stave off the blobby belly, but I’m quite convinced I could do almost zero exercise and eat pizza for every meal and still remain stupidly thin. It’s a curse. I’d make for a terrible healthy living advert: Andrew eats whatever he wants and does absolutely nothing all day, yet doesn’t gain any weight! What’s his secret?! Is it AIDS? We’ll find out after a blood test! Well I certainly hope it isn’t AIDS, because that would be a bummer, especially given I’ve never bummed anyone or been bummed. That’s an awfully homophobic thing to say. Straight people get it too. I know, I was simply playing on the stereotype for comic effect. And now you’ve ruined it. But in truth, the scary thing is that apparently twenty percent of HIV carriers don’t even know they’ve got it. Being such an obsessive compulsive clean and hygiene freak, I get panicked whenever I see any sort of open wound not because I’m squeamish, but on the off chance any blood somehow finds its way into my mouth or anywhere, and that it’s infected. And even if that did happen, who goes for an AIDS test based on that? I’d probably end up having to say I’ve been having lots of unprotected sex up the shitter just to be taken seriously. But once they do finally cure AIDS, it could almost, in some horribly warped way, be used as an easy weight-loss solution to shed that spare tyre. Just pay a sufferer to do a fatty up the bum or in one of their bed sore-encrusted folds, leave for six months to a year, then administer the cure after the immune system, and subsequently the pounds are wasted away.

Unternehmen - Undertaking

2008-12-06T17:22:00.000Z

My entries have been waning recently as my time has been dedicated to a different undertaking - attempting to be funny into a microphone in front of many handfuls of people in a darkened room. Or stand-up comedy. Last night I performed my second ever set and it went surprisingly well! I’m not one for blowing my own trumpet - if I could I’d never get any work done and you’d be staring a blank screen (zing!) - but I was adequately satisfied with my performance. It was of course less scary than my debut a month ago, but still quite a bizarre experience hearing genuine chuckles throughout the room, and on one or two occasions getting a full on belly laugh for something I’ve said. There’s a few things I wish I’d done differently, but it is all a learning curve and I’ll just know for next time! The most encouraging thing about it was that the funniest guy of the night came up to me at the end and dished out a ludicrous amount of praise, and his friends being genuinely shocked it was only my second performance ever. But anyway, I can’t continue this without sounding like a smug twat, so I’ll stop. The point is I am working when not writing these increasingly irrelevant articles, so for the historian attempting to piece together my formative years, I’m not spending all my time playing X-Box 360 games and watching South Park. And that’s not sarcasm. But that is.

Dabei|bleiben - To Stick With It

2008-12-01T17:18:00.001Z

If you’ve read all of the entries I’ve written for this project so far, you’re mind is probably numbed beyond measurement, perhaps even more than if you’d immersed your head in a paddling pool of Bonjela for five months. Yep, I’ve somehow managed to stick with it that long! Five months of inane drivel constructed into sentences that are routinely far too long, pretentious and often irrelevant. This truly isn’t me fishing for compliments either - I am my biggest critic and doubt I’ll ever be completely satisfied with what I write. So I’ll continue to pick my work apart, and question the relevance of sentences as they are written. Is this one required? Or was it as extraneous as it’s predecessor and it’s successor? I understand there’s a fine line between confusing the reader and simply seeming confused. No, I just made that up, I have no such insight. I’m guessing, however, that I’m sounding more perplexed than aware, more like someone who is trying to sound clever by relentlessly utilising shift-F7 to access the thesaurus at any given adjective, casually inserting the first word it suggests without really considering how the sentence resonates. Like that. Which is true to some extent. Right, I’ll stop. This is getting stupid. I’ll put an end to this linguistically suicidal foray into self-deprecating literature, and, HA! I just referred to my work as ‘literature’, which my be technically correct, as it, or rather will be, printed written material, but it just sounds so blooming pretentious. And how bad is that? I didn’t shift-F7 that word even though I’ve used it earlier in the piece. Oh my, I truly must terminate this before somebody gets hurt, it’s getting out of hand. It reads like the ramblings of drunken, textually frustrated imbecile, hell-bent on sounding clever, but clearly just sounding bent. And not in a gay way. Just as in queer. But not in a gay way. Just odd, different, and possibly slightly infirm. But who knows, if I don’t finish off this ‘article’ soon, I’m going to run out of synonyms for ending, terminate and finish off. Which would be disastrous. The end. No. Wait. The bottom. Actually, no. Forget it. That was the second best synonym, so I’ll just stick with The End. Incidentally, there is no synonym for ‘synonym’. How wonderfully ironic. Now if only I could be certain that is an example of irony. But I can’t. So just strike from the record anything beyond the initial The End. The real end. Done.

