Let's have a little chat about insurance, shall we? See, insurance troubles me. I know the reasoning behind why I have to have it, but the fact is, I begrudge every bloody penny I spend on it. Why? Because I've never, ever claimed on either my 'buildings or contents' insurance or my motor insurance and yet the premiums continue to rise every bastard year.
  It didn't used to be like this. I remember as a wee small Fish being royally scalped when I insured my very first motorbike. Twenty-three years of age on a brand new 500cc Yamaha, parked off-road in South London? Five hundred and sixty quid, thank-you very much young man. The following year, as I hadn't killed myself or any other road users, it fell to five hundred and twenty quid. As the years went by and I changed bikes and built up a no-claims bonus, the insurance carried on falling. Same thing with the car premiums. Another year without wiping out any grannies on a zebra crossing, another few notes shaved off the bill.
  And then something strange happened. Around five or six years ago, my insurance started going up. Full nine years no-claims and all of a sudden, I'm paying forty quid more than the previous year. From then on, my insurance quote has gone up annually without fail. Doesn't matter whether it's car, house or bike, the days of paying a lower premium as a reward for not making a claim have gone right out the window.
  Why is this?
  I think there are several answers. For a start, all the insurance companies and underwriters appear to have got together and decided that they never wanted to make a loss ever again. They realised that the British justice system was a complete fucking joke and that nothing would ever be done to clamp down on the number of illegals driving around without insurance, so they simply decided to hike the premiums of all the law-abiding idiots to cover the shortfall. Wankers.
   Secondly, anyone living in a normal area appears to be subsidising the premiums of those fuckwits who insist on living next to, or more frequently in, a river. Year after year these arseholes are washed out of their home in the Thames Valley or Norfolk.  Each winter they move into a caravan for six months while everything dries out and spend thousands of pounds redecorating, only to get washed away again the same time the following year. Yes, it's a lovely picturesque dwelling and I'm sure it was very pretty when you bought it, but it's on a fucking flood plain and when your place on the river becomes a place in the bloody river for six months every year, then it's time to call it a day and move on, because I for one am sick and tired of regularly shelling out on new Axminsters for someone too stupid to take a fucking hint.
   Finally, and most tellingly, I reckon the biggest cause of these endless insurance hikes is the fact that every single company is constantly on the box advertising their fucking selves with our bloody money. Worse, they try to be funny about it. I don't want a comedy rodent in a smoking jacket or a nodding bulldog being amusing at me and I certainly don't want some annoying fat cunt with a bendy moustache singing annoying operatic catchphrases in my general direction every bloody ad break.
  Just piss off with the TV spots and take some money off my bleeding premiums, you utter, utter bastards!

Are you a pirate?
Peter Mandelscum thinks you are, and, let's face it; he's the one 'in charge' of the country these days, so he ought to know. Apparently, old Mandy is ticking right now about the amount of money slipping through his fingers because naughty people are illegally downloading and file-sharing  movies and music, thus depriving huge, multinational media corporations (not to mention the Treasury) of large sums of money. This clearly has to stop, which is why Mandy has decided (after a nice dinner with one David Geffen) to clamp down on file-sharing once and for all. In future, he wants to see your ISP keep an eye on exactly what sites you're visiting and what you're downloading and, if you're being a naughty boy, he wants them to limit (or even terminate) your account. Quite how he expects the ISPs to police this, he doesn't say.
  He patently hasn't heard of 'ghost surfing' either, but I digress.
  The Government's own report into file-sharing (commissioned from Jupiter Research) concluded that some 11.6% of us were engaged, or had engaged in, file-sharing activities while online. As this didn't sound very threatening, the Government then 'tweaked' the figure up to 16.3%. (Interestingly, a bit of digging revealed that Jupiter Research initially assumed that there were 40 million people with 'access to the internet' - never mind that at least five million of them were too young to click a mouse or too old to be arsed. Nor did they take into account those too fucking thick to work out where the free films are and how to get them.) Still, figures are figures, and Mandy's ones showed that a whopping 6.4 million people were obviously dabbling in pirate naughtiness; a figure that somehow became 7 million when the report was actually published. Clearly nonsense, but when has a total lack of credibility ever gotten in the way of a NuLabour mission? As we've seen recently with Professor Nutt's opinions on drugs, whenever the facts don't tally with official NuLabour world view, the Government will simply invent some that do.
  So out came 'The Strategic Priorities for Copyright', which announced that evil British downloaders are stealing some £12 billion worth of copyrighted stuff every year.  They even had the audacity to quote this number, often and loudly, all across the media world a few weeks back. Only it's bollocks. Absolute bollocks.  Even if we go back and actually use Jupiter's figures before the Government jacked them up, then there would be about 3 million 'pirates' stealing that mythical £12 billion. This would mean that each four-person home with an internet connection is pulling down £4000 worth of content every year, or, put another way, spending five hours a day watching films they haven't paid for or listening to music they haven't bought or a combination of both. Now I love a good movie, but three of them? Every single night? Day in, day out? Not even Barry fucking Norman sets that kind of benchmark.
  In reality, like so much of what this Government tells us, these figures are simply horse shit. Yes, there is a piracy problem, but £12 billion worth? Get real.
  So why do people go pirate and what's the solution? Well, it's down to greed. In my opinion, the whole issue of digital piracy would be drastically reduced if the record companies released low quality 'samplers' online. You could play the tracks (in mono, say) for free, and then if you liked the album, you'd buy it. Same goes for movies. Small, three-inch screen versions of the film in question and, if you like it, you'll shell out for the disc.
  Except there's a flaw in this argument.
  An awful lot of gullible people are happily paying on iTunes for precisely that - tiny, tinny versions of the latest films and albums to 'enjoy' on their mobile phone. As long as these morons exist, then the greed of the global media companies will insist that they be milked, which in turn will keep the prices of CDs and DVDs sky-high and ensure that digital piracy will continue unabated.
  Am I a pirate? Hell yes, but one with my own set of ethics. I refuse to buy counterfeit discs because the quality is always, always shit. What I will admit to is using the torrent servers to download low-quality .avi versions of DVDs I think I might like and then watching them on my netbook. If I don't think much of the movie, I delete it. If I like it, I go out and buy the DVD and then delete it. However, when it comes to mp3s, I am scrupulously honest. I always pay for the music I download. Always. Only I'd have to be a complete fucking gibbon to do so via iTunes. No, I go shopping in Russia and so should you. Click on the image at the top of this article and welcome to my world...

  The English language. A multi-cultural tongue derived from West Germanic, Norse, Anglo-Frisian and Norman roots and moulded by time and use into the wonderfully diverse and lyrically poetic system of speech we use today. It is the official language in fifty-three countries and somewhere between three and four hundred million people have it as their first language and as many as 1.4 billion have it as a second. That's almost two billion people, a third of the entire planet. Thanks to the Industrial Revoultion and the rise of the British Empire, English is now the dominant international language in science, business, aviation, entertainment, radio and diplomacy and it has, quite literally, created and shaped the global communication infrastructure of the world today. The Oxford English Dictionary lists over six hundred thousand definitions of words used in English in various forms or guises.
   Yes, the English language is a truly impressive and formidable linguistic creation.    
   So why do so many of the people I come into contact with seem to possess a working vocabulary of approximately thirty-seven words? I can forgive the occasional 'erm' and 'um' as natural breaks in the flow of someone's speech, but it's getting to the point now where if I have to listen to one more shagwit punctuating their pointless utterings with an intermittent stream of 'you know's and 'I mean's, I'm going to stab someone. Worse still is when they combine them, resulting in every sentence being propped up with 'you know what I mean?' No, I don't know what you mean, you cretin, that's why I'm having to waste my time listening to you.   
   Over time, I've slowly come to the conclusion that most people who talk to me have absolutely nothng of any importance to impart. I reckon a good ninety per cent of everything I hear each day is just the result of a bunch of bored, bipedal mammals vibrating their vocal chords for the sheer pleasure of doing so; lowing away in my face simply to annoy me. The sad thing is, I always fall for it. I always start off listening intently when they come up to me, smiling as they begin the conversation and then out flops the first 'you know' and that's it. My eyes glaze over and once more, I'm facing yet another vertical cow mooing at me for no apparent reason.   
   Worse that the 'you know' brigade are the people who insist on speaking in cliched colloquialisms or even outright aphorism. I find these morons a lot easier to deal with though. Every time someone uses the eye-wateringly banal expression 'at the end of the day', I dive in with a quick 'it goes dark' and that's their train of thought derailed immediately. It's astonishing how often people are rendered momentarily silent by this, which just proves my point that they haven't actually got anything to say, they're simply using me as a sounding-board for a quick moo.    
   My most patholigical hatred however, is reserved for those cattle who, for reasons known only to their idiot selves, have decided to become Australian by proxy. Why have they started making all their statements sound like questions by raising the inflection at the end of every sentence? Why do they insist on informing me that they have 'no worries' upon completing our interaction? Why don't they just die?    
   Please don't think I'm being sociopathic here, I'm not. If you genuinely have something to say, then I'm only too pleased to hear it. If you want to have a proper conversation, I'm more than happy to pass the time of day with you, but for the love of God, spend a little time and think about what it is you want to discuss and structure it accordingly. There is nothing more heartwarming than sharing a conversation with someone who knows what a pause is and how to use one. Trust me, you don't have to keep talking continuously in order to converse effectively. Plan ahead, pause once in a while and you'll find yourself more involved in your social interactions than you ever thought possible.  
    I'll leave you with a final thought. Never dismiss the effectiveness of a choice bit of unwarranted viciousness dropped at random into a conversation. A well-timed insult can transform a routine interaction into an intense battle of wills and add interest and conflict to an otherwise dull day.
   Know what I mean, knobhead?

On March 28th at 20:30 hours GMT, we will all be encouraged to turn off all our lights as part of Earth Hour. This is in order to raise awareness about energy conservation or global warming or saving the frog or something, I don't know. The reason behind it doesn't matter to me because I won't be pandering to this load of painfully worthy right-on eco-bollocks. In fact, I shall be turning all my lights on for the full hour, as well as flicking the hot water switch and creating a full forty gallons of piping hot water I have no intention of using. For good measure, I will also be racking the central heating up to the 'dole scum' setting of twenty-four degrees and sitting around in my pants enjoying the stifling sub-tropical warmth. Why? Because I am utterly sick of this whole climate change con. Because I despise the way we've all been gullible enough to take this crap as gospel truth without once questioning it and, most of all, because of the stinking, reeking hypocrisy of all these government people and famous-types wagging their holier-than-thou fingers at me for not being 'green' enough. Never mind that right now the skiing in resorts from Scotland to the Alps is the best it's been for half a century, the planet, we keep being told, is getting warmer by the day and we must all be shamed into doing our bit to safeguard our future.
   Right, so if we've established that cutting down our CO2 emissions is of the utmost importance to saving the planet, then Gordon Brown won't be pushing ahead with that new runway expansion at Heathrow, will he? Except, actually, he is. Gordon wants that new runway so he can attract more business investors into London so they'll build more offices in Canary Wharf and then engage in the time-honoured practice of leaving the bastard lights on all bastard night while no one's in them. Here's the hypocrisy. You, the little people, have to squint at your newspaper under a flickering 'energy-efficient' light bulb while the important City banking types (the ones that are responsible for your house being worth a third less than it was last year) get to leave all the lights on in all the offices in their custom-built skyscrapers just in case they feel the urge to pop back for a quick snort of coke or a boff of their secretary. It's not just the bankers and politicians, either. The luvvies are hassling us, too. Cutting down on greenhouse gasses is a very big issue for Emma Thompson. So much so that she was right at the front of the last demonstration against Gordon's Heathrow expansion (deliciously ironic - Lefty vs. Lefty.) So does her oh-so-right-on stance mean Emma will be swimming to the fucking Oscars this year, then? Of course not. She'll be Club Class or better sipping Bolly all the way there and back. That's because the rules don't apply to Emma, just to little people like you and me.
   This whole sorry eco-bandwagon has now filtered its way down to a local level, too. For instance, I keep getting asked if I want a 'bag for life' every time I go into a supermarket. Why? Am I expected to carry a couple of these stout hessian things around with me every time I leave the house on the off chance that I might need some groceries? Balls to that, I want plastic bags. Lots of them. In fact, from now on, I want each individual Item I purchase placed in it's own plastic bag. And if it's a bottle, I want that wrapped in a couple of plastic bags before being placed in a plastic bag. I fully intend to take up drinking wine again just so I have some bottles in the weekly shop for them to put into plastic bags. Fuck 'em. Here's the hypocrisy again. The supermarkets could easily provide us with strong paper bags if they wanted to but they choose plastic ones instead because they're cheaper. They know damn well that paper bags biodegrade in weeks while plastic ones take decades, but they don't care. And if they don't care, then why should you? The same supermarkets also happily charter dozens of cargo-ships and aircraft to import huge amounts of exotic produce into the country every week and then chuck it away the moment it goes ten minutes out of date. When I was a kid, you could only get strawberries a couple of months every year because they were seasonal. Now, you can get them all year round, they just ship them in from warmer climes. It's not just strawberries, either. There's a bewildering array of stuff from kiwi fruit to kumquats sitting there on shelf after shelf, slowly going off, and all of it brought into the country on huge fossil-fuel burning vehicles spewing ton after ton of CO2 into the atmosphere. Want to save the planet? Stop eating strawberries. Or kiwi fruit. Or pineapples. In fact, just stick with a nice homegrown English pippin instead. Except you can't, because last time I looked, English strains of apples were being imported from Europe because we've uprooted most of our orchards on an EU directive and the ones that are left have been geared up to producing inedible varieties for the cider industry.
   Anyway, forget fruit, what about the rest of the shopping? What's with all this packaging? I buy a pizza and it's wrapped in cling film. Fine, but then It's sold in a nice big printed box with a picture on. How much did it cost to produce that box; to print it? How much will it cost to re-cycle it? It's the same story with breakfast cereal. They even sell individual portions of breakfast cereal in individual cartons complete with an individual serving of milk. What the fuck is all that about? So you can take your breakfast with you and eat it at work? Well, yes, you could do that. Alternatively, you could simply get your lazy fucking arse out of bed ten minutes earlier and eat your corn flakes in your own kitchen like normal people, but I digress. Anyway, If you think the pizza and cereal packaging is extreme, check out the ready meals. An endless array of plastic trays hiding inside cardboard boxes with the occasional sachet of sauce, add to taste. Could they not be sold in microwave pouches? And chocolates. Do we really need each one of Terry's finest in it's own individual niche on a plastic tray along with a separate cardboard 'menu' to select them from? What's wrong with a bag? Supermarkets are full of this sort of bollocks. They tell you they're helping you to save the planet and save your pennies and yet there they are, adding masses of pretty packaging, charging you for it and then begrudging you a fucking bag to take it home in. Still, 'every little helps' right?
   Nah, sorry, I'm not buying it. Count me out; I don't want to play anymore. All this began because Al Gore lost an election to a halfwit and then had to find something else to do with his life. He hit upon the idea of climate change and then made a very nice living flying all around the world dumping tons of CO2 into the sky in order to tell us all about it. Well fuck Earth Hour and fuck all the eco-warriors. From now on, you can call me the anti-Gore. One man can make a difference. From this day forth, I shall turn on every light switch I walk past at work. In fact, I shall make a point of going into rooms I have no business going into simply to turn on the lights. I shall boil the work's kettle and then not make tea. I shall leave the engine running on the work's van while I go for a tea break (on the occasions that I do make tea.) I shall, in short, do everything in my power to counter all the efforts that the gullible people are making up and down the country and I hereby promise not to rest until my own personal carbon footprint is the size of a fucking clown's shoe.
   Up yours, Al.

