Wonderful Electric

Josh writes:

Enough of this crap -- time for some porn! Technoporn, that is.

Dave knows what I'm talking about -- look at him, with his barely legal MP3 players and slutty, slutty PSP accessories -- honest officer, that Home Theatre PC swore it was sixteen! But anyway.

First of all: September?! Can I wait that long? I mean, sure, it may well be a good thing to wait until there's a longer list of titles, and there may have been a firmware update or two by then as well, but seriously -- four months? When I could walk down to ETown Digital and buy an import on my lunch break today? It's a test.

Of course, it's nothing compared to how long I'll have to wait before the new Nseries Nokias are available here at anything close to a reasonable price...

Yes, in cellphone news, Nokia has finally chosen to ditch the "four digits pulled out of our arse" naming scheme for their phones in favour of a series-indicating letter followed by two digits pulled out of their arse. The N90, N91 and N71 -- why those numbers? I'm fairly certain not even they know.

Leaving aside the "iPod-beating" N91 (already discussed by bloggers larger than I), the N90 is the one that interests me. I was attracted to the 6260 and its "flip/twist" form factor when it came out, but figured was a bit too new -- best to wait for the next version to appear, to give them time to iron the kinks out (much like I should have waited for the 6630, which improved on my 6600 in several important ways). The N90 fixes a bunch of the 6260's problems (lack of a screen on the outside for one) and adds a bunch of new features -- hot-swapping memory cards, Carl Zeiss optics, and the fact that it is basically a cellphone transformer. Sweeeet...

People have complained about the size of it (it's basically as big as the digital camera it's trying really hard to be), which doesn't bother me, because A) I carry my phone in my jacket, which has pockets more than big enough to hold it and B) I'm over 25, and can remember when cellphones were the size of cinder blocks. Listening to teenagers whinge about how some bit of plastic that fits in the palm of your hand is "sooooo huuuge" makes me feel old. Then it makes me feel like beating teenagers, which is much better.

Advertorial

Apathy Jack writes:

Observations, gleaned from original research: The number one topic of conversation at strip clubs proper is the dancers themselves. When young guys, and older guys, go to clubs and believe they are chatting up the dancers, they will discuss that dancer’s career. (Interviews conducted between 1999, 2001. Subject sample: patrons, friends, employees, former employees. Possible biases in study: early interviews conducted drunk, in strip clubs). They will ask how long she has been working at the bar, and they will ask what the other customers are like. They will hope that she says “they are weird and creepy and shallow and nothing like you.” Another favourite question is, what do you do other than dancing? Young male students, in particular, are disappointed if dancing turns out to be her full-time job. As if that’s demeaning, somehow. As if now they have nothing in common.

Very few patrons have a strip club experience – they have a meta-experience. They are longing for an out of body experience, not for themselves, but for the dancer. They discuss the dynamics of straddling strangers for money in an abstract way, with the woman sitting exposed on their respective lap. Always, do you enjoy this line of work? Never, are you enjoying this right now?

...

The more observant of you will have noticed that I didn't write that - it is from one of my personal favourite pieces at Dog Biting Men.

Although you'll already know this if you read DBM (as most of you probably do, given how many hits they get in the course of a day...), but just in case: In the National Business Review tomorrow (Friday) is the first column of policial commentary written by Ben Thomas and David W Young.

Well worth a read (the column, I mean - who knows about the rest of the magazine?)the NBR can be purchased from any fine magazine merchant...

Josh to Business Community: Nigga Puh-lease

Josh writes:

I was going to write something of substance on today's front page story, but then I figured, hell, I don't care about my political beliefs or economic ignorance, why should you?

A quick summary of my thoughts, though, since this "business confidence", "perception = reality" bollocks is the closest I have to a pet hate when it comes to things political/economic:

48% pessimism, eh? "Sends a chill", according to the editorial. Look at the graph of business confidence over the last three years*, though, and a few thoughts occur to this particular ignorant lefty:

1. It is, as my father would say, all over the place like a madwoman's shit -- three 30-40 point zigzags over the course of three years? This is not what I would consider symptomatic of a community that knows where its shit is at.


2. Following on from this, the last three times there were big dips in confidence, they rose back up fairly sharpish -- what's different about this one that it's a sign of the apocalypse?


3. Now, as I say, I don't follow these matters too closely, but my understanding is that the economy's doing quite nicely, thank you, and has been for the last three years, while the business community has oscillated between "we're fucked" and "we're really fucked". Again, as a layman, the impression one gets is that these darlings of the right don't know their arses from their elbows.

Jack recently opined that a good way to become right wing is through repeated exposure to lefties -- I'd say the reverse is true, too.

* Not included in the online version of the article, but made available here though the magicks of modern technology.

Tastes like icecream.

RSJS writes:

Slurping up that salty white Bluff gold.

The Herald - hopelessly naive or a giggling quietly to itself over a polite journalistic erection?

"Mine."

Josh writes:

From Big King
Originally uploaded by Brain Stab.

In the last two days I've stood on the top of two hills in Auckland, and have come to two realizations. The first is that it can get bloody windy on the top of North Head; the second is that thousands of years of human conflict do make sense from a certain perspective.

I can imagine a person standing atop a hill like those I did, looking out at the vista stretching forth in all directions and thinking:

"Mine."

I understand "mine" -- I've always understood "mine", it's just that with me it generally applies to cars and consumer electronics. Not, for instance, vast tracts of land. There's something primordial going there, I assume, but I've never fully tapped into it; certainly never to the extent that I did on the top of Big King, staring out at the city I've called home my entire life for the second time in my immediate history. Of course, there's a difference between the "mine" you feel towards something that's already yours, and the "mine" you feel towards something you really, really want to be yours...

It's always seemed bizarre to me, the sheer volume of lives wasted and destroyed over what amounts to lines on a map. (I could claim that Anzac Day has brought such thinking into sharp relief for me, but I'm pretty sure the timing is just coincidence.) Maybe living on an island nation has something to do with that -- when your nearest neighbours are a fairly serious swim away, you tend to take for granted that the flag you go to bed under will be the same when you wake up.

Nevertheless, I always equated the heavy centuries of atrocity and counter-atrocity that have unfurled as a result of some thick-necked bastard looking at his neighbour's patch with "mine" in his eyes to Aunty Doreen refusing to talk to Cousin Denise because of What She Said About Our Ron At The Wedding. I still do, but I at least feel closer to the root cause now. It's in me, as it turns out, which means (since I'm nothing special) that it's in you too.

So stay away from my fucking PlayStation.

The Eleventh (and Penultimate) New Sermon of the Neo-Catholic Church

That Morthos Stare writes:

I have heard the sound of madness.

Have you ever either been so ill or, conversely, so excited and vital that attempts to sleep extend almost indefinitely? You have been forbidden the grace of rest; your stupor or energy are to be wasted in a state not quite life and not quite the lesser death. When denied sleep, denied rest, your mind processes information, it connects and tags every sound and image, all because your mind cannot, will not, rest. It is something which, given extended duration, will take a stable mind and rend it for all it is is worth.

For me this pseudo-madness has a noise, a signature sound that, experienced in any way, drives me to utter distraction. Until today I did not know what that noise was.

Now I do.

The sound of my madness is pink noise.

My madness is not the voices of psychosis, but the knowledge of every other voice that is not my own. My madness is the external world imposed upon my solitude, the sound of others when I would rather you be silent.

My madness is the madness of crowds.

For my madness is you.

Another glass of Chardonnay, Mr Guevara?

Apathy Jack writes:

... or Why I’m Not Much Of An Activist Anymore

I’m tired these days. Every so often, I get in a mood to change the world, but before too long, the crushing weight of realism forces me back in front of the television.

When you think about it, it's no wonder that we failed so miserably in the world-changing stakes. I found a chant sheet from my activism days recently. One of our chants actually started with "One two three and a bit..." for fucks sake. And then they got really bad.

I remember the old student activist group I belonged to: Trust fund babies who had their fees paid for them, protesting that the common student couldn't afford uni. That's true, but I was one of three people in the whole organisation that actually had one of the student loans we were railing so vehemently against. Another one was my brother.

Another group I used to belong to had, as an official position in it's national structure, a Maori representative. In the entire national body, we did not have a single Maori member - nor, from my little research on the matter, had we ever. A pack of honky hippies paying lip service and then going out armed with little more than "One two three and a bit."

One of my favorite out-of-context lines is the relevance one of Anthrax's lyrics has always had for me in terms of the political activists I hung with:

Difficult for me to get a grip on what you mean
When you stick your fingers in your ears and create another scene
You always step into the traps set perfect in your path
Busy going crazy over whose knife's in your back.

We were trying to change the world, but the main argument seemed to be that our parents had given us everything we had ever wanted, so the po' folk should be given the same treatment. Any questioning of the party line was met with reactions that were either the metaphorical equivalent, or – and I’m not kidding here - the actual occurrence of, activists sticking their fingers in their ears and walking out of the room to avoid the argument. The Marxists were so busy fighting the Trotskyists who were so busy fighting the Maoists that the Capitalists just wandered past the scuffle and sat in the throne.

But hell, since my days as an activist, I've always maintained that the best way to turn someone into a right winger is to expose them to left wingers for long enough. I would rather have lunatic left wingers in charge than lunatic right wingers, but I'd rather have sensible right wingers in charge than the lunatic left. I am a left winger, and I will always be a socialist at heart, but the left wing is just too myopic and delusional to properly run the world.

Defeatest, I know, but that's what comes from being defeated.

I wonder what's on television...

Squeal, piggies.

RSJS writes:

How Rob Robinson’s day is going, according to Granny Herald*:

“Once again - could it get any worse - his force was embroiled in a scandal”.

“No police officers have yet been stood down from duty, pending disciplinary and criminal investigations, but Mr Robinson said yesterday that some might need to consider whether they should stay.”“Mr Robinson said some of the emails had been sent to police from external sources, and criminal inquiries might be extended to other agencies”

“They were glum, disbelieving, eyes cast down, saying nothing as they waited for Mr Robinson and his assistant commissioners to arrive. Standing behind a lectern, he tried to be positive. The police had found the problem, as part of an internal review of police culture, and they were dealing with it. There would be no shirking of individual accountability, and no excuses. The behaviour of those who spread the pornography was abhorrent and some might face charges”

People are bringing out the big guns from their pocket thesauruses to hammer a few coppers having some smut on their PCs. Depending which page you turn to on the Herald, this porn is either videos taking up 20% of the police storage capacity (defined as what we don’t know, but by the sound of things the 10 thousand-odd flatfeet have smaller hard drives than my cellphone) or 5000 images across their vast blue-sparking Robocop system. 200-plus officers are implicated, painted red as sin and in the dock awaiting the Bitchsmeller pursuivant . You know what, in the 3 days I’ve had my iPod its collected over 7000 pornographic images. Digitised filth clings to every computer on the damned planet like toilet-paper to a foreskin, and in the age of smut-spam we sometimes don’t even solicit said gape-flap goodness… This is why after hammering the Pope’s ring and (if you believe the fringe media high on mushrooms and jonesing for a spot of mockery) tapped his egg head with a silver hammer to make sure the gooey caramel centre had finally dribbled into his cassock, they burned his laptop and had altar boys eat the ashes. Now whatever grotty art photography John Paul Ringo George had is filtering through the digestive tracts of angelic wee lambs and will probably end up on Ratzinger’s wrinkled cock. But that is a story for another time.

The point is, people are getting very excite about the copper-top Playboy fun. One dire statement read:

“They were messages opened, stored and sent on for others to look at - more than once. They were of explicit sex acts, and showed genitalia”

I would like to see pornography that lacked nuts and guts myself, maybe some of that spinning-eye of balloon-rubbing stuff. But our boys in blue are a simple lot and presumably like a bit of gash-gazing after a hard night’s graft. Ooer missus, and even a shot of bestiality – I’m guessing dogsex, or maybe a horse? Or even the infamous arse-eels…

The point is, the plod have thus far this year been hammered for photographs of officers in balaclavas, for driving Herr Prime Minister up the country, and for not replying to 111 calls. Too busy looking at porn, ho ho, says the radio this morning. The rock FM, I think. I don’t know, some unfunny satin-jacket clowns I use to motivate me to wake up and get the fuck away from my alarm clock.

So on one hand, we have the minutiae of police life raked over the coals, snapshots of computer systems to troll through all CSI and forensically in search of boobies (hooray!), calculations on whether they’d have to hit 88 miles per hour and travel back in time to get the Big Boss Lady to a rugger bugger match, presumably rummaging through sock-encrusted lockers to find dumb-arse Polaroids of peelers in beanies, and every single thing that is found becomes a NATIONAL SCANDAL and the chief of police must APOLOGISE and the government HARRUMPHS and the public wring their hands and wail like stabbed virgins with SHIVS IN THEIR SPINES and rattle their jewellery in the front rows and are aghast, aghast I say at the deplorable acts of these officers. Said hand-wringers I imagine also lick their dogs and shoot chickens in the eye with bleach-filled Super Soakers as Janola’s cheaper than Viagra to get that much-needed wife-beating wood up. And doubtless cheat on their taxes when they’re not writing letters to the editor. And I’m betting a lot of them wonder why their children look more like Manu the Milkman than their pasty-white father. Fucksticks.

Ironically these point-scoring arse-investigating brown-finger-waving Dudley Do-rights, backed by the more anarchic of the media who didn’t like Officer Friendly’s truncheon tricks at CHOGM when they were doing sociology degrees and those stoned politicos waking and baking and trying to change the world so they can toke deeply from their human-skull bong without fear of cavity searches, have another axe to grind.

This is he response-time axe.

For police are like some kind of uniformed orgasm to these people. Perfect at the right moment, but bloody annoying when you’re trying to park your car on yellow lines, or steal a candy bar discretely. Imagine Timmy the Example-boy swiping a Starburst lollipop, grape if he’s smart, and just as he reaches the dairy door WHAM, Officer Cavitysearch appears before him and declares him nicked. Or, same scenario, Timmy at the door and with a shudder and a gasp he’s blissfully coating the inside of his briefs with sticky wallpaper paste and thinking idly about stealing cigarettes. He then curls up and has a flatulent nap while the store-owner beats him for shoplifting and leaking semen on his chequered floor right beside the rack of potato chips. The filthy monkey.

And while for the most part people don’t like the idea of hitting 140kph in their car and shooting a load of spunk into their slacks (okay, some do do that for fun but they’re sick boy-racers in need of a severe head-slappy, little grease-skinned wannabe 2 Fat 2 Furious zombies in love with N2O and man-cock) we love the idea of Constable Jim clapping the handcuffs on some dastardly wallet-swiping villain in a stripey shirt and wee domino mask. Hell, that’s a perfect time for a sigh and a cigarette, n’est-ce pas? Police can be great stress relievers…

But they don’t, like so many of my ex-partners, come on cue. The infamous Piha pretty-girl case with the POSSIBLY NAKED (God the press loved that fact) girly roaming the wilds of Piha before vanishing like Kaiser Sose. Or the families who live atop wind-swept mountains and wonder why the police don’t helicopter in to pat their hands and make them tea. And today, sandwiched between the PORN HORROR SCANDAL SHOCK MINGE POLICE TRUNCHEON SALAMI XXX debacle (which looks like the last Mpeg I dragged off eDonkey, and sadly had too many balloons, not enough genitalia) articles, was a tale of some poor hick in Northland who the police asked for assistance due to them having no manpower in the region.

Said cuntknuckle claimed:

"I didn't want to look like I was knocking the police. "It's a resourcing issue. Policing has to change and that's a management issue." Mr Russell said he had lost about $500,000 worth of stock and property through crime. The Government needed to address rural policing”

Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear. Resourcing, eh? Does oo need a bit of resourcing? Awwwwww…. For the love of the Virgin Mary’s unsullied-but-most-likely-poorly-groomed minge people, who the FUCK is going to join the police force under this regime of PC bullshit and daily carrot-nosed duck-weighing nut-juggling witch hunts? I haven’t got the Tiger-Woods balls to join up, and nowadays anyone thinking of the force will be labelled a misogynistic porn-addicted slacker in an IRA balaclava before they even reach basic training. Why would anyone want the hassle? And if they make it through to join the ranks, they know they’ll be reviled by the same pathetic pernickety grubbers who shuttle between bemoaning these devilish porn-mongers and howling like air-raid banshees when their Volvo is dinged by parties unknown and no-one gets the chair.

We are vilifying our police on the same pages we whinge that there aren’t enough of them. What next, complaining about the ever-broadening legions of crack-brained criminals while also bemoaning their lack as prison warders are being laid off? Waging a media war on the bogeyman of Pee while lamenting its absence when you need to finish an article by the paper’s deadline?

The only thing I wonder is: Is this deliberate? Is it politically-sponsored to engender a complete collapse of our policing system to allow sweeping changes? Or is it corporate, with the intent of ushering in rentacops to replace the government’s toy soldiers, bringing in Coke-sponsored street soldiers gunning for Pepsi drinkers and P Heads with equal vigour and answering to nothing but the mighty dollar? Why the hell is this happening? What utopia do we think we are creating, or is no-one looking past the glee of watching a grand old institution fall apart under the weight of the slings and arrows of those too cowardly to put their arses on the line? HOW DARE you scrutticks make me side with a bunch of Maglite-wielding knobgobblers with blue tits on their heads? You can tell that I hold society in low regard when I’m on the side of the thin blue whine…

God I hate you people. I’m going to go off and hug a detective. Nyah.

*All quotes taken from the NZ Herald website 22/4/05.

Apathy Jack writes:

In the name of not whining so much, I’m going to write something positive. If you only come here to laugh at my pain, you may as well have the next five minutes off...

I’m going to write about why I like my friend Wonko.

Of course there’s the stuff about him being a good bloke and pleasant company and all, but here is something to illustrate what a decent chap he is...

First off all, we have to flash back to my university days, before I even met him.

When I was nineteen, I was like a lot of second year Uni students – a dick.

I had fallen into the activism scene, and had adopted the commensurate class-hypersensitivity and hatred of the bourgeois that comes with Second-Year-Socialist Syndrome. Fortunately, living in the Whitest Suburb In New Zealand™, I had more than enough targets for my newfound vitriol.

One of the biggest targets of my ire was a chap from the church I belonged to at the time. Rupert, we’ll call him.

Now, lets be clear – I was a dick who took every opportunity to rail against my own social class, and really was quite humourless with it. However, a young radical couldn’t ask for much better a target than Rupert.

Rupert’s parents were, if not obscenely wealthy, then at least in the higher order of very well off. Rupert lived in a nice house and drove a good car, both of which had been paid for by his parents. He worked a few days a week at a factory they owned, getting paid more than most of the full-time employees, and still received the odd stipend when the need arose.

Of course, being of upper-middle class stock myself, this by itself did not damn him. What made him so reprehensible in my eyes (and remember – I was bringing to bear the sort of passion you can only arouse when you are a nineteen year old self-loathing whitey who has just discovered the cliff notes on Marxism) was that he didn’t have any concept of money as something that some people didn’t have.

Case in point: Another student in the congregation was complaining that her rattletrap car was breaking down, but most of this month’s allotted loan money had already gone on necessities, so she wasn’t sure what she was going to do.

Rupert mused on her situation, saying that he didn’t get why she just didn’t buy a new car. And that’s the thing, he was telling the truth: He genuinely didn’t get why that wasn’t a viable option.

