Great Tits Cope Well With Warming

VIA

Oh wow a great new Meme - ManBabies - a site where people Photoshop their head onto their babies bodies and visa versa. I want one! This is defiantly the closest I've ever come to being broody.

Via Why That's Delightful

Mjohnson has a little side project on the go. For the last ten weeks I've been interviewing high profile communists to get their opinion on a news story of the day. I'm posting pictures of them with their views on my Flickr account, I've put a link to my Flickr account in the side bar, there will be a new communist every Wednesday. Here is this week's

You can read it better if you click through to Flickr, or here.

Here's a link to the news story refered to in the picture.

I almost forgot to update you all: I succeeded in upholding my tradition. The village of Longhope in Gloucestershire had a visit from a new force in Pagan neo-tradition. Yes I ran through the village wearing only a cycling cape at around 00.30am Sunday 4th April (Saturday night).

This post is an update to: Neo Paganism

It was, I'll admit, more difficult than last year. Firstly I wasn't as drunk. Last years had been the spur of the moment idiocy of a drunk man, this year, though I'd had a few, it was pre planned. I was actually dreading it in the run up and had started making increasingly desperate excuses to get out of it. Right up to the last minute I wasn't going to do it.

Secondly there were more people there. Last time there were four of us. I was the most drunk and the nudity was generally ignored so as not to encourage any further madness. This time there were twelve of us and at least three of the girls decided to chase me and try and steal my cape. Unfortunately I was caught - I was feeling a bit asthmatic - and my nakedness was put on show for a passing car; no honk - bastard - it was cold, it's what you do with it, and besides I'm a grower not a shower.

The thing which made it more doable was that my friend Wendy had a baby the night before. What better time then for a traditional fertility festival thingy. My mate Wendy is amazing, we saw her in the pub at 11pm (not drinking) she cycled the fifteen minute bike ride home to her house boat and had had the baby by around 4am. Her first baby in three and a half hours!

We'd popped round that Saturday morning to see the newby and he was amazing - we bought them (among many other things) cocktail sausages and a water Lilly to chuck off the side of the boat, mark the spot kind of thing. (The cocktail sausages, because I thought she might need the meat, I was right, I'm super sensitive). So there you go - a festival of new life in every sense of the word! (Unless you were one of the pigs that went into the sausages).

See you all there next year. (The girls are bringing wipping sticks!)

This was scrawled on a wall at the end of my road this morning:

Boris

It's the Friday night, bank holiday weekend, and I'm on a packed train from London Paddington to Bath Spa. I've been on it a very long time. The train was running late straight off. The little crackling voice in the ceiling that gives excuses told us a lorry had hit a bridge. What bridge we are not told, but knowing the British Rail Network a lorry hitting a bridge anywhere in the country, nay the world, is enough to bring the whole network to a standstill.

We are then delayed further just outside Didcot, the excuse we are given this time, signal failure. Our snail pace slows to stationary. We were left waiting for the unfortunate person that was still working in the signal box to turn their computer off and on again, about thirty minutes.

While we sat there something special started to happen. It was the loud Australian standing in the isle that got things going. He went off about five minutes before the Brit's thawed out and started talking to strangers. There was a time when you got the feeling that people might be thinking, 'God we're already dealing with major train delays, please not the loud boorish antipodean', but then snorts and smiles started to be shared.

The Aussie had found our soft spot, he was slagging off the train company. Maybe he was a particularly good loud-Aussie, but I think it was the timing that got the smiles. The famous Blitz spirit was showing it's face. It's a form of resignation, a stoic acceptance of inconvenience and a determination not to let it stop you being chipper Despite the fact that you weren't chipper before, actually you haven't been exactly chipper for a while, this delayed train is not going to stop me being chipper.

Conversations between strangers started interrupting the relative silence of the stationary train. It was the kind of small talk you get in a tea break during a seminar, but without the name tags. The common theme was just how bad the trains are. A subject as familiar as the weather to most Brits.

When the little voice crackled through the tannoy - not to tell us we'd be back on our way, but to politely apologise for the problems with the tannoy - half the carriage was laughing out loud. “On behalf of first great Western Trains I'd like to apologise for the problems with my apologys.”

I did my bit, I joined the queue for in the buffet behind a girl buying 8 miniature bottles of vodka an in front of half a stag do. By the time I got to the front all the beer had gone so I blagged a free bottle of wine from first class and dished it out to the people at my table. Well the two guys at my table. I think the Asian girl that refused may have been a Muslim.

It's odd that the Blitz spirit is named after a time defined by struggle when it is really a surrender to inconvenience. There was a subtext to Churchill's 'We will never surrender' speech, 'we will suffer terribly and still just get on with it.'

So why am I typing instead of talking to my new found friends? Because of Swindon. A few people got on and off and Didcot, but Swindon was an influx of new people and a departure of some of our guys. These Swindon people, they don't know what it was like back in the signal failure, they weren't even there. I know the delay was tough and we didn't have much, but we made the most of it you know. People were just different back then. You could leave your laptop on the table without worrying about it and people shared what little wine they had. We were all in it together – I kind of miss it you know.

is unclear, but the scientists who photographed the event speculate that it was the behaviour of a frustrated, sexually inexperienced young male seal.