Here is the scene in London over the New Year as thousands of shouty Middle-Easterners living in the Big City (joined by one or two of the usual rag-tag crew of Lefty arseholes - Galloway, Alexei Sayle, etc) all got together to go and have a yell outside the Israeli embassy. Apparently, they were protesting about the fact that Israel had decided to unload a long-overdue airstrike against Hamas strongholds in Gaza after putting up with years of random rocket strikes from over the border. How dare they. In the last few days, there's been lots of television footage of wailing bearded gentlemen looking very upset and even more shouty than usual. One of them, I noted, had wrapped his recently deceased child in a Palestinian flag and was shaking her corpse in the air over his head as a throng of his equally shouty kinfolk looked on. Quite what this was meant to achieve escapes me, but I'm sure it all made sense to him. More sense than, say, quietly grieving over her body in the hospital and then leaving her to the care of the undertakers, but, hey, it's a different 'culture', innit? Anyway, such wilful retaliation from those evil Jews against years of random aggression from the Left Bank was simply not on in the eyes of the poor, innocent, downtrodden Palestinians, so they did what any right-thinking individual would do and went en-masse to honk about it in somebody else's country. Let's just reflect on this for a moment, because I cannot think of any other nation on this planet that would put up with this sort of shit. A load of foreign nationals (and one or two Guardian reading tits) march loudly up to the gates of the embassy of another bunch of foreign nationals and kick off, at which point the British Police, on overtime, paid for by the British taxpayer (very few of whom, one supposes, were in the crowd) are called in to keep them apart.
   Am I missing something here? Because if I had a beef with the people of another country and felt that strongly about it, I would go to that country and kick off over there. Getting all righteously indignant and aggressive over here simply doesn't compute for me. It's like Tesco staff marching into Morrisons and having a moan about Sainsbury's. What's the fucking point? Mind you, I know only too well why these 'protestors' are doing their protesting over here. It's because we're too stupid to do anything about it other than play pushy-shovy with them and get sued for 'police brutality' if, God forbid, any of the poor, innocent, peace-loving marching folk fall over and sprain their ankles. These arseholes wouldn't dare try this anywhere else in the world. If they acted like this in the rest of Europe, they'd be hosed off the streets by watercannon. If they tried it in their own countries, they'd be shot. So, what better place to have your little riot than in good old Britian; the land of free speech? (Providing you're on the far Left, of course, absolutely no Right Wing views will be tolerated on pain of immediate prosecution.)
  This country is a joke and the rest of the planet is laughing, loudly, right here on the streets of our Capital. Happy New Year.

I for one am totally fed up with the Royal Family. After reading about yet another drunken night out for Prince Harry and his big brother's shenanigans with the helicopter, I think it's about time we had a bit of a change. Don't get me wrong, I'm not advocating the abolition of the monarchy, far from it. I just feel that the current batch are past their sell-by date and we need to have a reboot of the franchise. You see, I've just read David Starkey's fascinating series of books 'Monarchy', and basically, the whole 'Royal' thing is just a pale shadow of it's former self these days. I look at sour-faced old Liz and the retard son lined up to replace her and frankly, I'm not impressed. Centuries of European Royalty interbreeding to keep the bloodlines pure has resulted in the human equivalent of pedigree Chihuahuas. Chinless, highly-strung idiots incapable of dealing with the real world without a minder to look after them. No, it's time to go back to the fundamental basics of Royalty, where you got to be King because you were a charismatic leader of men in possession of a few hundred mates with fucking big swords. It worked for William in 1066, and there's no reason why we can't have the same again. Just think - if some big, blustering bastard clad head-to-toe in iron plate stormed into Buckingham Palace with a load of Knights, slaughtered Her Madge and her inbred offspring, stuck all the heads on the gates and said "Right, I'm the fucking King now, who wants some?", you'd be impressed, wouldn't you? You'd think 'Yes, here's a born ruler; a strong man unafraid to take charge of a situation. I could follow him!' and quite right, too. That's how it worked for centuries and it set the cornerstone for the wonderful cosmopolitan society we live in today. We need to go back to this; to resurrect our national pride in our Monarchy.
   So who do we get to rule us? Who should be the new King of England? (because the first thing he's going to do is march his troops north to sort those bloody Scotchmen out, obviously.) Well, I have an idea. A decent king needs to look the part, so we need someone physically imposing; a big bugger to fill that armour. Next, he would need wisdom and maturity, so someone in their fifies or sixties who's been around a bit would fit the bill nicely. Also, as a leader of men, he would need a powerful voice to ensure his commands were heard and obeyed. When you put all these criteria together, there's really only one candidate - Brian Blessed. Shit, the man even has experience of being royalty, he's played loads of 'em! Just watch 'Flash Gordon' to see him as Vultan, Prince of the Hawk-Men. Can't imagine this King talking to trees and selling his own range of expensive groceries, can you? He's climbed Everest, for God's sake! No, it'd fighting, wenching and drinking all the way for King Brian! Visualise the coins of the realm, too. No more saggy-chinned old ladies on the back of the pound coin, just huge, great beards! And just imagine the Christmas Day message from this bloke! He'd be half-drunk on mead by three o'clock and bawling at you in your very own living room, it'd be aces! No, that's it, I'm sold. Brian Blessed for Regent! Remember - as things stand now, the moment old Queen Elizabeth carks it, those treacerous Australians are going republican because they've lost all interest and respect for the Royal Family. That's not going to happen with King Brian in charge, is it? He'll be straight out on the next Hercules to give those yampy ex-cons a fucking good shouting at. Come on Brian, history awaits! Round up some mates and get those claymores sharpened. All hail King Brian the First! Marvellous!

April 23rd. Does this date mean anything to you? Well, no, apparently not, judging by my experience today. April 23rd is St. George's Day. St. George, for those of you who are unaware (and there are obviously a few), is the patron saint of England. So, given the fact that I live in the Capitol city of England, you'd expect that I'd've seen quite a few red and white flags during the day, wouldn't you? Especially since I had to travel from my home in South London all the way up to Edgware in the north and back again. Know how many flags I saw? One. And I was fucking wearing it. I am positively incandescent with rage as I type this. What the hell are you people playing at? The one day each year we, as the English, have to shout a message to the sinister Socialists running our country that we're proud of our nation and we - correction you - blow it. Still, I've no doubt a good few of you were togged up to the nines all in green for St. Patrick's Day back in March though. Out 'enjoying the craic' and getting trolleyed on the black stuff. Yet, when it comes to sticking on the old red and white once a year and raising a pint of ale to your own nation's patron saint - nothing. This is exactly what Nu-Labour wants from you. Total subjugation. That way, once you're Englishness has been eradicated, you won't mind, or even notice, that you're paying for the Scots to have free presciptions, healthcare, student tuition, transport etc, will you? Because, hey, we're all 'British' now, aren't we? Somehow, we, as a nation, have managed to be convinced that celebrating our Englishness is wrong. Racist. A harking back to colonialism and slavery. It's bollocks, of course, but we've fallen for it haven't we? Wake up, people. How the hell is it 'racist' to wear the colours of your country in your country on your patron saint's feast day? You do it often enough when the perennially under-achieving 'En-ger-land' football team plays, so why in God's name can't you pull the shirt on once a year on the 23rd of April? Yes, it's vulgar and jingoistic and ever-so-slightly low-brow, but then again, so are the Proms, but we have no problem swelling with pride when we can rope our Scottish and Welsh 'pals' in, do we? But try to muster a bit of self-pride on our own as a nation without a sporting event to hide behind and we just can't do it. Because we're frightened. Frightened that someone might point the finger and call us a racist. A Nazi. A BNP voter. We've been bullied into submission for the sake of a quiet life because we can't bear the thought of being accused of rocking the great 'multi-cultural' boat. Never mind that St George, if he ever existed, was more than likely a Turkish soldier from the Third Century and all that stuff about dragons was myth and metaphor. It's the fact that he is a symbol of England's existence as a seperate entity from the not-so-United Kingdom that the ruling classes despise, and so they've quietly spent the last decade and a half systematically fading him, and his feast day, into the background to the point where, here and now barely two hundred years after Trafalgar, you all sit there too ashamed of your great nation's past to buy a flag to stick in your car window for a couple of hours. You make me sick.

One of the earliest Rants I had on this site was against scooters. At the time I was a recently exed-biker who had just gotten rid of a Kawasaki ZZR-600 and was looking forward to purchasing a Suzuki 1200 Hayabusa. Unfortunately, fate (read: 'pregnancy') intervened and here I am, five years later, looking at this and thinking it's the very thing. Now after half a decade of not freezing my cobs off every morning straddling a (let's be honest) somewhat uncomfortable (but really sexy) motorbike to get into work, I'm toying with the idea of getting back on two wheels again. This time, however, I'm old enough not to give a rat's arse about how I look or the performance of the machine. This baby will give me 120 miles an hour on the motorway, sixty miles to the gallon and will cost me less than two hundred notes to insure. Also, there'll be no clunky gear-changing and I can sit in a sedate, relaxed position while I get there. All this and ABS braking, too. Not quite 'Ogri', I know, but I'm still toying with the idea of a test-ride. I'll let you know how I get on if I do...

Here I am on a glorious morning in early March. The sun is shining, the sky is blue and the steam from my freshly-filtered coffee is wafting lazily in front of my monitor. All is right with the world. Except it shouldn't be. You see, last night Gordon Brown (you remember him - he's the unelected Prime Minister of this Septic Isle. The one who puts his fingers in his ears and goes 'la-la-la' when anyone tries to remind him of the manifesto promises his party made, such as offering the country a vote on the EU Referrendum. But I digress...) Anyway, last night old Gordon had 'emergency' talks with boffins from the Met Office about the massive storm front bearing down on Britain in the early hours of this morning. There was talk of eighty mile an hour winds, huge tidal surges of a metre or more and chaos on a par with 1987. Apparently at one point, the situation looked so bleak that a hitherto unprecedented number of flood warnings were issued, fifteen flights from Heathrow and eleven from Gatwick were cancelled, the port of Dover was closed and radio stations were telling their listeners to stay indoors. Mention was made of the Great Storm of 1703, when eight thousand people shuffled off this mortal coil courtesy of the wind, rain and tides. Scary stuff! I went to be last night fully expecting to be woken in the wee small hours by the sound of the roof and the flat upstairs tearing loose and heading skyward to the land of Oz at high velocity. Except I woke to a shaft of sunlight and the singing of the blackbird in our apple tree as per usual. And when I checked the news - the BBC 'state propoganda' news - I found that the 'killer storm' of last night had suddenly transformed into 'persistent heavy rain'. Curious.
   So where was the trail of carnage and destruction we'd been promised? I was completely at a loss to explain until I realised that we have a Budget coming up this week. Suddenly it began to make sense. What better way to generate huge amounts of revenue than to indulge in a good old-fashioned bit of scaremongering? 'Look everyone! Climate change is here! Flood and disaster for all! The only way you can stop it is to give us more taxes!' That's how this Government thinks, you see. All climate change is as a result of you and your cars and electrical appliances. Never mind the fact that the biggest storm this nation ever saw was three hundred years ago, way before the the Industrial Revolution. Never mind that Boscastle was recorded as being washed into the sea over four hundred years ago. And again in 1847. No, YOU, the proletariat, with your filthy internal combustion engines; YOU are the cause of all this. Al Gore said so, so it must be true. Ignore the fact that volcanic activity and cattle stick thirty times the amount of CO2 into the atmosphere that vehicles do, just cough up now and Alistair will put things right. What will actually happen is that Alistair will use most of the new taxes he's going to hit you with to fill up the hole he's made bailing Northern Rock out. Well, I say 'Alistair', I actually mean 'Gordon'. Blaming Alistair Darling for the balls-up that New Labour has made of the economy is a bit like Parky blaming Emu for chucking him over the sofa. Still, only two years to go until we can vote this shower out. Personally, I'm counting the days...

