Moat Madness...

Grim as the unfolding saga of steroid-ridden bodybuilder-turned-murderous rampaging gunman Raoul Moat was, I couldn't help but laugh at some of its media manifestations.

First, the magnificent photo, reproduced everywhere in the British media, of gritty armed policemen stalking the fugitive gunman...


The Grauniad captioned the photo 'Police point guns and stunguns towards Moat'.

More accurate, I feel, would have been 'Gurning policeman auditions for You've Been Framed' or 'Gurning policeman finds rampaging gunman drama a bit of a laugh'. What was he thinking as the camera pointed his way? "I'll put me gritty face on, you never know, I might get a part in The Bill"?

EDIT: It has been suggested by various people that the gurning policeman may, in fact, be shouting at the photographers to get back. Now that I look at the photo more carefully, this seems a very plausible explanation, the copper's apparent snarl merely being a warning caught mid-shout by the eager snapper's camera shutter. If this is the case, then I apologise unreservedly for casting aspersions on a professional doing a tough job.

But even better was the news that Paul 'Gazza' Gascoigne, famous alcoholic nutter and one-time ball-botherer, appeared on a Geordie radio show pledging support to his old mate Moat.

The cherry on this particular newscake was the quote from his agent:

Gascoigne's agent, Kenny Shepherd, said: "He's doing what? I am sitting having an evening meal in Majorca. I'm speechless."

A wonderful scene is conjured of Mr Shepherd being phoned during his meal and told what Gazza's done now followed by a stream of half-chewed paella and four-letter amazement projecting from his mouth...

Silly Mugger...

I was mugged the other day. Saturday night, to be exact. Well, Sunday morning, to be anally precise.

This is the third time I’ve been mugged since moving to London in 1997.

The first was a brutal affair, back in 1999, as I was grabbed at knifepoint by three bastards who nicked everything on me, including my bankcard, with which they also emptied my tenuous account, before kicking the shite out of me. But they didn’t stab me, which was a victory of sorts.

A few years later, after a thoroughly lubricated evening down the pub, I was robbed at knifepoint by a little scrote who came up to me, asked for a pound, and then pressed a knife into my ample gut and demanded everything I’d got. This consisted of around £3.50 in change. He was genuinely aggrieved at this, whining, “Is that it?” as if expecting me to reply, “I'm terribly sorry, I forgot this Faberge egg stuffed in my back pocket.” It was my turn to be irritated at this point, and I explained, as if to an especially dim school child, that my pissed state was indicative of an evening in the pub and that, therefore, he was lucky I had as much as £3.50 left on me...

Last Saturday’s affair was even more feeble, demonstrating both a lack of commitment and a want of intelligence on the part of the mugger. I was proceeding in a homeward direction, having availed myself of a refreshing non-alcoholic drink at some friends’ flat (after a victorious pub quiz evening), when a youth in a hoodie (not at all a stereotype, then) ran up to me from behind, swung in front of me and said, one hand deep in a pocket and pushing out the front of his jacket, “I’ve got a gun, gimme everything.”

He looked more nervous than I was, so I handed over some small change, and with his free hand he patted down my pockets and took my phone and a memory stick, before patting a lump in a small pocket and asking, “Whassat, then?” “Those are my house keys.” “Oh right, I’ll leave you those.” Cheers, I thought, how chivalrous. Which, in the circumstances, it was. After grabbing my bag (which contained my Spitting Image Series 3 DVD, the bastard) he legged it. He completely missed the other pocket with my wallet, containing my bankcard, Oyster card, and £60 in cash. The knob-end.

Each time I’ve been mugged, it’s been a progressively pathetic affair, characterised more and more by idiocy tempered with almost a residual chivalry.

At this rate, I confidently expect, around 2015, to be mugged by some berk dressed as a Regency fop who will flounce up to me, wave a scented handkerchief around my nose, and lisp, “Stap me vitals, sirrah! Would you be so kind as to furnish me with the contents of your pockets, my good man?”

To which I shall reply, “Fuck off.”

On This Day… 9 June 1870

London, 9 June 1870

MUCH CONVERSATION in fashionable salons of late has concerned that most wondrous invention, the electrical telegraphic transmitting-and-receiving engine, or ‘telegraph’ for brevity of terminology. In an effort to impart to our loyal readers the requisite degree of informed comment, we felt it incumbent upon ourselves to solicit the opinion of a savant possessed of acknowledged expertise in such arcane natural scientifical matters, and approached, most humbly, Sir Isambard Kingdom Perkins (Bart) BSc, PhD, FRS, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Electrovoltaic Studies at the University of Oxford.