Taglich - Daily

2008-12-01T01:17:00.000Z

Since I’ve been ill, my daily routine has become increasingly humdrum. I got sent home from work last Wednesday, and have been off with an annoyingly snotty and achy cold ever since. I’ve spent probably nine tenths of my time in my room, huddled up in bed, watching downloaded TV shows and a ridiculous amount of the BBC News Channel. On occasion, I’ll leave my room to visit the kitchen and the toilet, for input and output respectively, nod and have short conversations with my housemates (in the former only) before shuffling back into my cosy den of sickness. The last four days have probably been the laziest of the last year. I’ve never been so utterly inactive. I walk to work every day, and on my days off, I’m usually out and about somewhere. Even when on holiday, walking is pretty much my primary activity as I explore new places on foot. So right now, I’m feeling rather idle and unfit, despite holding the decent excuse card of illness. However, today I return to work, which is probably a good thing even through I still feel pretty shoddy. Otherwise I’d end up in that treacherous downward spiral of lethargy, where the longer you spend out of the work, the less attractive going back becomes, to the point where you become a penniless lowlife on Job Seeker’s Allowance with no prospects, no hope, friends or desire to amount to anything. Which right now, doesn’t seem that bad.

Schatz - Treasure

2008-11-30T07:06:00.000Z

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

2008-11-30T06:01:00.001Z

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

2008-11-28T01:00:00.000Z

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

2008-11-17T00:55:00.000Z

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

2008-11-16T04:54:00.000Z

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

2008-11-14T03:46:00.000Z

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

2008-11-12T00:42:00.000Z

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

2008-11-11T05:38:00.000Z

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

2008-11-09T05:34:00.000Z

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

2008-11-06T04:30:00.000Z

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

2008-11-03T04:27:00.001Z

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.

Bremsbelag - Brake Lining

2008-10-28T23:24:00.000Z

I know almost nothing about cars. People sit in them, press some pedals, make various lights blink and occasionally run other people over. Ask me any basic question about their inner workings or elementary maintenance and I’ll stare blankly back at you. If only I were a girl, that sort of response would be totally acceptable, but as a guy, to lack such knowledge makes me feel a woefully inadequate member of the sex. I could therefore be completely wrong in my assumption that brake lining is something car-related, which only further proves my automotive ineptitude. At a guess, I’d assume it was the seal for the fluid that, through the power of hydraulics, applies pressure to the brake disks when some compensation-seeking sponger steps into the road. This, amazingly, is remembered from one physics lesson from when I was about thirteen. I even remember my crude diagrams and green pencil crayon used to shade clumsily over the already poorly drawn lines. I could be completely wrong about this. In fact I’m sure I am. I was twelve and the pencil crayon was more deep turquoise in colour. So all comic misdirection aside, I’m not too bothered by not knowing the relevance of exhaust size to fuel consumption, or how different oils affect whatever, because it makes my bewilderment completely genuine when petrol heads bang on about that shit in my company, making them more likely to change the cock-boring subject.

Heimlich - Secret

2008-10-27T23:22:00.000Z

I honest don’t have a secret stash of pornography. Perhaps that sounds like a guilty confession, that I’m denying it just a little too much, but it’s true. I find it disgusting and it clearly exploits and objectifies women in a horribly vile manner. Of course, that would be my stance were I a complete prick. It’s such a classically old counter argument, but if anyone is exploiting anyone, it’s the women themselves who get paid a ludicrous sum of money for being less or equally naked than they were at birth. Okay, so they’re also being fucked, but that’s only natural too. Okay, so they’re being told to pee on eachother and one is being directed to take a slimy turd in the other‘s mouth, and that’s a little less natural. However, the Two Girls, One Cup actors are clearly consenting adults, and were evidently paid a real shitload. Poorly construed jokes aside, the reality is I simply don’t find pornography that sexy. So many of the actresses breast ‘augmentations’ are negatively cyclical; starting off as good, getting better, looking great, looking a bit daft, looking pretty stupid, to looking vile. Also I don’t understand why guys find watching two lesbians the pinnacle of sexual fantasy when these are often the same cockends who find gayness in men so utterly revolting. I don’t object to it on any moral or other stupid grounds, and will happily watch it for comedy value, but in terms of a masturbatory aid, if I may be so crude, it’s just not worth the effort. Now, pictures of hamsters on the other hand…

Unternehmen - To Go On

2008-10-27T23:20:00.000Z

I can’t wait to go on another trip. Travel is horrendously addictive, and while I enjoy my life in living the jewel of East Anglia, I just crave being away. The trouble is, the pound losing value by the penny load every day, making any trip abroad increasingly expensive as the weeks grind on. But while sterling is haemorrhaging value, travel within the UK should theoretically cost the same as it always has, or perhaps even less because more beds are left vacant as Crunch, the Credit Boogeyman scares everyone into fiscal tight fistedness. But where would I go? Good question. Thank you. Well, now that you ask, I find Northern Ireland strangely alluring. Visiting a place where just ten years ago people were getting shot and bombed all over the shop, church and pub sounds like an interesting trip. Plus they drink an awful lot over there if George Best is considered a reasonably average NI dweller. It’s one of those places, like so many I’ve been to lately, where people ask you why the hell you’d want to go there, which is quite a good reason in itself. Often the places most people have never thought of visiting are not publicised in the travel agents or advertised on TV, meaning the chances of being surrounded by idiots are substantially diminished. Plus it is in the UK, and people should see their own country before they have full licence to slag it off it to foreigners.