Have a look at this. Lovely, isn't it? This, for all you lagerboys out there, is called 'beer'. It's what your dad drinks, because he's a man. It's not 'superchilled', it doesn't have a 'creamflow' head and you don't get a slice of lime to stuff in it. It is simply a mixture of water, yeast, barley and hops. That's it. In your local Wetherspoons, it goes for less than two quid a pint, so why are you idiots paying three and a half quid for Stella? Oh yes, it must be all the extra ingredients you're getting, like Ammonia Caramel, which gives it some colour, Rhoiso-alpha Acid, which increases bitterness and Propylene Glycol Alginate, which stops it frothing all over the shop while it's, ahem, 'brewing'. Let's not forget all those other free chemicals you're getting, too. The ones they stick in to speed up the brewing process (and therefore their profits), such as Betaglucanase, Protease, Tetrahydroiso-alpha acid, Sulphur Dioxide, Amyloglucosidase, Silicone and last but not least, Sulphuric Acid. (This, believe me, is by no means an exhaustive list.) Hmm...'Reassuringly expensive' indeed.
   Now you may not know this, but 'lager' is a German word meaning 'storage'. That's because in Germany, brewing is controlled by very strict laws and has to mature for quite a while (up to a month or two in certain cases). Over here, most of the big-name lagers brew for a few days at most. The brewing process is artificially kick-started, artificially stopped and artificially pumped full of nitrogen to liven it up again. The reason they serve it 'superchilled' is because the human taste-bud doesn't work too well at low temperatures, so you don't realise that what you're drinking doesn't actually taste of anything. That's why all the money gets ploughed back into promotion - to keep their low-quality product in your mind. Dude, you're not drinking lager, you're drinking advertising.
   Real Ale, on the other hand, is a living product. It's fresh, full of natural ingredients and is served from a hand-pump (because it doesn't need to be pumped full of nitrogen to give it some 'zing'.) It's cheaper, it has some taste and it doesn't require a costly refrigeration system (which you pay for). There are loads of different types, from 3.5% Milds to 8% Strong Ales, so if you only drink Stella because it's 5% and makes you feel like a big man, why not give Hobgoblin or Abbot a go? They're just as strong, are full of flavour and won't make you feel like a pig has shat in your head the following morning. Natural ingredients, see?
   So that's it. You can carry on paying over the odds for a pint of dead chemicals, or you can try a fresh, lovingly-crafted product. If you're still not convinced and insist on being a lagerboy, at least go for an imported one, like Becks or Heineken that are brewed to strict German and Dutch quality laws which forbid them being pumped full of shit. If you're unsure what to go for, a quick rule of thumb is this: If it says 'Brewed under licence in the UK' on it - it's piss. At the end of the day though, it's your choice. I'm really not bothered so long as you take the time to think about what you're sticking down your neck.
   Click on the pint glass if you want to know more...
   Cheers!

I've been listening to Radiohead. No, hang on! I got tired of constantly reading about how brilliant they were and so I decided to do a little downloading and really check them out properly. I felt I owed it to myself (and Thom Yorke) not to slag them off anymore without really knowing any of their work. (This is in stark contrast to my opinions of U2, as I'm very familiar with their work, having had it hammered into me by an old girlfriend, meaning that I have no qualms whatsoever in labelling them as overblown, derivative bollocks.) So the last couple of evenings have been spent listening to 'The Bends', 'Kid A' and 'OK Computer' (the best album ever made, apparently.) Know what conclusion I came to? They're the new Smiths. Seriously, for the 'nobody understands me/life is so unfair' type of student, Radiohead offer a far more realistic outlook on things than Morrissey and Marr ever could. The music is less catchy and the lyrics more morose with none of the political side-swipes getting in the way of a good moan. Having said that, though, one or two songs really stood out, and I'm sure I'd have just loved 'Creep' and 'Karma Police' in my college days. Naturally, back then I too was riddled with teenage angst, but I was always more 'screw you' than 'woe is me', which is why I spent more time listening to Marillion than Morrissey. Fish wrote about his girlfriend leaving too, only with him the lyrics were more about posting nude pictures of her to all her friends rather than moping over her memory alone in a bedsit. Venom. That was always the key ingredient for me. There's only so much sorrow and pity I can take before I want to choke someone. Anyway, back to the point. Radiohead. Perfectly acceptable if you're nineteen, pasty from lack of sunlight and little bit morose. Otherwise, avoid. There. Analysis over, Captain. Deleting files now...

According to the leaflet that's just dropped through the door, the Inner London Congestion Charge is going up again. First it was a fiver to drive into or through London, then everbody's favourite 'Socialist' Ken Livingstone pushed it up to eight quid and now we're told that from January, it may be going up to eleven quid. Oh, and the zone is being extended all the way west into Fulham, too (no doubt to cop some revenue from all those mums doing the school run in their Chelsea tractors.) We keep getting told that the reason for this is to reduce congestion on London's roads (although, curiously, nobody ever seems to question where all this money is going as it certainly ain't visible in an improved public transport infrastructure - then again, haven't we got an insanely expensive Olympics to host a few years down the line?) Anyway, a moment's reflection in anybody sane would suggest that the reason London's roads are so congested is that only half of them are ever in use by Joe Public in his Ford Mondeo. Think about it. Most main roads are two lanes wide in either direction, but ever since the introduction of bus lanes, all the cars are now limited to one lane. In effect, you've doubled the amount of traffic at a stroke by halving the amount of road it can travel on. Of course there's going to be congestion! Cynically fleecing the motorist by charging them huge sums of money to pass through the City or forcing them to take a long detour (and thereby gridlocking all the outer roads) is the kind of warped logic that ends up concluding if some horses are brown and some cows are brown then some horses must be cows. It just doesn't work that way.
   Years ago, before the introduction of  bus lanes, I had a job that entailed driving a van all over London day in, day out. It used to take me forty-five minutes to an hour to get from Elephant & Castle to West Drayton. Yesterday, it took me two and a quarter hours. The twenty minutes it took to cross Vauxhall Bridge illustrates my point perfectly. I kept having to let buses in from the left-hand lane because they wanted to go straight on, whilst I couldn't get into the left-hand lane to actually turn left until the very end of the road or I'd cop a fine courtesy of one of the squillion bus-lane cameras on every lamp-post. Sheer madness! Ken, forget screwing the motorist over to pay for a showpiece in 2012 that nobody apart from you actually wants, scrap all the bus lanes, pull down the cameras and watch the traffic flow again. It's not rocket science, mate. Then again, if you do that, there'll be less money in the coffers to pay for all your visiting terrorist mates, won't there? You odious little pipe.

This is the Intrepid Fox on Wardour Street. It's the best pub I've ever set foot in and has been my spiritual home in London for nigh on two decades. It has two floors dedicated to alternative music and whether you're a rocker, a punk, a goth or a post-nu-metal-cybergrunge weirdo, you'll feel at home here. The tunes are great, there's cold Newcastle to be necked and there's always a game of pool on the go and fine people to talk to. I've lost count of the number of great nights I've had in the 'Fox, but it's not just my favourite boozer, it's also a living piece of London history. It was founded as a pub in 1784 by Whig leader Charles James Fox, who promised free beer to anyone who'd vote for him. It survived the Blitz intact and the Sixties saw Rod Stewart and Mick Jagger trading punches at the bar when Mick poached Ronnie Wood from Rod's band 'The Faces'. In the early Seventies, Actors Richard Harris, Tom Baker and writer Daniel Farson were regularly thrown out after colossal benders under it's roof and later in the same decade, Malcolm McLaren and a certain John Lydon adopted it as their local as they proceeded to change British music forever. So with all that in it's past, you'd think it's future as an icon of Cultural Heritage would be secure, wouldn't you? Well, you'd be wrong. It's owners Mitchells & Butlers have sold it off to property developers who plan to completely gut it and build a 'new and exciting development' (expensive flats for wankers) in it's place. The landlord, Pat Begent, who has run the joint for all the years that I've been going there has been given less than a month to get out and, quite rightly, calls the decision "a fucking travesty". What's worse, M&B deliberately kept the sale 'under the radar' so that Pat couldn't mount any sort of counter-bid or campaign. It stinks, people, it really does. I've spent half my life drinking in the 'Fox; usually before heading round the corner to a gig at The Astoria, which I've also found out this week will be closing soon, too - again, to be converted into flats and shops. What the hell is going on? That's it, I've had enough of this city. It's mean and cold and I don't like it here anymore.

It seems like every time I pick up the paper, I'm confronted with yet another story of some poor bastard being murdered by some piece of shit who has been released from prison on parole. This whole parole thing really annoys me. All this 'time off for good behaviour' bollocks. Er, no. If you're sentenced to five years, then five years is what you should do. Being a good boy whilst you're inside ought to be irrelevant. If you wanted to demonstrate how good you can be, you should've done it on the outside instead of being a scrote, shouldn't you? That way, you wouldn't find yourself in this situation. Being sentenced to five years should mean that you get out in exactly five years, provided you choose not to sod about and do drugs or play the tough guy. If you do, then more gets added to your sentence until you get the message. As for the view that prison should not be about punishment but about rehabilitation; who came up with that particular gem and why weren't the rest of us asked how we felt about it? As a taxpaying mug shelling out forty per-cent, I object most strongly to seeing rapists and child-murderers being given three square meals a day in a centrally-heated environment with access to satellite television and the internet when I have to get up at half-five every fucking morning and got to work full time to enjoy the same set-up.
   It's even more annoying when it's an illegal immigrant who shouldn't even have been in this country in the first place; especially when three meals a day and a bed constitutes a luxury hotel in some parts of the world. Some old pipe in a wig has also ruled recently that prisoners should all be eligible to vote. Hang on, whatever happened to the concept of 'outlaw'? Surely if you voluntarily choose, by your actions, to remove yourself from civilised society then you should no longer be allowed a say in how it's run. If law didn't apply to you when you chose to commit a crime then why should you be included under its umbrella when you're banged up? Take away the vote and the privileges and the remission and make prison harsh again. Never mind the degree-study opportunities and gymnasium, let's have some rock-breaking. We keep getting told that the reason these poor, misguided young scamps have to be let out early is because of overcrowding. Build more fucking prisons, then. Or, better still, make the ones we've got so brutal and unpleasant that no-one will want to go there. Simple, isn't it? Never happen though, because in the current political climate, the Human Rights of the incarcerated wrong-doer far outweigh those of the law-abiding Joe on the street.
   Still, there is a way to change all this. You can start by getting off your arse and down to a polling station on May 4th. Rest assured the crack-head who burgled you last year will be putting his tick in the box; he knows which side his bread's buttered. Hell, they'll even bring his ballot paper to him

As I write this, six people are in intensive care as a result of a drug trial going horribly wrong. I don't mean that a Colombian warlord has ordered them whacked, I mean that these guys were human guinea-pigs for a pharmaceutical company testing programme and things went a bit Doctor Jekyll for them the moment the syringe went in. Apparently, the six men suffered an extreme reaction to a new 'antibody therapy' drug called TGN1412 and began screaming and writhing around as their heads swelled up to three times their normal size and all their major organs shut down in alphabetical order. Predictably, the media wasted no time in jumping on this story and are currently making a big issue of how the head of TeGenero AG, the drug company in question, refuses to offer an apology to the families of these men. Quite right too. Why the fuck should he apologise to these idiots? They all volunteered to be injected with something that had never been tested on humans before and were each paid two thousand quid for their troubles. Apparently, at least one of them is a 'serial guinea-pig' who does this for a living and is reported to have made over sixty grand from similar trials over the last few years. Far from wanting an apology, I would have thought this cretin would be only too pleased with his new massive head. It'll mean more surface-area available in which to stick the needles in any future money-making activities...