After 45 minutes the seal gave up, swam into the water and then completely ignored the bird it had just assaulted, the scientists report.

LINK

Around this time of year every year lots of little regional villages and hamlets have fetes, fairs and parades. They’re all about Spring and the coming of summer, they have a pagan feel to them, and are supposedly ancient tradition, though many of them have been ‘revived’ at some point or another by people that fell asleep before the end of the Wicker Man.

Children dance round a May Pole, (which we all know is meant to represent a proud upright engorged phallus). The men Morris Dance with bells tied to their ankles clacking their rods together while waving handkerchiefs in the air and drinking real ale, (which we all know is meant to represent a golden piss shower.)

I’ve made a little collage of some of the nutty looking types you get at these things:

There’s the Padstow 'Obby 'Oss, that’s the guy dressed a bit like a that iconic Abu Garib picture, except he looks like he’s got a PVC patio table round his neck.

The Rochester Sweeps Festival, they’re the guys that have blacked up. I bet that took some explaining to H.R. People have been sent to ‘diversity training’ for much less in my office.

The Jack in the Green, he’s the green fellow and the walking tree is also a Jack.

The Wessex Morris Men, bottom left, apparently they chase the Dorset Ouser, no picture of him, he’s probably rather reclusive. Those Wessex Morris Men get up at 5.20 in the morning dance on the Cern Abbas giant (a giant chalk man with a giant chalk hard-on etched into the side of a hill) have breakfast and pursue the Ouse round the town.

And bottom right’s The Maypole.

So as you can see it is all rather odd, with real ale types, that may or may not have their own basement dungeon.

I was thinking about how weird all this stuff was last year. I think I had just seen an episode of countryfile. They were in some town where it was tradition for someone to dress up as a straw man and chase after women. I think the tradition was something like, if you get caught you have a baby, so I assume it wasn't just the straw that was prickly (boom boom).

I'd spent that weekend canoeing in the Wye valley, which is on the Wales England border, it was the best weather of the entire summer and everything was lovely. We were in a pub in Gloucestershire, near my friend's Mum's house, it was Sunday night, the May bank holiday was the next day, and I decided to start my own May tradition. At closing time I decided to parade home from the pub in the middle of the night naked, except for a green cycling cape, which I did.

This weekend is the first anniversary of my new tradition. A completely organic, spontaneously created tradition, and as fate would have it I'm going back to the village this weekend. This is a total coincidence. I was invited to celebrate the birthday of rising Internet star Becky. No one had remembered my tradition, but I am determined it shall live on. This is a vital part of the rural identity. It is important that traditions like this are carried on down the ages, by carrying on this tradition year after year future generations gain a real connection with the ways and customs of their ancestors.

Do you think I can get a grant from English Heritage?

I've been experimenting with new routes to work. For my latest trip I get the train to London Bridge, ten minutes, and then walk from London Bridge to Fleet Street, thirty minutes, about a mile and a half's walk. I walk past Southwark Cathedral, The Golden Hind, The New Globe Theatre, The Tate Modern, over the Millennium Bridge, past St. Paul's up Fleet Street and to work.

On a crisp spring morning the views of London while crossing the Thames from the Millennium Bridge turn a nasty commute into a pleasurable stroll. This morning however it was raining hard, and I didn't have an umbrella. Usually when it's raining I ditch the train and get the bus, but I was running late this morning and the train-walk combo is quicker than the bus. To further my woes I have a hole in my left shoe, in the sole, like the lady in that Stella Artois advert.

When I arrive at work I am completly soaked. We have a towel drying room downstairs in which I keep a grubby towel for such occasions, so I head down there. My feet are so wet my shoes feel like a pair of wellies when the water swishes over the top. The left one feels noticably heavier than the right. I take them off and leave then in the drying room and hang my socks up to dry. What I haven't realised at this point is that earlier I cut my lip shaving. When I eventually walk into my office, I look like I've had a bucket of water thrown over me, I've got no shoes, or socks on, and I've got a bloody lip. I looked like I'd just been rescued from the Titanic.

Back on the buses for me from Monday.

Kate Moss stripped the lining of her nose away by snorting Cocaine.

How does she smell?

Of her perfume.

I made a funny! I sent it into Heat magazine, hope I get published.

JUST CLICK THIS LINK

Via b3ta newsletter and Suddenly Cocks

Fucking Austria is a town that actually exists in Austria look!

View Larger Map

I was so close to this place when I went skiing. If I’d have known I would have had my picture taken with the Fucking sign.

This is a well documented phenomenon with plenty of scope for purile fun, these guys got some great quotes from residents annoyed about tourists constantly stealing the sign LINK:

Guesthouse manager Augustina Lindelbauer described the village's breathtaking lakes, forests and vistas. "Yet still there is this obsession with Fucking," she said. "Just this morning I had to tell an English lady that there were no Fucking postcards."

Even Graham Norton's got in on the fun:

However if you can't afford to go all the way to Austria there is a place called Cockermouth in the Lake District as demonstrated here by my friend, and up and coming internet star, Becky:

This is my friend Becky who is right funny singing a song she wrote with my friend Susan. They are ever so witty: