Slovenly Saturday

Today is Saturday and I'm not working. Tomorrow is Sunday and I will be wrkign. Because of this, and the fact that I'm perpetually knakcerked, I'm going to take things very easy today. So much so, that I don't think I'll bother getting dressed, or washed for that matter.

Today I inted to be as lazy as possible, right down to not correcting typos or spelling meistaks I as I compose blog posts.

And this is an interesting experiment,. Not being trained a trained tupist, I tend to havet o to correct use my backspace key quite a bit, the woerd autocrorrect thing is great - uless it's set to american Englaih . Obviouslty, Bloogger sodoesn't have this utlity, so you generallty have to watch what you're doing and make quite a cfew corrections as tyou tippy-tappy away at the keyboard.

owNow, not correctiong things that are mistyped is almost impossible. It's the same as not striaightnening papers prior to stapling them. Looking ofver this text as I type is cayusing my blood pressure to rise because I really I am fighting the urge to go back over it and correct the mistakes that have krept in. crept in. At one place of work, a lot of "send to all" e-,mails are sent out , via Outlook, which are written very much in the style of this post. The sender simply types the message, igrnoes all the typeos and spelling mistakes and hits "send". How fucking rude is that? How unprofessional is that? If i ver met this person, I'd urely like to give them a godo hard kick up the boobum with an iopen-toed sandal.

So this is how things are in a world without the backpspace key and cursor controls. Pretty much like real life really.

The Church of the 12th night Cakesniffers

Cakesnifferology
Religions and cults are weird things. Are religions just cults with a large following? I don't know, and I don't profess to know enough about this other than to wonder why people get drawn to these things.

I suppose one difference between a religion and a cult is that a religion, or proper faith, would never seek to isolate a person from their families or natural environments. Faith should never instruct a person to make financial contribution, as a proportion of salary, to their cause. Faith should survive through generations of leaders who represent the god, rather than being short-termists with the leaders acting as a god.

I wrote this somewhere else earlier: "Faithless in faith, we must behold the things we see". I guess it sort of means that seeing is believing and this is the safest option for a lot of people who don't quite "get" faith.

Anyway. I'm going to start a cult.

The Church of the 12th night Cakesniffer, or Cakesnifferology, will be a virtual cult that has the basic remit to spread normality and common sense across the globe. Unlike the Heaven's Gate cult, which lost 39 purple shroud-clad members to a suicide pact under the flight of the 1997 Hale-Bopp comet, we won't talk about aliens being our saviours.

Fuck it, I can't be arsed.

You need to be an egotistical, mentalist wanker to want such adoration and no normal person would want that.

I suppose that's why normal people don't start cults.

And there it was, gone, no sooner than it had started. So Cakesnifferology was never to be more than a passing whim and the world is a better place because of it. And for all the weirdos hijacking it, the passing of Hale-Bopp throughout those weeks in the spring of 1997 really was something else. Searching through my photo archives, I was sure I had a blurred shot of it somewhere, alas no. But I did find this from the 1999 solar eclipse.

In some ways we in the North of England were lucky on that August day because we weren't expecting the full solar eclipse, so we weren't so disappointed when it turned out to be cloudy (as fucking usual). In the end, the cloud provided cover for some pretty decent photos. And the eclipse itself, partial though it was, was one of the weirdest things I'll ever experience: the dusck-like light; the sudden chill in the air; the quiet as the birds ceased their twittering and the cars stopped to witness the event. Then with a click of the fingers, it was gone.

Starting a cult would've been a great way of getting people to wear Cakesniffer t-shirts though. You could imagine mothers across the world going through their teenagers' washing bags to find a screwed up sniffer t at the bottom (how dare they treat the garment with such contempt!), crying to their husbands that their little one had been lost to the Cakesniffy forces of blogworld.

"My baby, why my baby?"

"Because they've got internet access and blogging all night sure beats watching TV with us."

Deadly feline assassination squad

The South Lakes Wild Animal Park (they don't just talk conservation, they DO it!), thrills its vistors with awesome acts of carnage perpetrated by the big cats there (which is more than can be said for the pathetic penguins). Each feeding time, chickens are placed on top of telegraph poles and the lions and tigers are let into their respective enclosures, where they race to the tops of the poles to collect and devour the chickens: feathers, beaks and all.

Bengal tiger

These babies are too big to climb to tops of the poles....

Sumatran tiger

These buggers get right to the tops (they're only little)

Lion

I suppose its a bit like It's a knockout meets Animal magic, but we're ensured that they do it this way to exercise the animals who'd otherwise laze about all day (anybody who's owned a domestic moggie will understand this).