Regular readers know how much I love a good survey. There's something endlessly fascinating about looking at all those pie-charts illustrating what people think. The only thing that spoils these results for me is the tiny slice of the pie - and it's usually 8% or so - that is always reserved for the 'Don't Know' brigade. Whatever the subject of the survey, however serious the question, there will always be a section of the demographic who can be relied upon to be so fucking stupid that they simply can't fire up enough synapses to form an opinion. (Only slightly less annoying are the ones who consistantly tick the 'other' box - you know; the sort of smug, self-satisfied tossers who put their religion down as 'Jedi' in the last census because they thought it made them look subversive, the twats.) Usually, the question will be something like 'How would you vote if there were a General Election tomorrow?', and I guess you can sort of excuse a vague, non-committal response to that one given that you never know what juicy political revelations might pop up between now and 2009. (There might be another war to consider, or a change of Prime Minister, or a straight Lib-Dem candidate or something.) However, what I do find inexcusable is when the question boils down to a straightforward choice of two options, such as 'Do you prefer tea or coffee?' How can you possibly be so vacant as to come out with a 'Don't Know' for that? It makes you wonder just who these idiots are. In my head I'm absolutely convinced these are always the same people being interviewed in these surveys. Like a daytime television audience, I reckon there are a hardcore bunch of thirty or forty people who go around every large shopping mall simply to collar the poor survey-takers and inflict their lazy, half-arsed responses on them. I'd love to be there at the next one and add a question of my own to anyone found constantly giving out the 'Don't Knows' and it would be something along the lines of: 'I've got a four foot long Fireman's axe behind my back. Would you like a bloody good whack with it?' Obviously, in the interests of fair play, I'd have to point out to them that a 'Don't Know' would be construed as an affirmative response. Eventually.

Scenes of intense anger this week as livid Muslims took to the streets of London carrying placards with slogans like 'Behead those who insult Islam' and 'Europe you will pay - your 9/11 will come'. Some of these protestors were dressed as suicide bombers. One had dressed his small child in a hat bearing the legend 'I Love Al-Qaeda'. The reason for such a vitriolic outpouring af anti-Western feeling (ironically, by people living here and enjoying the benefits of Western society) was due to a cartoon run in a Danish newspaper which pictured the prophet Mohammed; something which is forbidden in Islam. The cartoon was run in several countries across Europe with similar reactions in other cities. Typically, none of the protestors were arrested, although one wag who thoughtfully brought along a handful of the offensive cartoons to hand out to the crowd was quickly whisked away. Apart from that, the police contented themselves with standing around and watching quietly, just as they did when Abu Hamza was calling for the death of every non-Muslim outside Finsbury Park mosque not so long back. (There are obviously different definitions of 'incitement' and 'racial hatred' depending on whether or not you're a follower of Islam, but I digress.) What this disturbing series of incidents has brought home to me is that there doesn't appear to be much of a market for the Islamic sit-com I was toying with. There I was, all set to follow the crazy antics of Imam Tehd and his dopey sidekick, Imam Dhugal as they got up to all sorts of comic capers in their mosque, (such as trying to win a place on the 'Shouts Of Praise' programme or kicking Ayatollah Brenahn up the arse) when these events kind of took the wind out of the whole project. OK, I knew that the hardline fundamentalists probably wouldn't think too much of my idea, but that's cool, I thought, the law-abiding 'mainstream majority' of Muslims - the ones we keep being told are against these acts of anti-Western dissent - might be up for a bit of comic relief. Then I remembered that it was the 'mainstream majority' that voted Hamas into power in Palestine last month on their 'lets wipe Israel off the face of the planet' ticket. So, unfortunately, my hopes of creating a groundbreaking new niche in comedy were dashed. Sorry, Tehd. I don't think the market's quite there at the moment. Maybe in a thousand years or so when screaming fanaticism has been replaced with serene introspection in this comparatively new religion. I mean, it took quite a while for the Christians to calm down, didn't it? After all, those wacky Puritans were still burning midwives at the stake only a handful of centuries back simply because they they knew a bit about herbs and so therefore must've been witches in league with Lucifer. Fair play, though. I often feel the urge to set fire to the odd vegetarian myself once in a while...

Did anyone see the New Year in by watching the celebrations on the telly live from London? It was absolutely amazing. Twenty minutes of the most intense non-stop visual and aural barrage I've ever seen. It was even better with our living-room window open, as we're near enough to the Thames to hear the explosions. The whole thing centred around the London Eye, with all the rockets and sky-displays launching from the ground around it and even from the wheel itself. There was a full laser and strobe lightshow, and even several specially-rigged barges full of pyrotechnics dotted along the river to maximise the effect. Awesome. So where was all this at Millennium when some silly bastard dragged his flu-ridden carcass up to Trafalgar Square to witness the 'once in a lifetime' show promised by Tony Bliar? Remember the 'River of Fire' we were promised? I don't and I was there looking at it. There certainly seemed to be some sort of river of fire thing going on last night, though. At one point, the display was so intense that the white-balance on the outside broadcast cameras went tits-up. I though they'd dropped the bomb for one moment. Yes, last night's celebrations were truly spectacular and fully deserved the months of hype. Unfortunately, the months of hype were all in Late 1999 and pillocks like me believed them. If only they'd said 'It'll be great! Just come back in five years and you'll see what we mean!'. It would've saved me a six mile walk home at two in the morning back then, too. Where was Ken Livingstone and his extra three hundred buses in '99, eh? Git.

One hundred and eighty-six applicants out of around eight hundred were rejected for the latest recruitment drive for Police Officers by Avon and Somerset Police because of their sex and the colour of their skin. They were male and white. These otherwise perfectly acceptable candidates were automatically paper-sifted because Avon and Somerset Police was already 'over-represented by white men'. Andy Palfreman, the Chairman of A&S Police Federation slammed the move by saying 'It's not lawful under sex or race discrimination Acts.' Batook Pandya, the director of Support Against Racist Incidents added 'People should be selected on their skills, not the colour of their skin.' Very true. Unfortunately, the Human Resources 'managers' at this (and certain other) Constabularies don't see it that way. In their heads, all minorities must be proportionally included in the make-up of their organisations, which means that if they have the choice between a five foot tall black lesbian and an ex-Marine to choose from to fight crime in their particular metropolis, then guess who gets the job? Now while I think the idea of a diverse make-up in any organisation is right and laudable, this is not the way to go about it. You don't reject people because they don't tick the boxes you're looking for; what you do is actively campaign and recruit within those areas and raise the profile of the job until you get the people you want coming forward. If they still don't want to join then accept it and move on, otherwise you end up bending over backwards and re-writing the criteria until the particular minority of your choice becomes the ideal candidate. 'Positive Discrimination', I believe it's called. A similar thing has been mooted recently by Education Authority bigwigs here in London, who are concerned that young black males are not doing as well in their educations as young white males. They suggest that the problem might be solved by teaching these kids in an all-black environment with black teachers. These specially segregated classes will, they say, rectify the lack of progress and encourage the kids to excel. It sounds reasonable, doesn't it? Having black children taught by black teachers to give them a better chance? Trouble is, you swap the word 'black' for 'white' in that last statement and what you have is a little thing known in South Africa as 'apartheid', and we all saw what a resounding success that was, didn't we?

The Government is proposing to introduce a National Curriculum for toddlers which aims to dictate how infants learn ‘communication, language and literacy.’ It will, predictably, create lots of jobs for otherwise unemployable Guardian readers and cost billions to implement. The Department for Education is keen that all young children learn ‘personal and social development together with a knowledge and understanding of the world’. Which, in a nutshell, boils down to ‘piss off back to work, Mum, while the state brainwashes your kids and turns them into obedient little Socialist robots.’ Can you just imagine the kind of thing a pre-school moppet will pick up if this insane idea gets off the ground? A healthy contempt for Britain and British history is undoubtedly a given, probably followed by a load of pro-European rhetoric and a comprehensive grounding in Islam by the age of four. The mind boggles. I know I shouldn’t get too concerned, seeing as a fair percentage of today’s school leavers can’t even spell their own names after eight years of New Labour education, it’s just that I seem to recall a similar scheme being adopted in Europe not so long ago. Germany went through it’s own phase of instilling state-approved ideals and values in it’s children from an early age to ensure they were educated ‘physically, intellectually and morally in the spirit of National Socialism.’ They called it ‘Hitlerjugend’. We called it the Hitler Youth…

Motorcycle deaths are down to their lowest levels in seven years. ROSPA; the Royal Society for the Prevention of Accidents says this is due to traffic calming measures such as speed bumps and the increase in Gatso cameras. Bollocks. The reason that deaths are down is twofold. Firstly, motorcyclists are much better trained these days and those who do finally get their hands on a licence are far safer road users than most pillocks on four wheels, and secondly, because the anti-biking Nazis who run this country have made the actual process of getting said licence so bloody hard with the two part test and initial b.h.p. limits, more and more seventeen year olds each year simply can't be bothered. The main killer of motorcyclists is, and always has been, the inattentive and unobservant wanker in the car and the sole reason that motorcycling deaths are down is that there a fewer motorcyclists than there were seven years ago. Soon, it will be by far and away the safest form of road transport because ther'll be no bikers left. When this happens, I've no doubt ROSPA will view it as a resounding success for their road safety campaigns. Twats.

It's October 21st 2005 - 'Trafalgar Day'. Two hundred years ago today, Admiral Lord Nelson led the British fleet to an overwhelming victory over the combined French and Spanish ships. By the end of the day, there were around 1,500 of our brave sailors killed or wounded. There were over 17,000 of the same on the other side. The victory cost Nelson his life, but it ensured the naval supremacy of this country for well over a century. No Nelson, no Empire. He was that important to our history. So how is the great man's achievement being honoured today? With an hour-long programme at teatime on BBC2 showing a commemoration ceremony live from Plymouth. No biography, no story of his colourful and scandalous love-life, no step-by-step explanation of the apparently suicidal way in which this tactical genius split his fleet in two and went straight at the enemy broadside before finally getting in among them, splitting their line into three and pounding them into kindling. No. One lousy hour of fireworks and maybe a ship or two, and why? Because, yet again, the powers that be would rather ignore this country's past than risk offending anybody by celebrating it. Perish the thought that we British should have a bit of national pride for a day. You won the Ashes, that's enough flag-waving for one year. We're a 'multi-cultural' society now and nobody wants to see your Union Jack, you nasty racist. Go away, it's nearly time for the Diwali celebrations. To be honest, I'm amazed that the BBC hasn't dropped that first 'B' in favour of an 'S' for 'State' yet, but I suppose it's only a matter of time. The least they could've done here in London was to throw a street party at Greenwich or give Nelson's Column a bit of a revamp. Instead, Ken Livingstone has placed a statue of a pregnant, armless woman on one of the plinths 'to celebrate disability'. If these Socialist wankers really want to venerate a disabled hero, I suggest they cast their eyes upward at the one-armed fellow with the eye-patch at the top of the column. The poor bastard must be looking down with his one good eye and wondering why he ever bothered...

Another month, another Hollywood remake. In 2006, we’re to be treated to yet another version of Superman, this time with X-Men director Bryan Singer at the helm. I’ve just seen the pictures of the bright young things cast as Lois and Clark and I can’t say I’m impressed. Brandon Routh, the guy playing geeky Clark, is all dark and smouldering; pouting away like a Calvin Klein model and Kate Bosworth (Lois) is about eighteen and blonde, which is excellent casting for a world-weary thirty year old chain-smoking cynic, don’t you think? It looks as if they were aiming for something that would feel like a big-screen version of ‘Smallville’, in which case why didn’t they just make a big screen version of ‘Smallville’ and be done with it? Bryan Singer is a gifted director who can get under the skin of his characters and display their weaknesses and humanity in a way that makes the audience genuinely care about what happens to them. Look at the way Nightcrawler was presented in ‘X2’, or how the death of Jean Grey was handled. And therein lies my problem with Superman. Superman isn’t human. He has no weaknesses. He is pretty much invulnerable and can do anything, even fly. Where’s the scope for human drama in that? Christopher Reeve and Margot Kidder gave it a pretty good go back in the Seventies, then in the Nineties we had Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher and a few years ago, up popped ‘Smallville’. Superman has been done, and done to death. He is a one-dimensional cartoon character and there is just no way anyone in this day and age will find any resonance with him, which is why I’m convinced this film will tank at the box-office. I hope it does, given that its budget has been estimated at $250 million. Maybe then Hollywood will stop all this ‘remake’ bollocks and look around for some fresh new ideas. Meanwhile, everyone can look forward to 'The Wicker Man', 'The Fog' and 'The Creature From The Black Lagoon' before that happens...

Ok, I'm slowly coming around to the idea that hands-free communication is a good idea in this busy twenty-first century world of ours, but I still have to do a double-take everytime I find myself next to somebody with one of those 'Bluetooth' headsets. It's not so much the fact that they have a piece of silver plastic in their ear with a flashing light on it, (if you really have to demonstrate your love of 'Star Trek' by impersonating Lt. Uhuru, then be my guest) but is it absolutely necessary to gesticulate wildly whenever you talk in public? You might think that standing in a bus-queue and talking in a raised voice whilst windmilling your arms and conducting what to the casual observer seems to be a one-way conversation with God gives you a 'switched-on man-about-town with the latest technology' kind of vibe. It doesn't. Two things are going through everybody's mind. An initial thought of 'nutter' which is then swiftly replaced (upon spotting the earpiece) by a final, dismissive one of 'twat'.

The following was posted in a national Australian newspaper out of Sydney. One day, in an ideal world, we'll see the same common-sense perspective applied to our own once-great nation. Obviously not while the current Government is in power, though...

   IMMIGRANTS, NOT AUSTRALIANS MUST ADAPT.