Hell, to this day I maintain that Rupert was worthy of some level of scorn. Perhaps not as much as I began to openly pour on him, but you know...

I guess that after a while all of my various taunts, rants and general antipathy must have started getting to Rupert, because one night he tried to buy me off.

Sounds far more dramatic that it really was, so let me explain: An outing for the younger types of the congregation, and we stopped off for dinner at McDonalds. (How’s that for being a paragon of socialist revolution: A church trip to McDonalds. I’m Che Guevara, me.) Digging deep into my ragged pockets for the evening’s fiver, I dropped it on the floor, probably spilling sundry protest leaflets and copies of The Communist Manifesto at the same time...

As I bent down to pick it up, Rupert performed some manner of remarkably unballetic move in attempting to substitute my five dollar note for a twenty that he produced from seemingly nowhere.

When I asked him exactly what he was doing, he made the sort of face my grandmother used to make when she’d sneak me lollies before dinner, and said something about me just keeping the twenty. I don’t exactly remember his exact words, but to this day I remember his “wink wink don’t tell Mum” tone.

Well, young Castro that I was, this enraged me. He was trying to salve his conscience by giving me money. As if throwing cash at me would mean that there weren’t poor people anymore. If I would shut up about the fact that not everyone was born with a silver spoon, then he wouldn’t have to have his face rubbed in it anymore. This is what his sort always did – ignored the problem. They didn’t want to face the unpleasant underside of the capitalist dream that paid for the Chardonnay they drank on their yachts.

Hell, even aside from revolutionary ideals, I remember feeling distinctly insulted at the implication that I would accept such a payment.

Even these days that memory makes me realise that Rupert was kind of a dick, even if I was one too.

Flash forward a few years, and I was one of the actual poor: Unemployed, paying $125 in rent every week, but only bludging $124 off Work and Income.

Some friends and I were at Waiwera, queuing to pay the entrance fee. Wonko, who happened to be standing with me as I searched my pockets for loose change, matter-of-factly told me that he was paying for me to get in. When I protested, he said simply “I have a job, and you don’t. I’m paying today.”

As we shuffled toward the hot pools, I found myself for the first time in years flashing back to the McDonald’s episode, and comparing the two.

The essence was not in Wonko’s words, which were far blunter than Rupert’s “just slip it in your pocket before anyone sees and we’ll say no more about it” equivocation, but in his straightforward tone, as if it was a foregone conclusion. This was not someone trying to clumsily bribe me into easing their conscience, it was a tiny little gesture by a friend. It was the easiest thing in the world for him to do, so he did it. Which sounds eminently sensible, but not many people make that leap.

Rupert was trying to get me off his back, maybe to massage his aching upper-class guilt, or just to heal an annoying pain in his ass. He genuinely seemed to think that he was doing the right thing by throwing money at someone who hated him for having too much money.

My mate Wonko was being just that – My mate.

Sitting in the hot pools, I decided that when I got a job and had some money to spare, I owed Wonko a drink.


Of course, there’s a coda to this story:

Years later, in a bar, and I remember my promise to myself vis Wonko’s drink. I remind him of the time at Waiwera, and explain why he’s getting a drink out of me. I pull out my wallet, and ask him what he’d like.

He tells me to put my wallet away, and says that if I want to pay him back for what he did, then the next time I saw someone who could use a hand, I should give it to them.


I mean, come on. How can you not like that guy?

Fear and Loathing in the Service Industry

Josh writes:

At least I can laugh about it. Sometimes I have to pull my lips into a rictus grin, peel my tongue off the roof of my mouth and punch myself in the solar plexus, but a laugh is a laugh.

Some people make a point of reading The Lord of the Rings once a year; I read True Porn Clerk Stories. I've mentioned Ali Davis' long-discontinued journal* before, but I really must emphasize that it is the best thing you'll read online. Good, honest human drama, as Ms. Davis recounts her experiences with the regulars, the addicts, the freaks, the "two and a half people" she drove out of the store, all while offering insightful analysis of why people do the bizarre (and perfectly normal) things they do. And she talks about porn a lot -- tee hee hee!

Makes me nostalgic for my time in retail**, where the most I had to put up with was the occasional Generic Asshole. In three years there, the number of problem customers I encountered I could count on one hand, and even then the problems paled in comparison to coming into contact with another's coagulating fluids.

The worst customers tended to be flustered mothers shopping with kids, and they all went down to the women's or kids' section, so I almost never bore the brunt. I do recall one woman who interpreted "sorry, you can't return kids' clothes here -- the folks at the kidswear counter might be able to help you" as "fuck off, bitch -- not my problem" and reacted accordingly (when what I actually meant was "you're probably not going to be able to return that at all, but I'll fob you off on the kidswear manager who I know is at the counter right now so I don't have to turn you down myself, and hey, she might even bend the rules for you.")

There was the one guy who actually made a member of staff cry, but A) she was only 16 and B) he was quite obviously not right in the head. Not actually dangerous, but impaired enough to make his social interactions trying.

Or the mother who repeatedly swore at her young children (and I mean swore at them -- I don't believe adults should say "fuck" in the presence of their children, let alone at them) and clipped them around the ear with more force and less justification than I would consider appropriate. What do you do? "Lay your hands on that child one more time and I'll call the police, you horrible excuse for a mother," I thought silently as I sold her stuff and got her out of the range of my conscience as quickly as possible.

All in all, though, a fairly pedestrian foray into the service of the Dirty Public. Sometimes I find myself wishing I'd led a more messed-up existence, so I'd have more to write about. Then I read True Porn Clerk Stories, and tell myself to shut the fuck up.



* "Journals" are what we had before blogs, back when petrol cost a five doubloons a firkin and you could leave your doors unlocked at night without being throat-raped by Johnny Foreigner in your beds.

** Menswear counter, Farmers St. Lukes, operator ID 128, and that's all you Commie bastards are getting from me.

Headline of the Moment

Josh writes:

While the debate over whether we should scrap driving tests for senior citizens continues here, I think we can all agree that Florida should definitely introduce them...

Why I’m pleased it’s the end of term

Apathy Jack writes:

“Hey Sir, guess who came to see me over the weekend?”
“I think we both know that the answer is going to make me either sad or angry, so hows about you just tell me?”
“Tipsy.”
“Oh spectacular. Because things always go really well whenever he resurfaces.”
“He’s not as bad as you think.”
“He’s a car crash on legs!”
“There are a lot of things you don’t know about him, Sir.”
“I know he destroys everything he touches! Which is something I don’t think I’ve ever actually been able to say about another human being.”
“You can’t blame him for Danielle.”
“I can blame him for some of Danielle. And all the rest of it.”