“The electrical telegraphic transmitting-and-receiving engine, or, as I shall henceforth refer to it for reasons of brevity and clarity, the ‘telegraph’, is a most complex device typical of the cascade of miraculous inventions which prove that Man is, indeed, the highest of God’s multitude of creations,” elucidated the prodigious savant.

Explaining that the new ‘telegraph’ represented a prodigious advance upon earlier communicatory techniques, such as the shoutophore, in which lines of men spaced every fifty yards shouted the message to each other, Sir Isambard waxed lyrical of the communications revolution this powerful new technology has opened before Mankind’s very eyes. “We now survey,” he stated, with a not unseemly degree of scientifically motivated excitement evident in the jaunty angle at which he set his top-hat, “the vista of untold thousands of ‘telegraphs’ around the world forming an ‘Information Superior Railway’. This is unifying as never before our great Empire, as thousands upon thousands of telegraphic cables gird the globe, criss-crossing each other o'er land and ocean in an extraordinary mesh which some of my more irreverent colleagues have termed the ‘World Wide Crinoline’.”

However, a cautionary note was sounded by the esteemed moral campaigner, Mr William Booth Esq., who warned of the capacity for this miraculous invention to deprave and corrupt the moral fibre of the nation by facilitating the spread of confidence trickery, ribaldry and general beastliness. “Why, only this morning,” Mr Booth told us, the colour draining from his face, “I received several unsolicited telegrams, one purporting to be from a dispossessed Prince of Ruritania, humbly offering to pay me a thousand in sterling to help him transfer a hundred-thousand guineas from his embargoed bank account if I would only first of all wire him a hundred pounds, another that started, ‘There was a young man named Blunt,’ and worst of all, an offer to make my top-hat taller…!”

Minister Outed As Lying Bastard Quits Government

Roy Ters: Tuesday 1 June 2010, 11:14 BST

In a totally unsurprising development at the weekend, David Laws, the Liberal Democrat Secretary for Cuts in the Coalescence Government, was outed as a lying Tory bastard. His subsequent resignation was the least he could do, sources said.

His outing came as no surprise to anyone who had heard of him, however, as rumours had been rife in the Westminster village for years that Laws, an intensely secretive man, had flirted with Toryism. The signs were there from the start: public school, an obsessive interest in money, an obscenely lucrative banking career with Goldball Sacks, an even more obsessive interest in money, and millionaireism by puberty.

What clinched it for anyone with a modicum of intelligence, however, were Laws’s contributions to Liberal Democrat Supremo-in-Waiting Chairman Nick Clegg’s Little Orange Book in 2004. In two essays for the book, Laws advocated reducing the role of government to beating up poor people for not trying hard enough, and selling the National Health Service to an animal experiments laboratory in Milton Friedman New Town.

In a stomach-turningly moving interview at the weekend, after being rumbled and resigning, Laws stated that his upbringing as a fully-rounded member of the human race made it difficult for him to come to terms with his Tory tendencies. He had struggled for years to keep his Toryism a secret from his friends and his family, particularly his mother, and with the arrogance that being a Tory confers he had always assumed they were too stupid to notice.

However, Laws’s long-term relationship with arch-parasite James Nomates, a political lobbyist, proved to be the catalyst for his outing at the weekend. Simpering tributes to Laws were paid by Matthew Parris, another Tory bastard, his partner Julian ‘Not that Julian Glover’ Glover, and the increasingly-going-downhill Grauniad’s political egghead Michael White who, you would think, really should know better.

Smug Rightwing Fucktards

One of life's innocent little pleasures in which I indulge myself periodically is posting abusive messages on Comment is Free (CiF), the interactive commentary section of spellingly-challenged broadsheet 'The Grauniad'.

One thing I will not miss, however, now that New Labour have buggered off and we are ruled by the Cleggeronic Libservative Hegemony, is the immensely tedious habit of rightwing would-be wits using the term 'ZaNuLabour' (or even more predictably, 'ZaNuLiebour' or, the apotheosis of the sclerotic mentality, 'ZaNuLieBore'), because they think it's oh-so-fucking-clever, oh-so-pants-wettingly novel after thirteen (thirteen, damnit!) shitting years of New Labour to join the other nine million original-thought-challenged cuntish rightwing dullard smegma-for-brains wanktards to compare New Labour with ZANU-PF, Bobby Mugabe's squalid and brutal Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front.