 'Take It or Leave It'  - I am tired of this nation worrying about whether we are offending some individual or their culture. Since the terrorist attacks on Bali, we have experienced a surge in patriotism by the majority of Australians. However, the dust from the attacks had barely settled when the "politically correct" crowd began complaining about the possibility that our patriotism was offending others. I am not against immigration, nor do I hold a grudge against anyone who is seeking a better life by coming to Australia. However, there are a few things that those who have recently come to our country, and apparently some born here, need to understand. This idea of Australia being a 'multicultural' community has served only to dilute our sovereignty and our national identity. As Australians, we have our own culture, our own society, our own language and our own lifestyle. This culture has been developed over two centuries of struggles, trials and victories by millions of men and women who have sought freedom. We speak ENGLISH, not Spanish, Lebanese, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, Russian, or any other language. Therefore, if you wish to become part of our society, learn the language! "In God We Trust" is our National Motto. This is not some Christian, right wing, political slogan. We adopted this motto because Christian men and women, on Christian principles, founded this nation, and this is clearly documented. It is certainly appropriate to display it on the walls of our schools. If God offends you, then I suggest you consider another part of the world as your new home, because God is part of our culture. If the Southern Cross offends you, or you don't like "A Fair Go", then you should seriously consider a move to another part of this planet. We are happy with our culture and have no desire to change, and we really don't care how you did things where you came from. This is OUR COUNTRY, OUR LAND, and OUR LIFESTYLE, and we will allow you every opportunity to enjoy all this, but once you are done complaining, whining, and griping about Our Flag, Our Pledge, Our National Motto, or Our Way of Life,  I highly encourage you take advantage of one other great Australian freedom, "THE RIGHT TO F**K OFF".

   Australians. God bless 'em! If only my family and I could afford to emigrate to this wonderful country, we'd be off like a bloody shot. South London ain't too hot anymore, know what I mean? Don't get me wrong, it's still a nice area of the country to live in, just as it was in the Fifties, it's just that, what with me not having Somalian as my first language, I tend to feel a little out of the loop living around here these days...

I've just noticed how quiet I've been on the whole Rant thing lately, could this possibly be that I'm mellowing in my dotage and am no longer capable of getting wound up over things? Don't you believe it! Today, I've been reading about the latest Government plans to fuck the motorist over for a few more quid. Transport Secretary Alistair Darling (you know him; the one with the white hair and black eyebrows. A bit like Steve Martin, but funnier) is thinking about charging you £1.34 a mile if you travel in peak times, but 'significantly' reducing the price of petrol to compensate. So far, nobody in the Opposition parties seems to have worked the maths out and noticed that if an average family car does 40 mpg, then even if they made the petrol free, you''d still be shelling out fifty-odd quid a gallon in real terms, which is precisely the argument they'd need to shoot this prick down with. Just another craft trick by a Scottish cabinet minister to screw the English; a bit like Gordon Brown stealing everone's pension and hoping they won't notice him borrowing nine billion a month to plug all the holes. Do you have any idea just how much nine billion is? If someone gave you a quid every second from now on, it'd take thirty-two years to reach nine billion and that fat knacker is running this country into debt for this much every month! Less than eight weeks since the General Election and these clowns are already lining up some truly world-class ideas, aren't they? Just imaging what treats we can all look forward to over the next four years...

For the benefit of a certain Mr. Gates; can you please stop pre-setting your word processing products to what you laughably refer to as 'American English'. There's no such thing as American English; there is 'English' and there is 'Bad Spelling'. The only word you Americans spell correctly in its original form is 'Aluminum', but this is small recompense for your consistent juvenile mangling of 'Color', 'Odor', 'Rumor' and virtually everything else that should have a 'u' in it. Written English has been evolving on this fair island for the last eighteen hundred years or so. Your version was brought over by a bunch of barely-literate religious oddballs on the Mayflower, yet you have the audacity to refer to it as if it were a seperate and distinct language instead of merely being the result of poor education passed down over the last few centuries. Wind your necks in and write correctly, you insolent tossers! And since I've already mentioned you at the beginning, Bill, here's another thought for you. Your corporate biography paints you as a God-fearing Christian. If that's the case, then how, as a  'rich man', do you square the parable of the camel and the eye of the needle with the fact that you personally own more in assets that the twenty poorest nations on this planet? Can you spell 'hypocrite'? Oh wait, you're American - you probably can't.

Another tale of life in the splendid world of the Civil Service... After years of breathing in chemical fumes in our darkroom at work due to the architect placing it in the middle of the building to create a 'light-trap' (which is great for being able to turn the lights off effectively, but not so good for finding an exterior wall to fix an air-conditioning outlet onto), the contractors (read: 'lowest bidders') have finally chosen this week to commence replacing all the old air-conditioning units in the place. If only they hadn't waited until it was minus one outside to completely knock out every temperature control in the entire building for a fortnight, thus rendering it an illegal working environment under Regulations Six and Seven (Ventilation and Temperature respectively) of the Workplace Regulations 1992 (guess who's a qualified Health and Safety Rep, then?), things might not have been too bad. As it was, well...have you ever tried signing paperwork while wearing gloves? Not an ideal situation and one that was beginning to get us all down, and so it came as quite a pleasant little surprise when, halfway through the day, we finally took delivery of the chilled water dispensers we'd ordered last summer when it was hitting thirty-two degrees in the aforementioned area. Never let it be said that management never listen to their staff, it's just that their hearing appears to work on a more 'geological' timescale than ours. And talking of management; there's still no sign of the new boss a full four weeks after his successful appointment as the head of our department. That'll be another 'mushroom', then.

We have a new boss at work, the seventh in the fifteen years that I've been stuck in that hell-hole. Now apart from the one boss who had actually come up through the ranks from the shop-floor and therefore knew everything about the job and was bloody good at it, all the others have either been 'mushrooms' or 'seagulls'. The mushroom bosses stayed hidden in their office happily smothered by a warm blanket of bullshit of their own making, while the seagulls were the ones who flew in out of nowhere squawking loudly before crapping over everything and pissing off again. I have yet to form an opinion on this new fella, except to say that in terms of getting my job done, it makes absolutely no difference whatsoever whose arse is sitting in the big chair. The people who use our services (I won't call them 'clients' because unlike some in our organisation, I'm not impressed by late-Eighties corporate American buzz-words) tend to contact us directly and book their jobs in over the phone. We then go out and deal with them of our own volition. It's referred to in business as 'self-tasking' and it enables a motivated team of professionals to get on with things efficiently and, in turn, make their boss look good without any input or interference from him whatsoever. This works so well that one of the previous bosses never even bothered to find out what we actually did ('you lot use lasers, don't you?') and only ever came into our office to leave a tin of biscuits at Christmas. In fact, now I come to think about it, never mind the big boss, the whole bloody management team could suddenly disappear (if only) and the work would still be done (probably quicker, too, as there'd be no pointless e-mails to read or meetings to attend.) Then again, there'd be no bugger left to sign the overtime that we're obliged to work due to us being understaffed, either, so I think we'll leave these guys in place for now. Just until the revolution, you understand...

Hot on the heels of Tony Blair promising to 'match' the British public's generosity in raising £100 million for the victims of the tsunami with tax-payer's money comes Gordon Brown's magnanimous gesture in offering to pay 10% of Mozambique's debts to other countries. This should also be around the £100 million mark and is on top of the fact that he's wiping £100 million off their debt to the UK anyway. While I agree that the latter is a fine gesture to a struggling nation, the first two actions merely show the utter contempt that this Government has for clowns like me who were stupid enough to vote for them last time. So £200 million of YOUR cash will soon be on its way to countries like France and Germany on Mozambique's behalf; money that could be used to employ more nurses to stem the flow of people dropping dead from MRSA in our filthy hospitals or maybe a few more policemen to combat the fact that gun-crime has doubled since New Labour came to power. Perhaps if that jug-eared twat and his fat Scottish side-kick spent a bit more time in this country doing the job that they were actually elected to do instead of giving handouts on the global stage, they might see just exactly what we as a nation have to show for eight years of pseudo-Socialist soundbites. Sod-all.

Now that the festive season is almost upon us, anyone watching the telly at teatime is going to get pounded into submission by all the toy adverts. This in itself is worthy of a rant, but what has really caused me to comment this time is an advert that has just been on for Scalextric. In a sequence full of flash-cuts and aggressive music, a couple of fantastically detailed racing cars scream around a huge track past trees, grandstands full of spectators and under bridges and lap-counters. A pair of lads watch with animated faces as they control their cars with fingertip-precision; roaring them on for lap after lap around the bends and curves of their massive track. This is pretty much the same way that the makers of Scalextric flogged it back in the Seventies, too. It was a load of lying bollocks then and it is now. Have you any idea how much it would cost to knock up a playset like those kids have? And there's simply no way you could lay that much track down - the amount of power you'd have to shove through it to get the cars moving would melt your carpet. It's a bleeding rip-off, just like it was twenty-five years ago when I got a set for Christmas and wondered why I was left staring at a three-foot long loop of disappointment on which two tiny pastic lumps accelerated insanely into the first bend before flinging themselves off the track and into the fireplace. Bridges? Pit-crews? 'Taters! It'd cost you half a year's wages to build the one you saw on the advert and it'd still take you all of three minutes to realise what a pile of over-rated wank the whole thing was. So there you have it, folks, Scalextric - the perfect metaphor for the sport it represents. Just like Formula One, it's overhyped, overmarketed, far too expensive and you'll have lost interest in it by the first bend. Avoid.

There was a programme on the other night about pandas. Now, I hate pandas. The nasty, fluffy black and white little bastards. They're not even proper bears, for fuck's sake! They're just jumped-up marsupials who're playing out of their league like those little spaced-out koala twats. And their refusal to abandon that 1979 Siouxsie Sioux look is getting right on my tits, too. This programme informed us that the Giant Panda only eats bamboo and has to munch it's way through pound after pound of the stuff to stay alive. Nutritionists have proven that bamboo has next to no vitamins or minerals and is almost pure fibre, which is why the stupid creatures have to eat the stuff for fourteen hours solid, leaving them so knackered that they sleep for the next ten before waking up and starting the whole routine again. Just to give you an idea of how mind-numbingly vacant these things are; if there is no bamboo around they will slowly starve themselves to death rather than tuck in to any of the other lush, green vegetation surrounding them. And this is the face of the World Wildlife Fund? No wonder they're an endangered species. Darwin proposed the notion of 'survival of the fittest' and quite right too. I say we chop down all the bamboo and consign the useless little wankers to history. They're too stupid to be allowed to pollute the planet with their prescence any longer. At least with a big stick we can get real bears to give us an entertaining dance...

Mediocre 'Twilight Zone' rip-off 'The X-Files' is released on DVD in a multi-disc extravaganza this month and to commemorate the 'event', one of the movie magazines ran an article about alien abductions. Funny, but have you noticed that all the people who claim to have had close encounters tend to be American? They usually follow the same pattern of some lone idiot driving along in a pick-up when all of a sudden a saucer lands and whisks him away in order to perform some bizarre experiments on him before dropping him off exactly where they found him. Yeah, right. I mean, have you ever studied basic astronomy? Even the nearest star to us is four light years away (which, for the hard-of-thinking among you means that a space-ship would have to travel at the speed of light for four years to get here.) Most astronomers seem to think that the nearest likely place for life is Sirius and that's a mind-boggling 8.7 light years away. Now, I don't know about you but if I was a member of an advanced alien civilisation, the last thing I'd want to do is spend the best part of a decade flying across the galaxy in order to examine some halfwit Redneck's anal cavity for an hour or two before sodding off again. At least I'd want to take the fucker with me to show the folks back home, wouldn't you?. Then again, these are Americans were talking about. No wonder they put the bastards back again. I imagine it's like when I used to catch frogs in a jam-jar as a kid.  Fun for a few minutes, but I soon got tired of it and went off to find something more interesting to do. Curiously though, I never felt the urge to interfere with Kermit's arse at all during his brief spell of captivity. Oh, those crazy extra-terrestrials...

It's the first weekend of October and Wolves are already just fifth from bottom and in real danger of being relegated from the SuperTopPremierChampionLeague, or whatever the fuck they're calling it this season (it's still the second division as far as I'm concerned.) Yesterday's humiliation was losing one-nil to West Ham, something that, living in London, I'm no doubt going to be reminded of for the next week or two. Now we keep getting told by their Chief Executive Jez Moxey that the club has to be run as a business, but it clearly isn't working is it Jez? In the real business world, companies tend to get the best out of their employees by offering incentives for results, so allow me to offer an idea. Instead of paying your (ahem) 'top' players X thousand more than your less gifted ones, how about paying them all the same wage and giving them a 100% bonus if they win? The difference between plain pay and double money should get the lazy bastards motivated. Add some extra bonuses for higher league placings and the fuckers will be promoted by the end of March. Or you could just carry on paying them huge sums regardless of performance and watch the crowds fall to 14,000 again when they drop, which will no doubt see you out the door, too. Your call Jez, you top business-type fella, you.

Meanwhile in Iraq, a bunch of loonies stuck in the twelfth century continue to saw the heads off Westerners too stupid to listen to their consulate when it tells them to leave because it's not safe. As I write this, two Americans have been beheaded and a British bloke is currently awaiting his turn. The Islamic vermin responsible want the release of certain female Islamic prisoners being held in the West and, predictably, Tony Blair is considering just such a move. This will send out the message that terrorism works, meaning we can all look forward to more of the same. The way to play this out would be to follow the German example when they dealt with the French Resistance in WWII. For every German soldier the French shot, the Germans rounded up a handful of French and blew them away and pretty soon there was very little resistance left. Instead of releasing these female prisoners, Tony should line them up in front of a camera and send his own tape to Al-Jazeera with a commentary along the lines of 'These are the ones you want releasing, right?. Your move, loonies.'  Then, if they kill our bloke, we give their girls a really close haircut. It'll never happen, of course, and why? Because we're concerned with their 'Human Rights' while they're concerned with 'Destroy The Infidels At Any Cost' and there's only ever going to be one winner in those circumstances, isn't there?