People are always telling me I should blog more teaching stories.

But here’s the thing – there’s too much.

I mean, I have the perfect story, has all the elements: Me and a student sitting in a corridor, talking – doesn’t that image just belong in your Boston Public or something similar? The conversation is perfect angst fodder – a smart student who has gone off the rails in the last year due to family problems, and has started running with a bad crew. She’s smart enough to know that she is messing up, but doesn’t know how to stop. The hint of just enough personal issues to get the audience good and emotionally involved. With my gift for spin, I could write out the salient pieces of this conversation - accompanied by some pithy thing about my lack of coping mechanisms – in such a way that could tug a heartstring or two with no back story required.

But there is a back story. All of my kids have a context.

That discussion in the corridor is pressing on my mind, and I sort of want to write it down, write something about it, get it straight in my head (and that’s why I do this – none of my teaching stories are presented for your entertainment – they’re all to help me process something). But that specific user friendly perfect-for-the-camera scene isn’t what I’m worrying about. I’m worried that we’ll lose this kid. She’s spiraling, going out of control, and too damn many teachers have written her of as “a naughty girl” (to quote one of them one the subject). How the hell can I save someone who isn’t even sure she wants to be saved, when no one else wants to save her either? I’ve lost too many this term, and I don’t want to lose any more.

I mean, obviously, there are the amusing little anecdotes, which I could throw up and be done with it, like this one from last week:

Me “So, how did it go with Nurse? Did she give you drugs?”
Unwell Student “She was really grumpy at me. When I told her I was sick she yelled at me. I don’t know what I did.”
Me “Yeah, Nurse doesn’t like sick people.”
Unwell Student “But... she’s a nurse.”
Me “Hey, if you were around sick people all day, you’d get pretty fed up with them too. Y’know, the same way that I hate everyone under the age of about twenty.”

But then there’s the girl who came to me a few days back because she had gotten a pxt from her ex-boyfriend – a photograph of him with deep lacerations on his chest that spelled out the message: Look what you’ve done.

In my life, this sort of stuff runs the gamut between amusing and faintly irritating; I’ve known enough cutters in my time to recognise emotional blackmail when I see it carved into some dickhead’s chest. My girl, on the other hand, is terrified out of her wits that he’s going to kill himself and it will all be her fault. My kids are, well, kids. They don’t have the experience to deal with this sort of thing, and they damn well shouldn’t have to.

I need a holiday. All of this will be waiting for me when I get back.

RSJS writes:

Look ma, I'm off to pound-in-the-arse prison! Take that, America!

Bwa hah hah. Eric the Red Nosed Reindeer, described as a “suspected white supremacist” which presumably makes him a braindead Nazi skin with just enough nouse to bitch “prejudice” and “mistrial” at anyone who calls him that, rejoiced at the fact he isn’t going to the chair. To quote the article, “`I have deprived the government of its goal of sentencing me to death,’ Rudolph said in an 11-page statement in which he railed against the federal government, supporters of abortion and gay activists”..

He’s going to prison for life, no chance of parole. He’s 38, which means it is feasible for him to waste away for half a century in the grey-bar hotel. Where they won't give him Milo to drink, so goodbye my-first-moustache.

Now, as any good white supremacist will tell you, them dirty non-Aryan types the You Ess of Eh? is so fond of lambasting (y’know, those shifty-eyed foreign devils the Americans ferried to their land of the firearm by the thousand to do their cotton-picking) are crammed standing-room only in the near-infinite numbers of slammers the Yanks dot their countryside with between Starfucks and Walmarts. And if we take a leaf out of the standard nigger-baiting Bibles such gents as Rudolpho the Cabana Boy peruse, these chaps are all meaty colossuses with knee-length white-woman-raping uncircumcised penises and poor impulse control.

Now, Whitebread here didn’t just try to blow up the Olympic Games and an abortion clinic, he also had a crack at a lesbian bar. And in his statement mentioned above, “railed against…gay activists”.

In short, Rudolph here thinks he’s a winner for agreeing to be incarcerated in pound-in-the-arse prison for fifty years, knee-deep in the donkey-rapists he despises all doing terrible acts to each other that doubtless will deeply offend his delicate white-trash heterosexual sister-banging brain. He’s going to be the cock-ring for half the American prison system for the rest of his natural born days and will quite probably drown in gay black semen, and that my-first-moustache is going to be more Dirty Sanchez than drinking chocolate. And he thinks he’s deprived the government of something?

I don’t normally like justice, but this is pretty sweet. Hope he likes the taste of pillow.

Hitlog Follies, Part 4 and Counting

Josh writes:

Our hitlogs have taken a turn for the gynaecological of late, with such search terms as see the vagina arousal (I'm responsible for that one, I'm afraid) and hug vagina leading happy internerds to us -- I swear, you people make this too easy for me. What's most worrying about the second one is that I will bet good money they meant to type in "huge vagina".

Oh, and someone in Pakistan thinks teachers should be paid more. That's nice to know.

Apathy Jack writes:

“Stop being so damned upset.”
“I’m not upset.”
“If you weren’t upset then you’d smile, giggle, and ask me why I think you’re upset. The fact that you gave me a proper reply proves to me that you’re upset.”
“Were you a detective before you became a teacher?”
“Remember how long I’ve known you for.”
“Mister, I’m pissed off at someone.”
“Right. Well, I’ll help you kill whoever is making you upset.”
“Cool. Hey, Mister said he’d help me shave her!”
“Hold on now. ‘Shave’? I was on board for ‘killing’ – when did we stop talking about killing?”

Make With The Clicky

Josh writes:

Given that we (and by "we" I mean "I") have been rotating new links into and out of our Big List O' Attention Whoring on the right, it could be useful to collect the lot of them in one place. If only so the people who have been rotated off to make room for others don't feel left out and cry like little bitches. I'm not saying that any of them would, but some of them definitely would. Linky goodness follows...

Blogs

• Celebrating Mediocrity - Krimsonlake ("full time crazy, part time student") lives in Palmy so you don't have to.
• David Farrar - One of New Zealand's more prolific bloggers.
• Dog Biting Men - Media commentary and stuff that is not media commentary. I think I worked on Craccum with Neil Falloon, but that was before The Operation.
• Hoodoo.co.nz - Dave's gratuitous technoporn.
• Kete Were - Large ups to the Grey Lynn massiv.
• Kung Fu Monkey - I used to have a T-shirt that said Kung Fu Monkey, but it got stolen. I'm just saying.
• Mutopia - See, it's like "utopia", only mixed with "mutant", so that -- oh, just go and visit Hewligan, OK? Jesus.
• Spanblather - More local blogging. That'd be a good thing.
• Stupid Internet Name - Insightful, humourous, engaging local blogging. Fucker's making us look bad.