But oh-how-wrong I was. New Labour are History (albeit very recent history), and yet these smug arsebrains are still at it:

Gamebird
12 May 2010, 5:27PM
...Trident is not being replaced, what is being replaced are the submarines to mount the weapons system in... ZANULabour wanted to replace four SSBN’s with three which means there would be gaps. You want to make significant cuts then you cut the money going to the NHS, you cut the money we are spending on welfare benefits, you cut or eliminate the money given in foreign aid. We junk the non-jobs that ZANULAbour created.

Can't they let it go? Are they so unimaginitive that their tiny minds trap them into repeating it over and over again like some lobotomised monk mechanistically chanting the same invocations to his non-existent cunt of a God? Like some miniscule asteroid of thought endlessly orbiting a dying sun of unoriginality? No, don't answer that.

Every time I read it, I can just picture some four-eyed greasy-haired rightwing policy-wank fucktard hunched over his keyboard smirking and chuckling at how ingenious, at how razor-sharp and original he is as he types it (and it's not even a proper chuckle, but that loathesome snorting noise made by spotty sixth-form charisma-voids who think they're witty that sounds like a pig being rimmed) and I just want to reach through the screen of his monitor, grab him by the throat and scream into each ear in turn, “Your self-satisfied smuggery makes me want to vomit down your throat!” at which point I would do just that, ramming my puke down his gullet with a meat tenderiser until he chokes and splutters on it and coughs up blood and mucus and bits of his own teeth that I'd chipped off with the tenderiser and his own vomit mixed with bits of my spew fighting its way back up, before administering the coup-de-grace by emerging fully from the screen and kicking him slowly to death on the dried-semen-encrusted tissue strewn floor of his fetid den.

Or something like that.

You Can Run But You Cannot Hide, John Finnemore, Not Even On Radio 4!

A few weeks ago, you may remember reading a moan of mine concerning ‘The Daily Mail’ and their inability to correctly use the word ‘ironically’.

Some time after, imagine my surprise when I heard guest artiste John Finnemore’s contribution on Radio 4’s ‘The Vote Now Show’ (3 May 2010), which dealt with this very topic. Annoyingly, I can't post an audio clip of it, so here’s a transcription:

Steve Punt [reading from The Daily Mail]: “Ironically, his mother was interned by the Japanese during the War.”

John Finnemore: “Yeah, that is ironic, isn’t it? I’m sure the irony of it tickled her at the time: ‘How ironic,’ she must have thought, ‘even though I’m a foreigner, some other foreigners are locking me up. You’d think all of us foreigners would get on, given we’re basically all the same!’”

Right, you’re on fucking notice, Finnemore!

If, for example, I ever hear you use the term ‘Cleggeronic Libservative Hegemony’ I will kick your head in, and don’t think I don’t mean it, don’t think I can’t find you anywhere in the world at a moment’s notice, and don’t think I’ll just be listening to your public utterances, your stand-up gigs and guest-spots on ‘The Now Show’, I’ll be listening to you when you’ve popped out for a cafe latte, I’ll be listening to you when you’re buying your guilt-assuaging traidcraft courgettes from Waitrose, I’ll be there listening to you at night when you’re asleep because I listen to your fucking dreams, Finnemore, I watch your dreams, I record your dreams on HD PVR, I live your dreams, I AM your fucking dreams, so just watch your step, son, alright?

Watch your cocking step.

Oh, and give us a fucking job at the BBC...

Cleggeronic Libservative Hegemony

Apparently, some bloke called Dave Cameron and some other bloke called Nick Clegg - who looks amazingly like Dave, and who I always used to confuse with the old duffer in the cloth cap and mac in 'Last of the Summer Wine' played by Peter Sallis, who also moonlights as the voice of Gromit's mate Wallace in Nick Park's wonderful fillums (Peter Sallis, that is, not Nick Clegg... or Dave Cameron for that matter) - have coalesced into a Coalescent Government of Great Britannia.

Or something.

I think I was in the kitchen making a cup of tea when it was on the telly.