Seeing as though the weather forced me to spend most of this year's Cornish holiday either in the pub or nearest pasty shop, I figured that for the next month or two, I'd try and stick to the healthy option when it came to the lunchtime sandwiches I bought for work. Imagine my surprise then, when I glanced at the ingredients for my supposedly 'healthy' chicken fajita wrap this afternoon. Apart from the tortilla and the chicken itself, I found such wonderfully diverse things as raising agent E400, glycerol, E500, emusifier E471, preservative E282, acidity regulator E262, colour E160a, preservative E330, emulsifier E433, stabiliser E412 and preservative E260. Further down the list came peppers, salsa and finally sour cream. Now at the risk of being sued, I shaln't divulge the name of the supermarket I bought this little gem from, but let's just say that if this is one of their 'Be Good To Yourself' products I'd hate to see what their 'Fill Yourself Up With Carcinogenic Shit' range has to offer...

If there's one thing I can't stand it's a multi-millionaire with a fucking social conscience. It was bad enough when Sting dragged that poor plate-faced Amazonian twat around the chat-show circuit in order to raise awareness for the rainforests, but the latest one to jump on the bandwagon is really getting on my tits. Step forward Paul Hewson, or fucking 'Bono' as he prefers to be known. Chap, if you're that concerned about Third World debt, why not use some of your immeasurably vast fortune to do something about it, rather than inflicting your tedious soap-boxing on anyone who'll listen. Nelson Mandela may be impressed, but the rest of us aren't. Never mind 'Live Aid II', If this really means so much to you, why not organise a global sponsored silence? You agree never to record another boring sub-standard 'rock-song-for-the-middle-aged-homeowner' and we'll all give you a quid to fuck off and never come back. This approach sounds far more reasonable to me, Boner old son. You'd no doubt make a fortune for your African pals and we'd all be spared anymore of your God-awful Simple Minds tribute band soundalike records. Oh, and those yellow shades make you look a twat, too. Twat.

Have you noticed that whenever somebody asks you how you are, they don't actually give a shit? This really annoys me, as it's a total waste of my time. You bump into someone you haven't seen for a while and don't particularly like anyway and it's 'Hello, how are you?'  You're expected to reply 'Fine, thanks. Yourself?' to which they'll come back with 'Oh, not too bad' before you both begin a perfectly avoidable conversation. People are so socially conditioned to perform this ridiculous routine that you can really derail them when you refuse to play. Try it. Next time someone asks you how you are, put your hand on their shoulder and give them your best 'wounded puppy' expression as you croakily utter 'I've not been well.' For added emphasis, take a step forward into their personal space and cough as you begin a long, descriptive account of your imaginary ailments. Use words like 'septic', 'discharge' and 'contagious' and they'll be out of your face and halfway down the road before you know it.

I've just watched the highlights of the latest Wolves defeat (4-1 at home to Southampton), and as far as I'm concerned, that's the end of our Premiership campaign for a few more years. There are many reasons why we've been so shite in our first time in the top fight, but the biggest one is the fact that our 'Chief Executive', Jez Moxey, is a twat. He has been quoted as saying that a football team must be run as a business, and that you can't just go round buying players to get youself out of trouble. Fair enough, Jez, but here's a thought. Being in the Premier League brings in a guaranteed £20+ million quid every season with another three or four million coming in through other associated sponserships. Add in the fact that there's a full house at Molineux every home game and I'd say that you had a pretty good incentive to splash out six or seven million on the transfer market last January in order to secure another twenty million pound payday next year, but did you? Did you bollocks! You couldn't even be bothered to sort out the twelve players that will be out of contract in the summer. Result? Relegation, the loss of twenty million quid and the home gates down by six or seven thousand a week next season. Run a business, Jez? I wouldn't trust you to run a bath, you clueless fucker...

The P.C. Brigade are having a pop at the deaf now. They reckon that some of the signings used to indicate people of other nationalities and persuasions are offensive. The signs for a Chinaman (pulling the corner of one's eye to make it appear slanted), an Indian (finger pointing to centre of forehead to indicate a bindi) and a homosexual person (limp, hanging wrist) are all deeply distressing and should be replaced immediately. Therefore, the sign for a Chinaman is to become a finger moved from the heart to the right shoulder and then to the hip (supposedly indicating a traditional Chinese tunic.) The sign for an Indian becomes a traced finger-outline of the shape of India's coastline (?), and a homosexual person will be indicated by - wait for it - placing a clenced fist on one palm while giving a wobbly 'thumbs up'. I can think of my own sign for the bearded, lentil-eating prick who came up with this crap. Two fingers, followed by a fist moving rapidly forward.

The global march of the corporate fat cat continues, with HSBC, the former Midland Bank, posting record-breaking profits of over seven billion pounds. That's pretty good isn't it? I bet the next time you get charged twenty quid for going a few pence overdrawn, you'll be saying, "Well, at least my bank made seven billion quid profit this year!" Given the state of the financial markets anyway, I really don't see the point of giving your money to Sir John Bond and his overpaid cronies to look after. Why not buy a load of gold sovereigns and stick them in a strongbox instead? They're bound to be worth more in a few years and at least you'll have the pleasure of knowing that no useless suit who couldn't change a lightbulb in the real world will have been leeching off your hard-earned to finance his portfolio. Curiously, HSBC shares dipped 8.5p when the announcement was made. Could it be that people are finally getting sick of only making a few pence a year interest on their current accounts while Bond and his ilk pick up millions in perks and share options? There's hope for you lot yet...

Look, if you're going to use the escalator on the Underground at the same time as me then there's a couple of things we ought to get straight. It's a moving staircase, ok? That means you just stand there and you get taken to the top. Simple, eh? You don't need to walk up the fucker - it's going that way on it's own. What you do is stand quietly and enjoy the ride. What you don't do is come up behind me, slap your briefcase into the back of my knee and say 'Excuse me' in a whiny, stroppy tone of voice because all that's going to get you is a smack. You want to walk? Take the stairs, that's what they're there for. Otherwise, chill. You'll live longer...

I'm really getting to hate all of those bastards who insist on owning a sodding great four-litre 4x4 when they live in the middle of London. What in God's name do they think they're playing at? What possible use do they have for variable transmission, apart from making a quick getaway from their kid's school in the next street after they've dropped them off. And I bet they're really grateful for those huge great tyres when they have to mount the kerb to get their fat arses two paces nearer to the fucking cashpoint, aren't they? As for those bull bars on the front; well, when that rogue elephant thunders toward them down Chiswick High Street, at least they'll know that the collision damage on their metallic paint will be kept to a minimum. Finally, a special note to those with the top of the range model with the winch on the front. Why not use it to see if you can pull your head out of your arse, you twat.

I'm utterly sick of the double standards employed in this country when it comes to the whole 'European Community' thing. I mean, whenever you have to fill in your height and weight these days, it has to be in centimetres and kilogrammes. Now I haven't got a Scooby how much I weigh in metric but I know it exactly in imperial. However, you're not allowed to do that anymore as we're all part of the grand European vision. Funny thing though, if anyone asks you how much your baby weighed at birth and you tell them three point five eight kilos, they'll look at you as if you'd just eaten a stoat. Tell them seven pounds fourteen ounces and they instantly know what you're on about. They have a frame of reference and they can picture it. No one wants five hundred and sixty-eight fluid ounces of beer, but they'll happily have a pint. So it really annoys me to read about the Government prosecuting shopkeepers who sell stuff in pounds and ounces - particularly when the same Government adamantly refuses to convert all the road signs to kilometers ever since it's own internal report suggested such a move would 'totally alienate' the voting public. Bunch of two-faced tossers...

You know those viewing figures that they publish every week to let you know that 'Eastenders' is getting less viewers than 'Coronation Street'? Well, these figures are based on a system that logs the viewing habits of more than 200,000 people with special T.V. boxes throughout the country. Their weekly telly is analysed before being 'averaged up' to create the national figure. Thing is, any channel registering less that 1,250 viewers is rated as a zero viewing figure for official purposes. Guess how many BBC Digital Television and Radio channels were given a zero rating at one point or another in the last twelve months? Thirty-seven. Guess how much of YOUR money was wasted on unwanted broadcasts that nobody took any notice whatsoever of? Two hundred and seventy-nine million quid. So next time you find yourself wondering why you're watching Indoor Crown Green Bowling on a Saturday afternoon instead of Premiership Football, you'll know why.

Returning to the previous Rant; a survey commissioned by one of the broadsheets found that a colossal 97% of the public felt that, far from being racist, Kilroy's comments merely reflected the right to free speech that millions of Britons died for in two World Wars. Not that the Left will see it that way, of course. Funny how this racism thing seems to be a one-way street, doesn't it?  I mean, there's hook-handed fundamentalist Muslim 'cleric' Abu Hamza preaching hatred against the West every week outside his Mosque in Finsbury Park and yet nobody objects to him having his say. The man is even given a police escort to and from his council house and still no-one bats an eyelid. Just imagine if Kilroy was claiming state benefit like Hamza. They'd have lynched the poor bastard by now...

Robert Kilroy-Silk has been sacked from the BBC for allegedly 'racist' comments. Apparently, he reckons the Arab states are 'promoting suicide bombers, amputating limbs and repressing women'. How dare you, Robert! You know Tony doesn't like it when people decide to make their own minds up based on the facts, rather than blandly accept the Government's point of view. You're like the little boy who told the crowd that the Emperor had no clothes on. He was perfectly within his rights to do so, but he still got a clip round the ear all the same. Bad racist! Off to commercial radio with you...

Hands up if you've been dumb enough to sign up for one of the New Year magazine collection scams. You know the ones - get your first issue and 'thing' for only £1.99 and spend the next two years shelling out a tenner a month to clutter your house up with tawdry crap. This year's selections are particularly hideous. We've got the 'Lord of the Rings' (badly) hand-painted metal figures (is it Gandalf? is it Dumbledore? no, it's the Archbishop of Canterbury), the build-your-own Red Baron biplane (look at the size of that Fokker!) and the predictably dull 'Teach Yourself Calligraphy or Crochet or Computers' ones. There is however, a publication that towers over all the others in terms of sadness - the 'Collectible Delivery Vans of Yesteryear' magazine, where six quid a fortnight gets you a toy car and a factsheet. Wow. Just how empty does your life have to be before signing up to this one seems like a good move? If you ever see me buying something like this, kill me. Please.

Ok, so who fell for the New Year's Resolution crap again this year? Why do people insist on conning themselves with this ridiculous social conditioning year after year? You can hear them at a minute past midnight in every house up and down the land promising to cut back on the booze or knock the fags on the head. Ask them again on the sixth or seventh if their resolutions are still intact and they'll tell you with a guilty smile that they just couldn't stick to it. I've been through all this shit myself on many occasions in the past, which is why this year I decided to make one that I could keep with the minimum of stress. My Resolution for 2004 is to headbutt anybody who tells me to 'Have a Nice Day'. That way, genuinely, one of us will.

Its just been on the news that at least twenty thousand people have been killed in an earthquake in Iran. Now there's no way I'm going to even try and get an amusing observation out of such carnage...but have you noticed that anytime there's a disaster of some sort in the Middle East, there always seems to be a little old woman dressed in black wearing a black scarf wailing at the top of her lungs and waving her arms in the air? I'm convinced it's always the same woman and ITN have got her on the payroll. Anytime they get the tip-off, they call her agent and arrange to meet her on site. 'Right, love, straighten that scarf and give us plenty of anguish...in 3, 2, 1 and - action!'

What is it that makes people want to spend eight quid to sit behind me in the cinema and have a fucking good chat?

We're on the home run to Christmas, and this is the week where cards start coming through your door from all those 'friends' who can't be bothered to pick up the fucking phone and speak to you from one December to the next. Now don't get me wrong, it's always nice to hear from old aquaintances, but come on! There are fifty-one other weeks in the year for these people to show you they give a shit that you're alive, but do they bother?  Do they 'taters! Yet, regular as clockwork, you can guarantee that their cards will be the first ones through your door every Yuletide, positively dripping with 'See you in the New Year' sentiments. One thing's for sure - it's a foregone conclusion that if you're unfortunate enough to drop dead in 2004, the first ham sandwich consumed at your wake will be eaten by some bastard you haven't spoken to for twenty years...

Above all else - above every single little thing on this planet that annoys me (and you folks know that's a pretty substantial list) - there's one thing guaranteed to cause the red mist to descend and put me in a skull-fracturing frame of mind. Whistling. What is it that makes certain people want to publicly broadcast a piss-poor, wind-powered rendition of a crap tune whenever they sit next to me on the bus? Its always the same culprits, too - old men of a certain age. You know; the ones that wear tank-tops under their jackets and insist on putting on a tie every day even though they finished work fifteen years previously. You got a tune in your head, Grandad? Fine, I've got a fist in my pocket. What say we do each other a favour and keep them both where they are, eh?