Sites Containing The Funny

• Bitter Films - You've all seen Rejected, haven't you? Go here for more of the same.
• Hello Cthulhu - Cute little web comic about everyone's favourite Dark God.
• Khaaan! - Khaaan!
• Men in Hats - Web comic about men. Men who wear hats.
• Newtown Ghetto Anger - Some local talent in the funny-making department.
• Pointless Waste of Time - So funny you'll shit.
• Ruthless Reviews - 80s Action Films - Classic 80s action films dissected. With hammers.
• Seanbaby - So funny you'll prolapse.
• The Editing Room - Abridged film scripts and rampant pisstakery.

Josh's Cousins

• Blogging it Real - Cousin Jamie and pals talk a bunch of crap.
• Cherry Bomb Comics - Cousin Tui and pals run a subversive, anarchist, feminist comic shop.

Other, Or Misc If You Prefer

• Arts and Letters Daily - Culture and sophistication. Not sure how that got in here.
• Dusk Records - New Zealand music is good.
• Neo-Catholic Diocese - Included so that Brother Morthos' sermons make a little more sense.

Get Ready For Love

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling writes:

If you are like me and spent half an hour farting around Tickitek trying to buy Nick Cave tickets, the are availible here .

$71.00 per seat. The best night out since the last TOOL concert and until the next TOOL concert. It's on the same night as my sister's birthday but one must prioritise.

I Can Do Teacher Stories, Too

Josh writes:

It's a well-observed fact of all languages that if a word has a number of different meanings and one of them is taboo in some way, it's the taboo meaning that ends up being the only one that people actually use. "Gay" is the most obvious example in contemporary English, but there are plenty of others: "prophylactic" is a general term for any sort of preventative; "sphincter" describes any of the many ring-shaped muscles found in most animals; and an "ejaculation" is simply any sort of explosive projection. But, since there's a specific meaning to each of them that is in some way naughty, that's the one that trumps all others. The moral of the story is: you're all dirty, dirty bastards.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, my lady companion is, like Apathy Jack, a high school English teacher. Like many schools, theirs is divided up into four "houses", which compete against each other on sports days and the like. A little while ago, her house came into possession of a disturbingly realistic fake rooster, which was named Cyril and became their de facto mascot. Much fun was had in hiding Cyril around the school for others to find, marred slightly by the fact that it turns out the principal has a bird phobia, and didn't take well to it showing up in her In tray... This same principal was responsible for the recent disappearance of said mascot, in light-hearted retaliation for some other incident of staff room japery that I'm not entirely clear on.

Girlfriend's reaction was to go home and knock up a bunch of "Missing" posters to distribute around the school. Posters with headings like "Missing: One Rooster", "Rooster Kidnapped; Police Baffled", and "Come Back Cyril, All is Forgiven". And, because English teachers are only human: "Have You Seen My Cock?"

You're laughing, aren't you? Dirty, dirty bastards.

The Tenth New Sermon of the Neo-Catholic Church

That Morthos Stare writes:

Good evening.

Modern Christianity is a vibrant force, filled with edicts, papal bulls and the waffle that comes mostly from the Protestants. Despite claims to the contrary it is mostly a growing religion (but, like many middle-aged gents, is putting on weight in the wrong regions) and, like all things that push the envelope, has its ups and downs. Roman Catholicism, reeling from the discovery that the Pope's renal system proved to be fallible (Congratulations, Bishop Jamie, on a sentence well parsed) has set out to show that the modern cleric can be cool and calm.

Not just that, but in any hat.

Hats are important; as Pope I have at least four good hats and a collection of sundry headpieces to fill out the rest of the week. Admittedly, most of my hats are of the 'about town' variety, with a few that fall into the 'going out' category (as well as one that probably fits into the type 'oppressing the natives and stealing their booty'). Yet it is hard to compete with the Cardinals in the 'other' Church. They have hats of all shapes and sizes (and that's ignoring those wacky Patriarchs with their super-cool Orthodoxy caps).

But, best of all, some of those Cardinals wear Aviators.

A Cardinal, resplendent in red, wearing Avaitors looks just like a crazed fantasy of the modern cleric 'ready for action.' You can imagine that, in a moment of crisis, he would almost lackadaisically pull out Glock from beneath his robes to administer Church Justice before pulling back the hem of his robes and revealing a scooter, on which he would chase evil through the streets of Rome. Possibly, nay, essentially, he would have theme music (preferably a classical composition rescored by Joby Talbot). Then, once sanctity was restored he would return back to the Holy See to party the night away...

The hat, you must understand, doth maketh the man.

Neo-Catholicism needs an analogue for such men of action. We have no uncommon hats, no motorscooters or Glocks, and only one of our number has a pair of Aviators. Currently Neo-Catholicism's greatest attributes are lethargy and a fanatical attachment to the sofa (currently residing in London). I am intent on thinking of choosing someone to change this. Someone with hats.

Or a really good pair of shades.

Definitely someone.

You may now make you final approach. Over and out.

Apathy Jack writes:

Want to know what does the heart proud?

Due to an increasing number of violent incidents at school, form teachers were asked to have discussions with their classes about issues of tolerance and appropriate behavior. Each teacher got a number of ‘discussion starters’ – things like “If someone tries to step you out, how should you react?” and “If someone says something you don’t like, what should you do?”

I looked around my form class – a bunch of seniors that I’ve known for four years, some of the best the school has to offer, and I thought to myself “Bugger this for a game of soldiers. I have good kids here – really good kids. They don’t need this talk.”

Then one of the autistic students walks past the open door of my classroom, and a pack of my boys start hollering and mocking him.

The boys that were yelling at the autistic kid are all youth leaders in their church, and often proclaim their faith to me and the fellow students. The kids that were telling them to stop being so mean and to leave the poor guy alone were the smokers who don’t quite get to every class on their timetable.

As I was yelling (and by god I was yelling) the smokers took my whiteboard markers and covered my board with anti-harassment and tolerance slogans.

I thought about bringing up Matthew 25: 40, but I already wander around muttering Mark 13: 20 to myself, and I’d hate to get Christian spirited out...

"I Just Want Peace -- A Little Piece of Poland..."