We were also told of horrible acts committed by poachers who ensnare and kill tigers to sell their bits for Oriental crank medicines. After being caught and tried in Indonesia, one such poacher managed to get out of his 5 year jail term by bribing whoever could get him out. This bloke had been caught by the conservation team as he'd gone back into the jungle to collect his snares, one of which had already been responsible for the death of a female tiger (that leaves about 499 Sumatran tigers now). Fuck, instead of going through legal channels, why didn't they just tie the fucker up in the jungle and let the tigers get him? Bastard.

Or even better, bring him back here and stick him on top of a pole for a special feeding time! What an excellent, super-villain way of killing somebody. Now, when somebody pisses me off, all I need to do is envisage them being suspended from a pole and being eaten feet-up by a big, fuck-off tiger.

I love nature.

Toilet humour

There's something in the air at the moment, with both myself and Angry Chimp having something to say about pooing, and the use of public lavs in general.

Women tend not to poo when they know there's somebody in a nearby cubicle. You'll hear nothing for a while as your wee waits to start (there's always delayed onset with an audience), then your neighbour will break the ice by getting some toilet paper ready, silence again, shuffle of feet. Your wee comes and goes and you're off, leaving them to get on with their business once you've washed and dried your hands.

But what if you don't leave? What if you wait? Will there be a stand-off? Who will break first? And how about playing that cruel game of going back into the lavs after you've left, knowing that there's somebody desperate to lighten their load in one of the cubicles? I'm sure you could cause a nasty case of haemorrhoids if you played your cards right.

That's the beauty of being a temp somewhere - you can really piss people off without it mattering.

In the dock: "Whatever"

"Whatever" is a word that can be used to convey at best disinterest, and at worst, utter contempt for a person and what they have to say. It is used in the same sneering context as:

• "(Fuc)k'offf!"
• "P-fah"
• "Yeah right"
  

It wasn't always this way; whatever can be defined as "any(a): one or some or every or all without specification" and it even used to be used in a positive context, for example in Status Quo's Whatever you want. But since the mid 1990s and now in 2005 it has skyrocketted itself to the top of the pile as the favourite dismissive of queens, fag hags and ineloquent teen slags on both sides of the Atlantic.

"Yeah right, whatever."

Those three words tell us so much about who says them, such as:

• Can't be bothered to listen;
• Can't be bothered to have a proper discussion about something;
• Can't be bothered to be
• Can't be bothered to take contraception;
• Face? Bovvered? Right, because I'm not even bovvered, so shut up.

"Talk to the hand, cos the face ain't listening"
"Talk to da booty, cos da hand's off dooty"

All mildly amusing the first time you hear them, but so tiresome after more than three or four times. Desperately sad when people, like my sister, take themselves seriously when they talk like that - accompanied by the RnB-esqe sideways movement of the head and raised hand, palm outward (what the fuck is all that about, sister?).

Nice looking lasses - Whatever!

But returning to "Whatever". I hate this so much because of the attitude it conveys. It actually conveys "attitude", whereby both you and your contribution are deemed worthless and yet those guilty of abusing this word rarely have anything to contribute to a debate.

It makes my blood boil to hear it, even worse if directed at me: little needles start to prick at my tummy; the heat rises through my breast and into my head; I go blind with rage; I could kill.

With the emergence of "whatever", the beligerent and uneducated masses of the western world have been provided with the ideal tool to really get under the skin of others. With this "attitude in a word" they can put on a display that shrugs a "You might care about stuff, but I don't give a fuck", which is delightful.

Whatever? Don't whatever me!

Neat and tidy

Entropy is described as being the measure of the degree of disorder, or "mess", for want of a better term. Entropy is the default setting for the world, and indeed the universe. Left alone, things get messy and disordered, chaotic if you like.

People have a natural tendency to rebel against entropy to return order to their environments. Anybody who's studied thermodynamics in chemistry or physics to any level will know that it's pretty tiring fighting against this descent into chaos.

To counteract messiness, people tend to develop little "tidying" habits to help maintain order, or to prevent mess. Things, like DVDs, CDs and books are categorised; other stuff is organised into rooms according to appropriateness and relevance (bathroom, kitchen, bedroom etc); desks are organised so that different piles mean different things.

Piles of paper
These are the things that we create subconsciously before filing or binning. But the paper isn't just "piled", sheet upon sheet in any old fashion. We have a tendency to automatically neaten the pile of paper so that the edges match up as much as possible - it just seems like that right thing to do. In fact, it's almost impossible not to. There are even guides in hole punches that centre the holes so that the edges of the pages are lined up neatly when the paper is filed in a ring binder.

Given some sheets of paper to staple, a recipient can't usually stop themselves from straightening the pile prior to fastening it - the usual method is to lightly grasp the papers in portrait orientation and tap the bottom edges against a flat surface, then to repeat this while holding the papers in landscape orientation. With the edges aligned, the stapler is then used to fasten everything together at the top left corner.

So, what do we make of this then?