Yesterday saw the last ever flight of a Concorde, bringing the age of supersonic passenger flight to an end. Aviation experts say that it is unlikely there will ever be supersonic passenger travel again as it is too expensive. Well, that's great news, don't you think? Bollocks to technological advancement, let's all stop designing stuff because it costs too much. Imagine if the Egyptians had adopted that mindset. 'Pyramid? Sod that, let's just stack a couple of slabs up there and we can all go home.'  Whatever happened to national pride? The cream of post-war British boffins designed Concorde as transport for the future; I wonder what they think at seeing us taking such a big step backwards? Why not go the whole hog and shut down Rover, too? I mean, cars are really pricey to run, aren't they? Let's all go buy a horse, we'll save a fortune.

All the newspapers are banging on about George Bush's visit this week. Apparently, it'll be the first full state visit ever by an American President and will cost something in the region of £6.5 million (enough to pay for 150+ extra policemen, if you're interested.) An estimated 14000 police will be on duty during his three day stay, not to mention the 700 strong entourage the man himself will bring. Everyone from armed Secret Service agents to personal chefs. Something like 250,000 people are expected to march through London demonstrating against him (not that he'll hear them as the glass in his armoured limo is three inches thick.) 'Experts' are popping up all over the place to talk about terrorist threats and security issues and generally, the whole of this great city is in a bit of a tizz. Curious, then, that the only thing that crosses my mind at this time is how much old Dubya resembles a chimpanzee. Check out www.bushorchimp.com and you'll see where I'm coming from. 

The Home Secretary has announced that any Asylum Seeker/Economic Migrant/Scrounging Bastard (delete depending on your point of view) who was resourceful enough to smuggle his raggedy arse into the country will be allowed to stay here, no questions asked, as it would be cheaper for the tax-payer in the long-run than processing all the deportation appeals. For God's sake, Dave, put the dog in charge - at least it might be able to see the scale of the problem...

You know when you wake up in the middle of the night and start pondering life, the universe and everything? Well, there I was at three this morning wondering about the concept of Heaven (like you do.) Now, I had a Catholic School upbringing (taught by Jesuits, no less) which almost killed the whole religion thing for me. Nevetheless, I'm amazed at the amount of people who profess to want to go to Heaven when they die. Think about it; if the Bible is to be believed then those who praise God the most stand the best chance of getting through the Pearly Gates. Aside from the question this raises about God's self-esteem (is He really that insecure?), just imagine the type of people you'd be spending eternity with. All those regular Sunday church-goers with their nice hats, the Salvation Army, the born-again brigade and let's not forget the happy-clappy fruit-cakes with their guitars. Sound like your idea of fun? If not, then it's Hell for you, fella, and that's where established Christianity falls apart for me. You can either suck up to the Big Guy all you life and then spend the hereafter doing more of the same or it's pitchforks up the arse time. Crap choice, innit? Where's the middle ground? So basically, I've decided to spend the rest of my life being a Viking Berserker. That way, when I shuffle off this mortal coil it's going to be meat, mead and Valkyries and plenty of it! If you can think of a better afterlife, you're welcome to it, but if not, I'll see you there and the first one's on me!

The BBC have just announced that they're putting the licence fee up again next year. It's going from £116 to £122. Now, I know I'm not the only one who hates shelling out extortionate amounts of money to this government-approved monopoly year after year. It really pisses me off paying these jokers when I watch a grand total of about four of five BBC programmes per week. I'm not a big telly watcher anyway, but that's not the point, they say. Apparently, I'm paying for the privilege of owning a televisual receiver, and it's purely incidental whether I choose to view the BBC's content or not; it's there if I want it. Fine. I'll send Greg Dyke a £122 bill for having the ability to access this site. I mean, it's there if he wants it, isn't it? The more I think about the BBC, the angrier I get. Take their marketing, for example. The bastards have the audacity to sell DVDs and videos of programmes that you and I and every other licence-payer have paid them to create! They should be sending each new DVD out to all of us with a bloody thank-you note, never mind trying to flog them using airtime that we've all bought for them! Wankers! The sooner everybody goes pay-per-view and puts these jokers out of business, the better.

The University of Pennysylvania have announced a revolutionary medical breakthrough. After years of experimentation, the boffins there have announced that they have succeeded in increasing the muscle mass of mice by 40% using injections of human growth hormone. Well, that's fantastic news, don't you think? Years of scientific study and capital investment to produce a rodent capable of unwrapping it's own Edam. I bet all the cancer sufferers and AIDS victims in Pennysylvania are positively delighted at the world-class level of bio-engineering being pioneered in their fair city.

My biggest ambition in life is to be rich enough to have nothing better to do with my money than buy mail-order tat from the back of the Sunday colour supplements. You know the sort of thing - plates with kittens on them, porcelain children pushing a wheelbarrow, Elvis clocks and the like. The day I win the lottery, I'll devote my waking moments to the aquisition of every last piece of magazine crap I can get my hands on. However, if I searched for a hundred years, I could never find anything as vulgar and tasteless as the statue I saw in last Sunday's magazine - a fifteen-inch high hand-painted resin model of the World Trade Centre entitled 'In Remembrance' and priced at £55. It was absolutely fucking hideous. I've just got to buy one and glue a small model jet nose-first halfway up the left tower. Realism is the key to this sort of thing, don't you think?

One of my favourite times of the year is fast approaching - Hallowe'en. I love taking the time and trouble to re-educate the youth of today away from indoctrinated American bollocks, namely 'Trick or Treat'. Join me if you will on the big day by following my example. Fill an empty washing-up liquid bottle with urine (your own, if you like) and hide behind your letterbox. When the little bastards knock the door and yell "Trick or treat!", simply reply "Trick!", and give them a squirt.  It's not cruel, it's character-building. Years from now, they'll look back fondly and thank you for it.

This year's crime figures were released recently and made interesting reading. Violent Crime was up 12%. Murder up 7%. Criminal Damage up 6%. Sex Offences up 5%. Gun Crime up 3% and Drug-related crime up 2%. 'Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime', right Tony? Wanker...

If there's one thing guaranteed to put a smile on my face, it's a celebrity suicide. Courtney Love was the latest one to try her hand this week, but unfortunately, her 'cry for help' was heeded in time. Don't you just love it? There's something inherently funny in famous people offing themselves when they've got a lifestyle that the rest of us would kill for. My favourite one was 'INXS' frontman Michael Hutchence, found hanging from his belt in his hotel room in an auto-erotic accident. A good-looking famous guy with thirty million quid in the bank could afford to have every prostitute in the city lining up around the block to clean his clock-weights, but no, he chose to wank himself to death. Hilarious! With this in mind, I've decided to resurrect the 'Dead Pool Sweepstake' at work. For a £1 stake, anyone can nominate a celebrity who they feel is close to the edge. If their choice shuffles off this mortal coil before anybody else's, they win the pot. Last time I ran one of these, one of my mates took £42 thanks to Paula Yates. Set one up at your own workplace, it's great for a laugh. To make it even easier, you don't have to stick to the suicides, just dead will do! Come on, Barrymore, come on...

One thing that really jacks me off at work is those people who disappear for a cigarette break for ten minutes every hour. In a typical working day, that's eighty minutes that they're not working. Or, put another way, five hours a week. Multiply this out over a year and it's something like nine and a half days spent sucking on a burning leaf. Well, I for one would like an extra nine and a half days leave credited to my card, but that's not going to happen is it, so I propose a more suitable solution. Everytime my colleagues go off for a fag, I'm going for a wank. All you non-smokers out there, join me in this protest! (although not literally) It's certainly cheaper than smoking (tissues cost less that ciggys) and it'll make you feel a lot better afterwards. What's more, the risks to your health are virtually non-existent. In fact, apart from slight repetitive strain disorder and possibly blindness, it's risk-free. Best of all though - you'll be getting paid for knocking one out. Fantastic!

Ever since I started going to rock pubs as a long-haired youth twenty years ago, I've always wanted to have a leather jacket professionally painted with my favourite album cover. For years I used to see these guys with their 'Iron Maiden' and 'Metallica' designs boldly displayed on their leathers and I'd think 'I wish I knew someone who could paint like that.' So, imagine my joy last year when I found out that a friend of a friend was an artist - and a bloody good one - and he was willing to paint one for me. Fantastic! So now, I am the proud owner of a superbly painted leather (cheers, Paul!) featuring a perfect image of Kate Bush from 'The Kick Inside'. Yes, after two decades of wishing I now have my perfect jacket. Except that I am no longer a long-haired youth, I am a thirty-five year old man with a shaved head, a goatee beard, ear-rings and a pierced face. These days, in a leather, I've realised to my dismay that I'm a dead-ringer for Rob Halford from Judas Priest. I look outrageously, totally and unashamedly gay. Add this to the fact that my favourite pub in London, 'The Intrepid Fox' is located in the heart of Soho, just around the corner from the world-famous gay bar,'The Admiral Duncan' and you can easily appreciate the inherent humour of the situation. So can I, ducky, so can I...

Ten years ago, a CD player would've set you back four or five hundred quid. Nowadays you can pick one up for forty. Ten years ago you'd have paid five hundred pounds for a Nicam video recorder, these days - sixty notes, tops. This pattern is repeated in virtually all electrical property from televisions to computers. The longer things exist, the cheaper they get. So, why doesn't this apply to other products, then? Insurance, for example. Why do we have to pay more each year to insure our ever-depreciating vehicles despite seeing our no-claims increase? I recently threw out all my old motoring documents and was absolutely gob-smacked to see what I'd shelled out on motorbike insurance in the last decade. If I hadn't been wasting money on something I've never needed, I'd have been riding a hand-built Benelli instead of an old Kawasaki. Fucking parasites.

Mankind has ever proven adept at finding names for things. Animals, trees, fish and birds in all their endless variety have been named. Stars and galaxies millions of light years away have been indexed and catalogued. Even bacteria and viruses that we can't even see have their own titles. So why is it that some of the most fundamental parts of our own body have been given such crap names? I'm talking toes, people. The first part of our bodies that we become aware of and look at the imaginative terms we have for descibing them. 'Big Toe', 'Little Toe', and not forgetting the spectacularly titled 'Middle Toe'. However, that still leaves two toes unaccounted for. What gems have we come up with for referring to them? What wondrous terms has the English language found for these appendages? 'The One Next To The Big Toe', 'The One Next To The Little Toe'. Priceless.

I'm starting to get really annoyed by all these people I keep seeing wearing ridiculous t-shirts from 'French Connection' . You know, the ones that have 'fcuk' written boldly across the chest. If these people are trying to look dangerous and interesting, then I've got news for you, kiddies - you don't. No one is shocked by them either. All you're doing is making youself look a sda cnut.

Filling in a form at work the other day, and I'm asked to indicate my nationality by ticking the appropriate box. Among the choices were 'White-British', 'White-Irish' and 'White-Other'. Everytime I'm faced with a form like this, I tick 'White-Other' and specify 'English' in the space provided. I'm sick of being labelled as 'British'. Devolution has been and gone and the Welsh are allowed to be Welsh and the Scots, Scots, yet English people are told that we must be British and proud of it. Well, I don't want to be. I want to be English, but I'm not allowed to even voice that thought in Tony's Brave New World as the 'racist' alarms go off. Researching this subject further, I was not at all surprised to learn that the Welsh and Scottish Assemblies still get to have a say in English lawmaking and policies. Why? You've got your own parliaments now, sod off! Funnier still is the fact that the Welsh and Scottish are still getting healthy chunks of English tax-payers money, too. Surely if they were that keen to sever all ties with Westminster, they'd be only too happy to generate their own revenue, wouldn't you think?

If there's one thing I really have no time for, it's religious stereotypes. Being a lapsed atheist, I've spent a lot of time studying comparative religions, and they basically all boil down to the same thing, which is along the lines of  'Everybody Should Be Nice To Everyone Else.' Not the most complicated of starting points, you might think, and yet every faith on the planet seems to insist on putting their own slant on it. The most ridiculous of which is undoubtedly to be found in religious clothing and symbolism. Is it actually written down anywhere in the Koran that in order to be a good Muslim you must wear a long white shift? Does the Talmud insist that you're not a proper Jew unless you are attired in a black coat and funny hat? Of course not, it's merely stereotyping and it's ridiculous. Every religion I've studied states that it's Divine Being created Life to be celebrated in all it's infinite variety. Do you really think that any God having gone to all that trouble to show off His creative skills is going to be happy that His followers are all obsessed with looking the bloody same? I think not. The worst culprits have got to be the Christians, though, who insist on using a cross as a symbol of their faith. Should Jesus ever feel inclined to return to us worthless monkeys, how do you think He's going to feel seeing all those constant reminders to an excrutiatingly painful death plastered ecerywhere? I mean, it might just annoy the guy. Is this wise?

Typical bloody Britain. One sunny/snowy/rainy day and everything goes to rat-shit. It's ninety degrees today and the rail networks are slowing every train down to a crawl because they're afraid the steel in the lines might buckle in the heat, taking a 90mph train down to something like 50 mph.. I reckon we should take a leaf out of some hot nation's book and see how they manage to run a railway in extreme heat. Let's see...how about India? The Indian Rail Network, although frequently overcrowded, always manages to run on it's rails at full speed, despite consistantly hitting temperatures in excess of 110 degrees. We should find the guys who designed and built India's network and get them to revamp ours. Not a bad idea, until you realise that it was British engineers using British steel who put India's rail superstructure into place and yet we can't seem to get it together in the nation that gave birth to the bloody railway in the first place. Good here, innit?