Josh writes:

He's got a point -- let's go! I've got dibs on Świnoujście.

Diarrhoea for your dining pleasure.

RSJS writes:

“Write me some more filth”. Lovely turn of phrase, the go forth and multiply of my tenure in Brain Stab. Vulgarity recently attributed to the base of my brain where arachnophobia dwells alongside the bodily waste and libido. Someday they will combine to form an unhealthy interest in a coprophiliac spiderwoman with lipstick-red poison sacs, eight arms to hold me and an obsessive seat-sniffing fascination with hairy faeces. Hope she’s got a nice rack… These people are wrong, of course, those who suggest my inspiration is a muscle-twitch little better than a spinal cord spasm to write “cock” at random intervals in some typing-Tourette’s syndrome. Actually it’s a filter hewn from the shattered code of Diarybot 3000, fed like geese on a cram-tastic diet of mulched Fear and Loathing and vitriolic Indian ink and let loose upon my purple prose to fill in spaces with semen like some sexual mortar, coincidentally my nickname for my pocket Howitzer which is in essence my editor, or at least-co-author, pissing aforementioned Indian ink like some acidic “essence of Ghandi” only more pissed off at the world. Something to singe the nib (knob?) and sear the brain (brain?), in concentrated doses. Alas concentration is beyond me (requiring a summer camp refresher perhaps), so a sensible discourse on the origins of my love of expressions like “gouge my gash with your barbed meatstick of infinite justice” will trigger some aside about salamis versus bockwurst versus some kind of IUD-headed Teletubbie critter with the “eh-oh” and Nu-nu Metal the Vivian of Vacuum Cleaner and next thing you know I’m missing my candy fix and thinking about orifices that slaver. Damn that fat slag who once said of a woman “She makes me drip” which is on record as the most noxious idea to date, especially given slag’s tendency to eschew underpants to ventilate her rancid minge. Which might be a bit gynophobic but then I’d probably be less tolerant of my kiddie-humping friends if they modified their language from the harmless “that toddler gives me wood” to “That bawling bass-mouthed baby makes my pee-hole dribble”. Um… not that I tolerate them now, heavens to Betsy no, scourge of the earth, harrumph, harrumph. Scourge, now that’s a good word to tack onto something. Such as a dribbling knob. Basher McGurk, Scourge of the Leaking Luncheon-truncheon. Tie a knot in it… Of course it’d be more fun to knot it while flaccid then watch it split its side like a frankfurter in a pot of boiling water while the poor subject’s arse gets tickled but my patented “Hello sir, I’m doing a survey for Greenpeace – might I tie your John Thomas in a sheepshank then lick your rectum?” stunt has fallen by the wayside since I lost my clip-board, which is a sign of authority and fear. Moreso than the glue-huffing stargazers on Queen Street, the top-knotters or the garish sticker-selling charity zombies, the clip-boarding earnest huggy types make me pray for death. None of them believe I’m a member of Greenpeace, either. No, they think, he’s lying to make me go away, false smile, false smile, shrug-move-on-hassle-another-stiff. Pricks. Heh, stiff pricks. I’d like to clip their boards, whatever that means. Clip their wings anyway. Then board them? Avast ye Rainbow warriors, have ye seen me mizzen mast? Swab me poop deck and don’t spare the grog. Arrrrr, booty. Christ what was my point? Ah, the Vulgatron 90210 and its ability to insert “dick” into any context. And hole, damp or not. Hah, see, inserting dick is funny, even I get that one. Literally. I get dick. Not dick as in “dick dick dick dick how many Quentin Tarantino quotes is that? A lot” but dick as in bugger-all. Not to say I bugger all with my dick buggering all in sundry or in the arse or in case of emergency like some Cockbot Emperor of the Outer Labia. Okay? Right. What?

Fuck it. Pulsating tentacle rape or some such, stick that in your search engine and smoke it. G’night…

Octopussy?

RSJS writes:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4412417.stm

“Author Sunil Gangopadhyay was quoted in a newspaper saying that he was sexually aroused by an idol of the Hindu goddess of learning, Saraswati.”

Sadly this chap is not quoted as saying “The bitch was hot”. That would have made my day. Because frankly Saraswati is a hot bitch, with four arms allowing her to slap all of one’s cheeks at once while explaining in a shriek that no-one gets to twaddle her halibut until marriage. Or maybe cave one’s skull in with a sitar or four… It’d be worth it, though. I mean: smart chicks are sexy. And she’s all set up to pull off her Nana Mouskouri glasses, toss back her head and do the whole Timotei head-bobbing hair-cascading take-your-eye-out-with-a-split-end thang. Methinks she needs to lose the sideburns so she stops looking like a 1950s crooner, but apart from that she’s one foxy deity and can heathen me up any day. Especially Friday for Catholic reasons I can’t bring myself to write…

That said, I’d have been more motivated to read this author’s work if he’d admitted to sucking Ganesha’s trunk while Kali tickles his colon in some theological anthropomorphic graven-idol spitroast extravaganza. If you’re going to be iconoclastic one has to be flashy. Every Suicide Girl or Gothic Slut has crammed a crucifix in her bald crotch for a photo op in lubricated Linda Blair appreciation, every half-arsed martial artist has made a Throwing Star of David in metalwork class, and Elder Gods are now plush. It’s passé, it’s old hat, we need new and fouler ways of horrifying the smug monkeys with their gazes fixed on eternity and their feet of clay kicking the unraptured wretches while they’re down… Somebodyt get jiggy with the Pope’s gaping throat-hole, that’d do it. What a way to go, pummelled into paste by the massed mitres and censers of a million Italians… a bit of blood (let’s see them get THOSE stains out of his Holiness’ pyjamas) a wet slapping sound or two and bing, you’d be immediately escorted to the VIP level of hell for that one. Old Nick bringing you Havana cigars rolled in the tanned thighs of Cuban maidens, cognac, Scientologist cock-holsters… Glorious. Anyone want to sponsor me for a Trans-Atlantic Papal Tracheotomy Tryst?.

Apathy Jack writes:

For no real reason, it makes me smile that a member of the Kapa Haka group was overheard telling her friend in an awed tone that I could out-pukana her. I wasn’t even really trying...

That almost made up for the amount of time I had to spend telling my Year 12s the difference between “lamenting” and “lamingtons”.

This never happened on Welcome Back Kotter, dammit.

Actually, I think it might have, which is worse...

TechnicalVirgin.com Was Right All Along

Josh writes:

Bill Maher on the consequences of abstinence pledges:

And so armed with limited knowledge, and believing regular, vaginal intercourse to be either immaculate or filthy dirty, these kids did with their pledge what everybody does with contracts: they found loopholes. Two of them to be exact.