Is it just me? Surely it's impossible to simply pick up a pile of papers and staple them without tidying them??? Surely you make sure you have all the relevant bits of paper in the pile before stapling it so that you don't have to put a second staple through to append something else to it????

What the fuck is wrong with people?


Synchronicity
Synchronicity is one of my favourite songs from 80s rock superstars The Police.

It's that thing that women who live and work together get when their menstrual cycles synchronise. Organisations have cottoned to that fact that, if you get a load of women who suffer from bad PMT working together, you can actually use their combined energy to power the photocopier for one week in each month. This can backfire and entire office blocks have had to have replacement windows after all the glass had blown out during an emotional outburst between two colleagues (something to do with wanting chives rather than pineapple in the low-fat cottage cheese).

I've noticed that there's a bit of synchronicity going on in the ladies' lavs at the Moonlighting Detective Agency. Every time I go in there, the same woman is there too. Trillion pointed out that I was seeing my reflection in the mirror, oh har har har. But seriously, it's the same woman, I don't know who she is and she always uses loads of toilet paper to clean herself up - as if she's messed herself and got poo up her back or something.

Very odd.

Poo seems to be the topic of the day - Herge has given a wonderful description of the use of toilet cubicles already. Not long ago, my dad announced that he was "going for a sit" on the toilet. This is his way of saying that he was intending to spend 20 minutes passing a poo that would resemble a hedgehog in both shape and size. A poo that would be impossible to flush that would need vigorous liquidising with the toilet brush.

How delightful.

In the dock: Facial hair

I don't like facial hair - particularly my own facial hair. If I'm excused the downy soft stuff, I have one bad beard hair and about 10 dark moustache hairs. I have a constant battle with my eyebrows.

These images have been severely cropped to prevent injury as folk fall from their chairs.

Tina's eyebrows & massive specs, 1999

Tina's eyebrows and even BIGGER specs, 1994

Fuck, what a complete minger.

Anyway, I'm not particularly bothered about hairy women, although I do often feel like attacking colleagues with tweezers. Then again, if was going to attack colleagues, I might as well do a proper job of it and attack them with a big, fuck-off knife and finish the useless twats off!

THE CHARGES

The Crown wishes to prosecute the furrier sex and brings charges of:

1. Laziness
2. Pornography
3. Pestilence
4. Cottaging
5. Thuggery

Against any man who habitually wears whiskers.

THE EVIDENCE

Why do men grow their facial hair?
A full beard can make them look like terrorists, or 1970s European popstar/porn actor.

At a push, I can cope with this, simply because of its comedy value.

Actually, no I can't cope with this. Beards are disgusting. They trap germs and they look horrible.

But I can sort of understand why men grow a full beard and moustache: basically because they're lazy and can't be arsed to shave. What I don't get is why men shave a little bit, taking time to create a lovely shaped moustache, like this effort from the lovely George Michael:

Now, to get this groomed effect must take quite some effort, and a lot more time than just getting shut of it all. But I must admit that our George here does look better with a few well-placed whiskers than without. Other blokes just look like complete nobs who are trying to look like George Michael and trying to get some in the men's lav.

Moving on to my absolute pet hate: cropped or shaved hair and a goatee beard.

This look is favoured by the majority of the adult over forty male population of Salford, particularly the minicab drivers. Wankers.

My twat next door neighbour models himself on the character Max here. The character Max here actually ridicules the men that so many of them model themselves on, but they're too fucking stupid to realise it.

Do they not realise how fucking ridiculous this looks? Why don't their wives, girlfriends or mothers tell them?

You just know that instant that you come across a bloke looking like this that he's almost guaranteed to be an ignorant, lazy, aggressive, thick as pig-shit, thug who needs a good slapping. You can be pootling along in your car and then notice that there's another vehicle right up your arse - from out of the blue. It'll be one of these cocks driving a Rover or a Mondeo (minicab).

Judge cakesniffer's verdict
We've encountered just a few scenarios in which the male of the species lets his testosterone do the talking and grows hair on his face. With modern grooming products, battery-powered razors, and shaving balms to smooth the skin, there's probably no excuse for a man to have any facial hair. Because of this, facial hair on men is:

GUILTY AS CHARGED

Punishment
I'd like to sentence all men with facial hair to a punishment that fits the crime, and one that will act as a suitable deterrent against reoffending and one that will also encourage all others to shave regularly and properly. I sentence all the accused to have full body waxing - including the knackers, very slowly on the knackers - in full view of their mates. The punishment may seem draconian, but it should be fun to watch.

A postscript
When some men shave, why to they miss those little clusters of hairs that grow high on their cheekbones. What the fuck is hair growing there for in the first place???

And what the fuck is all this about?




Who on earth could possibly think they looked good with lamb (or mutton) chop whiskers?? They look RIDICULOUS!