Currently leading my list of People Who Need A Good Kicking is whoever it is that insists on sticking a dozen leaflets in the middle of every magazine that I ever buy. They're always the same bloody companies, too. It's either 'Britannia Music' offering you any album you like as long as it's in the Top 20, or it's 'MBNA Credit Card' wanting to lend you money you haven't got to buy things you don't want. It smacks of low-budget desperation somehow, don't you think? I mean, if these firms wanted your custom that badly, they'd advertise on TV or radio like other companies.

Went on the London Eye the other day. Christ, where to start...? Ok, firstly, it's owned by British Airways, which means that the first thing you do is follow one of those annoying roped-off switchback queues until you get to the counter where you can purchase the £11 ticket for your 'flight'. If you got together with a few friends and booked a car to yourselves, you can wait in the 'departure lounge' prior to 'embarking' (I'm not making this up.) Next, you get offered a travel pack for £6, which consists of a plastic bag containing a flimsy pamphlet and a bag of Smarties. Finally, you have the option of purchasing a sight-seer's guide to maximise the experience of your thirty-minute flight - cost? A fiver to you, squire. While you're up there, revelling in the total lack of sensation that only a really slow ride on a oversized ferris-wheel can give, they take your photograph which you can purchase when you 'disembark' for a further £7. So there you have it, the best part of thirty quid for what is easily the most underwhelming half-hour of entertainment that London has to offer. I could've had more fun in a cat-litter.

For the life of me, I can never understand those people you see on trains who start queueing up by the door ten minutes before the train pulls into the station. Where do they think they're going? The West-Coast run into London Euston has the worst culprits. As soon as we've passed Wembley, two-dozen arseholes suddenly leap up and shuffle toward the doors. We're still six miles out, you gibbons, sit down and give your brains a rest! I've found a way to annoy these idiots, though, what I do is sit in the nearest doorway with all my bags on the floor around me and read 'Kerrang' or 'Viz' or some other anti-social mag until the train comes to a complete stop. Then, and only then, do I get up and calmly stuff the magazine into my bag before slowly opening the door and stepping out. Honestly, if I had a quid for every 'tut' I've heard...

I nearly got wiped out on a pedestrian crossing today by a cyclist. This isn't the first time this has happened, either. There I stood, patiently waiting until the lights went red and the green man started to bleep. I stepped out, and from nowhere some lycra-clad wanker with his head stuck in a bowling-ball goes flying past my nose at 30mph. These guys are a menace and should be made to pay road-tax and insurance like the rest of us. A nominal charge of £10 a year would encourage all cyclists to be a bit more responsible (although any grown man who chooses to wear lycra should be made to pay at least triple that on general principle, the sad bastard.)

Dancing. Why? What is it in some people's genetic make-up that makes them want to jerk their arms and legs about in a random fashion when they hear a piece of music? I'm not talking about dancing with your partner to a slow, seductive waltz or a sizzling tango. This is perfectly acceptable and we could all do with more of it. No, I'm talking about standing two inches away from another sweaty idiot at two in the morning and acting like an epileptic with his dick in the mains in the hope that the blonde piece in the corner will see you for the stud you are and want your body.Women are quite happy to dance alone or with other women because they are naturally more graceful than men and can pull off dancing without looking stupid. Men only ever attempt it if they are either gay or drunk, neither of which is going to impress the ladies. Stay at the bar, gentlemen. Preserve your dignity.

Why do shops still insist on the ridiculous practice of pricing things at '£something .99'? Is there anything weirder than handing over a nice, crispy note and getting a penny back? It gets worse when the word 'only' is involved, as they have no idea of when to stop. 'Only £9.99' is viable, but when you see cars advertised as 'Only £19,999', we're getting into the realms of urine extraction. Stop insulting my intelligence and let's call it twenty grand. You can keep the change...

I tried valiantly to watch a game of American Football the other day, but had to give up after two and a half hours as I was bored shitless. How this pantomime attracts the gates that it does is beyond me, yet the Yanks love it. It must be one of those things that simply doesn't work on this side of the Atlantic, like iced coffee or Adam Sandler. In American Football, each side has two teams, one for when they're attacking and another for when they defend. They can call 'time-outs' and stop the play to discuss tactics, they all wear huge body armour and helmets and they are absolutely obsessed by figures and data. Reams of numbers were regularly flashed up on the screen telling me how many yards of possession each bloke had made, how many passes he'd received, along with his height, weight, college and for all I know, sexual history. Yet, each time we try and sell them on the idea of real football (you can stick the term 'soccer' up your 'ass'), they turn round and tell us they don't get it. Bizarre. This is not the only example of the weird American taste in sport, they also have Baseball (though to be fair, us Brits do occasionally play this provided we are a) female and b) under twelve - it's called 'rounders'.) Then there's Basketball, where every single match ends with a score like 112 - 113 because it's played like this: Slap, slap, slap, dunk - Blues score. Slap, slap, slap, dunk - Reds score (repeat for an hour.) The ultimate in pointless American sports though, has got to be NASCAR, where they take a bunch of insanely powerful supercharged cars and race them. Round and round in a circle. A lot. Yawn. It would be easy to conclude from this that all American sports are crap until you remember that they did give us Foxy Boxing and Topless Beach Volleyball. Good old Uncle Sam!

Richard Branson wants to buy up British Airways' fleet of Concordes and run them as Virgin's trans-atlantic flagship service. Given the total chimp's fist that the bloke made of this country's rail network, I for one am looking forward to hearing the tannoys at Heathrow in the future..."Virgin Airlines would like to announce that the 11-15 to New York is running approximately three hours late and will today be re-routed via Rugby due to over-running engineering work in the Milton Keynes area. We apologise for any inconvenience that this may cause to your journey."

Summer's here and predictably, out come the cabriolets. I've never understood how a vehicle containing half the seats and equipped with a cloth roof can cost twice as much as a proper car, but I suppose it's a matter of taste. However, I am totally at a loss to explain the popularity of the so-called 'Smart' car. What's so smart about driving around in an underpowered motorised pram? You look a complete pipe and you've paid eight grand for the priviledge of doing so...

Talking of cars, the new Mini is available in a British Racing Green option, which is somewhat amusing for a small German car, but there you go. The only problem is that a certain branch of estate agents in West London have taken to embellishing this by painting yellow 'flames' and an individual 'racing number' on the sides. I saw three of these in the same road in Chiswick last week, which was bad enough, but the prize went to the guy - presumably the 'team leader' - who'd topped his off with a personalised registration. Now I can just see the attraction of having a personalised registration if you are rich enough to afford one that works, like 'DAV 1D' or 'B1 LLY', but when all your budget can stretch to is the likes of  'H3 COL', and that on a company car, then you really are one sad individual.

You know what I really hate? People who insist on wearing their work ID round their neck on a chain while they're on their lunch break. Every day in the sandwich shop, you can see them all queueing up with their name-tags on display like a row of smug Paddington Bears. Tuck them in your pockets, you tossers, No-one cares who you are or who you work for!

Woodpigeons. I have one of these moaning, asthematic little bastards living in a tree outside my bedroom window and every morning at five o'clock it treats me to a stirring rendition of it's timeless classic - 'Hoo HOO hoo' - until I get so jacked-off with it that I have to get up and put the kettle on. Now, the old lady over the road from my mom used to have a budgie that could whistle, sing and shout 'Pretty Joey' and even 'Pissbag!' which is much more impressive I'm sure you'll agree. What's more, it was only about a quarter of the size of the feathered prat in my garden, so it is with this thought in mind that I have decided to give Woody precisely one week to learn a new repertoire or it's Webley time.

The actor's union, Equity, is probably one of the most elitist (not to mention stroppiest) on the planet. You or I are allowed to have a 'walk-on' part in a TV programme, but if we want to speak, we have to belong to Equity. However, to even be considered for Equity, you have to have spent a considerable (and quantifiable) amount of time doing all sorts of stuff like street theatre, amateur dramatics, busking etc, until you finally get accepted and receive the Holy Grail of membership. So it always makes me laugh when I see Children's TV characters like the Teletubbies or the Fimbles, because inside each one of these seven-foot fluffy costumes is a 'serious' actor who has struggled for years to earn the right to make a complete dick of himself on national telly.

I have this theory which I have honed from years of conversations with my friend Brian and it's this - 'Everyone Called Brian Is A Cock'. Now many long and animated hours have been spent trying to knock a hole in this argument and so far, it has been impossible to do so. The fact is, you simply cannot name me a Brian who isn't a cock. Brian Clough? Cock. Brian Ferry? Greasy cock. Brian Brown? Aussie cock. Brian Blessed? Shouty cock. Brian Conley? Smug, unfunny cock. Even the actor is called Brian Cox (bit of a giveaway, there.) The theory really comes together when you consider that Marilyn Manson was actually born Brian Warner. All hail the Shock Rock cock.

I was all set to have a go at the poor quality of cartoons on TV these days. I had this really cool argument ready in which I compared and contrasted the animation of stuff like 'Scooby Doo' that I used to be glued to in the Seventies with the rushed still-frame-with-flickering-mouth Japanimation that the poor tykes are forced to endure today. I was really up for a rant here, 'Pokemon' was in my sights...and then I remembered we used to have 'Roobarb'. Oh dear...

Given that the majority of women fall into the size 12-16 bracket, why is it that every single designer in the fashion industry chooses to exhibit their 'creations' on six-foot androgynous skeletons weighing five stone, tops. I say 'creations' because these ridiculous wisps of silk bear little relation to actual clothing. What planet are these people on? Haven't they heard of economics? I mean, if I suddenly had a real jones-on to join the rag trade, you can bet that I'd want to coin in as much wedge as I could before the bubble burst. I'd have the Caroline Quentin Summer Collection knocked out in double-quick time and then sit back and start counting the shekels. All this sodding about with anorexic stick-insects just isn't going to pay the rent, is it? When was the last time you saw a woman strolling down the high street wearing a three-foot conical hat and baring a breast? Exactly.

There is an advert on telly at the moment featuring all the characters from the old children's programme Hector's House. There I was, halfway through 'Frasier' and up pops Hector and proceeds to try and flog me a fucking mortgage! How dare he presume that, simply because he and I were fairly tight in my formative years he can just appear out of the blue, twenty-odd years later and prostitute himself as a financial guru. Like I'm going to trust his mortgage advice...the guy lives next door to a frog.

The only reason why anyone should possess a double-barrelled name is to save the rest of us valuable arsehole-spotting time.

Fast food. Anyone who knows me will know my opinion of 'McBurger's' and it's ilk - namely, that it's cheaper and more nutritious to eat your money - however, stranded out on an all-night job recently, I was forced to frequent one of these places for breakfast. After waiting for five minutes in the queue (fast food?), young Johnny No-Stars asked for my order. I decided on a Sausage Muffin (I refuse to ask for a 'Mc' anything), a coffee and a hash brown. I got a Bacon Muffin, an orange juice and a hash brown. Three items ordered, one correct. I mean, it's not rocket science, is it? Next time I work late, I'm taking sandwiches...

I'm thinking about getting a new mobile phone but nothing prepared me for the vast array of technical wizardry available out there. Given that the sole criteria employed when purchasing my current phone was 'can I get a Lara Croft cover for it?', I was amazed to be confronted with built-in cameras, colour screens and Space Invaders. I was really getting carried away with it until the reality-check kicked in. Hang on, this is a phone. It will sit in my pocket and I will occasionally talk to people on it - end of story. If I want to take pictures I'll bring my camera; and as for a colour screen - pretty, but ultimately pointless, like stained glass windows or Kelly Brook. Two-hundred ringtones and downloadable tunes? Excuse me, but I want my phone to go 'ring, ring' in order to attract my attention, not give me a piss-poor, tinny rendition of Britney's latest offering. Where is this techno-juggling going to end? Can we look forward to phones with built-in shavers for the hurried businessman? Thin, vibrating phones for the bored housewife? I was about to share this wisdom with my fellow customers in the Carphone Whorehouse, but the salesman had this look in his eye, so I left. And could I find one of these pocket miracles with a Lara Croft cover? Could I bollocks...  (Alright, so I liked the Space Invaders idea.)

The best thing about riding a scooter is that you are able to nip through traffic and get to work quickly and cheaply. The worst thing is that you are riding a scooter.

On any given Saturday in the centre of Wolverhampton, you will find a guy with a megaphone  giving it large about Jesus. Now, I'm still a bit vague on the whole religion thing, but I feel that if there is a God, He really ought to rethink His whole recruitment strategy.  I don't know about you, but a shouty mentalist standing fifteen feet from the Ann Summers window display and thumping his Bible is not going to do an awful lot to turn me on to the Word. The water into wine gig...now that was a winner!

Whoever insisted that an inane four-note jingle be played everytime the word 'Intel' is used needs to be killed. Now.

St. George's Day 2003 - the Patron Saint of England, and nobody gave a toss. Except your humble narrator, who was rather resplendant in his white shirt with the huge red cross on. Isn't it strange though, that on St. Patrick's Day you can dye your hair green, wear an Irish flag draped over you shoulders and drink Guinness until you fall over and you're 'enjoying the craic'. Wear a white shirt with a red cross on St. George's Day and you're a racist Nazi. Funny old world, innit?