Is there any greater irony than the fact that the Christian Right actually got their precious little adolescent daughters to say to their freshly scrubbed boyfriends: "Please, I want to remain pure for my wedding night, so only in the ass. Then I'll blow you." Well, at least these kids are really thinking outside the box.

(Sign up for a day pass at Salon to read the full article.)

Apathy Jack writes:

Anyhoo, my classroom is meant to have 33 desks and a commensurate number of chairs. Strangely, this can fluctuate for reasons not worth going into, but that doesn’t matter (unless of course the Deputy Principal is in a bad mood – then he goes from class to class counting desks, and visits his ire on anyone found unbalancing the system...).

So today, after having my desks all rearranged and messed up for a few weeks for no real reason other than laziness after a few chaotic lessons, I used my free period to realign them in my pattern of choice, and, for the first time this year, I counted them.

I have thirty desks. I have absolutely no idea how long the three desks have been missing, nor do I have any idea where they have gone.

Of course, what then struck me was the fact that I only have twenty-seven chairs.

Over and above also having no accounting for said chairs, another issue presents itself: My Year 11 class has thirty students, and at no point so far has there been an issue of anyone going without a seat.

I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m pretty sure it’s something I should have noticed earlier...

Tube-steak for the coma-chick: "My name's Buck..."

RSJS writes:

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?c_id=2&ObjectID=10118143

"This is not only a death with all the sadness that brings. This is a killing," said Frank Pavone, a Roman Catholic priest who visited Schiavo shortly before she died. "And for that we not only grieve that Terri has passed, but we grieve that our nation has allowed such an atrocity as this, and we pray that it will never happen again," The Schindlers were backed by conservative religious activists, anti-abortion campaigners, advocates for the disabled, and by mainly Republican politicians. A small group of protesters who had kept vigil outside the hospice calling for Schiavo to be kept alive, sobbed and prayed when her death was announced, and then sang hymns in the morning sunshine.”


Right, my last on Shiva Destroyer of Worlds, the persistent aubergine of drooling tubeless death. She’s gone to a better place blah blah wank. Finally. Rang up the choir indivisible, shuffled off the mortal IUD, whatever.

Now correct me if I’m wrong (He says grinning and gurning maniacally and considering turning off the comments option on this fencepost while touching his nipples) but don’t good wee Catholics go to heaven? The place of candyfloss and feathers and eternal light shining out of God’s own puckered ring? Lots of love and hand-massages and glow-sticks, like a rave that never ends. Raise the roof and point to god indeed.

Whereas when one is in a perspiring ventilated state, one is trapped in a non-functioning sack of rotting meat staring wall-eyed at the redness within your eyelids while machines cram juices and oxygen into you through the now-infamous tubes of doom, and others suck the waste out to fertilise the petunias in the kiddie-cancer ward?

So the choices are joy everlasting with one’s God, or being paralysed and petrified in a carcass and hospital bed as the world turns without you even being aware, a lonely confused purgatory of torment and insanity, if the poor monkey even had enough brains to go bonkers…

She-devil’s parents, claiming to be good Roman Catholics, would rather sentence their own child to an indefinite period of mind-melting incarceration in the failing remains of her body, rather than release her to the welcoming arms of the Big Beard in the Sky. For whatever “She’s our daughter, we want to keep her like this” reason, they advocated this punishment.

Reasons:
1) Terri Showpony’s parents hated her very, very much. Possibly they are afflicted by Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy and would regularly inject rat urine into her veins to keep her comatose. Perhaps they loved the attention of their brethren who admired their overcoming this hardship so nobly. Maybe they just had a lot of rat urine to get rid of. Maybe they just hated their kid as she shat in their Bible.
2) They know Terrible Shivao used to bottle-fuck midgets and would be doomed to hell if she died so kept her in limbo while killing demons in the hope of redressing the bottle-dwarf buggering balance.
3) They weren’t Catholics at all and thought upon death Terri Shagnasty would end up a dirtburger in the local cemetery and they wuvved their little child so hence stretching what little shining existence she had out by hook or by crook.

So there are the choices as I see them. Either they despised their child, or callously lied about their devout faith in the Almighty Facial Hair in Heaven for whatever media-driven reason, or they spawned the antichrist. Now I’m sure out there someone will cite misguided love of a child but any love that wants one to keep one’s child wheeled around like Davros in a half-Dalek, ain’t a healthy love. The poor wretch had been staring at the ceiling for 15 years, either she was counting the dots in the tiles or she was out to lunch. Or she was gazing towards the heaven her parents denied her. Removing the feeding tube allowed their daughter to die and ascend, presumably. Okay, the parents don’t have their Mrs Potato Head child to dress in fresh hospital gowns at Christmas, but the kid gets the hell outta Dodge and into the nectar and ambrosia, joy. So keeping her trapped so they can go “but she’s our little girl” is selfish, which is gotta be a sin with those kooks. Or an alternative, the parents feared that if they didn’t fight they would be deemed culpable in the apparent murder of their child, a big ol’ sin (unless the child is recalcitrant, in which case it’s required) that they didn’t want on their records so again, they were looking out for themselves. Selfish bloody god-botherers.

Now don’t get me wrong, holding on to what one loves no matter what saw my family haemorrhage thousands into time-ravaged injured pets, toothless blind drooling cats and hobbled dogs that loved us and we cared about beyond reason but in each instance eventually we had to look at the wee mites and realise our insistence on keeping them going with money and pain was because we couldn’t say goodbye. And goddamn but I hope they were put to sleep before they started hating us.

Right, justification on Yank-bashing over. Terri’s either worm-fodder, a banjo-strumming angel, or skewered on Satan’s cock right now. So wither she’s too dead to care, to happy to care, or too prolapsed to care about this ramble. And her parent’s get to go on Oprah so everybody’s happy. Well, except the anonymous cock-knockers out there who feel it necessary to say “ooh, nasty Jellybean, tweedle de dee” but well, y’all are doody-heads. No, really.

Oh, and yes, I did just compare Terrence Shitvalve to my dead cat Tosca. What’s your point? The two of them (If St Francis of Assisi got it right) are grooving to the celestial choir while YOU sit reading codswallop in 12 point font on the FUCKING INTERNERD. You BLOA-ted SACK of PROTO-plasm…

***Maintenance update from Diarybot 3000 – Subroutine “Angstzor I CRY v.2 (Beta)” is now offline. “Fluffy Bunny 3.0” installed. Cuteness and light to follow shortly***.