Uberfahrt - Crossing

2008-10-26T00:12:00.000+01:00

Trusting drivers by default at zebra crossings will probably get your legs smashed off - it‘s only a matter of time. Generalizing massively, I can state that most drivers are selfish pricks, and care more about saving that five seconds on their journey than potentially maiming a penniless pedestrian like me. I think most people avoid accidents because they’re not great for either party; they driver gets a ban or a prison sentence, and the pedestrian gets a wheelchair or a funeral. There’s no real winners, or rather there shouldn’t be. But then compensation culture crossed the Atlantic and now we’re bombarded with adverts demanding we claim the pots and pots money that’s rightfully ours. If someone’s put you out in any way, regardless of how much a genuine accident it was, they need to pay you for it through, of course, a scumbag lawyer firm who’ve adopted a ’trading name’, such as Injury Lawyers 4 U, to cynically appeal to the working (but mostly unemployed) class. Even drivers who hit pedestrians at crossings are able to sue if they can ‘prove’ they weren’t paying attention to oncoming traffic. Which is so ludicrous you may think I’ve just made it up for this piece to shabbily prove an insubstantial point. So, unless you want to get injured, dead, or find yourself paying for the Injury Lawyers 4 U Christmas rape party (I‘m assured that‘s what they do to celebrate the festive season), always look both ways before stepping out!

Takt - Tact

2008-10-22T06:03:00.001+01:00

There are nice, or tactful ways of making requests, broaching subjects and asserting authority, that avoid making people feel like you’ve just taken a massive shit on their duvet cover. There’s also not so nice, or tactless approaches that do just the opposite, although duvet cover could be exchanged for any household item or body part. I understand why people can be purposefully tactless, if they want to be a prick and for everyone to hate them. Demanding, for example, an employee do some demeaning task or other rather than asking politely makes them feel special, big and clever, as well as suggesting they have inadequate genitalia and/or self-esteem. It’s the people who have no idea they are being completely tactless in any circumstance that worry me. How anyone cannot think before they open their big, offensive gob that what they’re saying might actually upset someone, or piss them off entirely is beyond me. Perhaps I’m totally wrong and simply overly sympathetic, empathetic, or just plain old pathetic, but I’d like to think another person’s feelings should be considered before your own. The obvious exemption to this is comedy. I think if you’re performing standup, you have licence to say absolutely anything you want, so long as it’s funny. The people in the audience know that your set is basically an act, and so shouldn’t be taken completely seriously. It’s when serious people, seriously piss other people off with their conscious or, more worryingly unconscious disregard for tact that I start to seethe inside. Unfortunately however, I lack the ability to construct an adequately tactful approach for telling them they’re being an insufferable tosser.

Pfirsich - Peach

2008-10-21T02:56:00.001+01:00

Millions of peaches, peaches for me. Millions of peaches, peaches for free. Although it sounds more like part of a George W Bush speech on world trade or poverty, these are actual lyrics from a band called The Presidents of the USA, and their song Peaches. That is the only song I can readily attribute to them, but it’s catchy as hell, so for me they should be spared being thrown on the awful one-hit-wonder pile. Perhaps a more appropriate lyric for the current president would be something akin to Millions for impeachment, impeachment of me. Millions for impeachment for free. Okay, that was lame, but at least slightly topical. But really, this whole intro was just a springboard to dive into the news surrounding the race to succeed W, that’s going to reach its blistering conclusion in just over two weeks time. Imagine that! Two weeks until the Bush dynasty is no more! Given it’s going to take years and years to sort out all the shit he’s done, even longer if by some anti-miracle, or rather just by plain old pessimistic inevitability, McCain beats Obama, but either way, the world should be a better place. Watching the last debate it genuinely amazed me how McCain was only behind by ten percentage points. Obama came across as the confident, commanding, eloquent and truly capable candidate, whereas McCain seemed nervous, beaten, bumbling and just hopeless. It would be more helpful for the USA in the long run if in the polling stations they instigated a simple system whereby a vote cast for McCain would result in a sectioning, delayed by twenty four hours so it doesn‘t discourage anyone else from voting that way. So therefore I’m not suggesting this is used as a fear-mongering tactic, Mugabe-style - it would have to be totally unbeknownst to everyone, including the candidates. The who point of it is that if someone turns up on polling day and votes for McCain over Obama, they are clearly mental, and should not be allowed to live amongst the general populace. And if you think this is just a crazy, crackpot idea, just think of all the assets that could be expropriated from the mentals, as well as all those extra jobs up for grabs. The US’ economic misfortune would be turned around overnight, and the rest of the world would breathe a collective sigh of relief, and maybe even scrape together a million peaches as a thank you gift to the new administration. Sorted.