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!

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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:

This is an interesting video from Cebu island in the Philippines - a place I've been - of a team of doctors and nurses removing a deodorant can from a man's rectum, no cutting involved, the can comes out the way it went in (unless he swallowed it). There are about twenty people watching, cheering, laughing raucously and generally having a good time, while filming the whole thing on mobile phones and cameras. When Doc succeeds in removing the thing he holds it up amid the cheers and has a little spray, like a magician proving it's not a trick. Shame they stoped filming before the white doves came flying out.

Scroll down past the txt for the video

We killed not one squirrel people. We drew a blank eight people and three guns and we killed nothing. The whole escapade has forced me to drastically downgrade my chances of surviving in any kind of post apocalyptic scenario. I had thought that as soon as I pulled myself out of the rubble and knotted my tie around an impressively deep gash in my arm I'd be spearing urban deer with photocopier parts and roasting them over piles of burning invoices and payment reminders. How wrong I was. No on this evidence I’ll be killed in the stampede for the last pack of Nick Naks.

I've included some extracts from my journals, which should explain things:

This tale is a follow up to: Killing a Squirrel With a Gun Road Trip 2008

Day 1: Traveled all day to arrive several hours before dusk. The advanced party has been here for several days. There have so far been no sightings of our quarry, but sprits are high. At dusk we hiked up the hill behind the farm to survey the terrain. The ground was uneven and I found the going tough, I even had to put my beer down on more than one occasion. I didn't let the others see, I don't want them to think I'm out of condition. Tomorrow we plan to wake early; we're expecting our target to be most active in the hours around daybreak.

Day 2: Curse our tardiness. We are drunken louts one and all. We awoke late, sprits dampened by the previous night's over indulgence. An evening of hard drinking followed by a new game - shooting in the dark - how can we expect to attain the status of anything more than yobs unless we focus our abilities. During the day we toured the 'Electric Mountain, pump storage, power station'. I had hoped that this cavernous facility blasted into the very heart of a mountain might demonstrate what can be achieved when man and machine harmonize their efforts. I'm not sure this message was well received. I think for some it simply demonstrated what lengths it was legitimate to go to have a cup of tea after Match of the Day.

Day 3: I slept poorly last night; my mind has been restless ever since I saw those whirling giant rods of steel within Electric Mountain. I don't know if it was the static or something else that has electrified my mind. I was relieved to hear that the hunt was called off. Today we walk over the hills to Harlech.

Day 4: Oh joyous world, we walked to Harlech yesterday and spent the day in much merriment drinking in various local boozers overlooking the sea. It is so heart-warming to be in the company of such friends. I volunteered to make the walk back, by this time it was getting dark and the wind had picked up to what must have been a gale. As I walked down those winding lanes with the Ewes and newborn lambs sheltering from the wind in the Gorse either side I was filled with a love for life. The entire world seemed to tingle. Like the hum of Electric Mountain but a thousand times more powerful, for this was not electric power, but the very life force of the earth itself. This morning we awoke early and took the guns to the field as planned. We lay there propped against the dry stone wall stalking our quarry in silence, after a while I once again detected that same hum, but this time there seemed to be a presence and that's when I saw the squirrel bounding across the field towards us. I looked up to my friends, but they lay still, they hadn't seen it, how?

Then I realised the squirrel was no longer on the grass, but was floating in the air towards me, radiating the life force I had felt the night before, it was a vision. It started to speak:

"Why do you hunt my brother with guns”?

"We need to remove it from the attic, it, it's an invasive species, we can't release it"

"Tell me what is an invasive species"

"Oh well I'm afraid the grey squirrel is driving out the red it is upsetting the natural balance of nature, so . . . it is the conservationists, they want them killed."

"Don't you see, by your definition, if the grey is an invasive species then Man is the most invasive species of them all? Should I exterminate Man Mjohnson? For was it not Man that brought the Grey to Wales in the first place?"

"But . . ."

"Feel Mjohnson, feel, I know you can. All of life is one and that includes Man and his squirrels. When you persecute the squirrel you persecute yourself. All life, every species, affects other species. Like the moon effects the Earth and creates the tides, species ebb and flow, this is all part of life. Do not fight it for you cannot. To fight it will cause much suffering, you must learn to live with life in harmony."

And then he was gone. Great squirrel. Father squirrel. I didn't move for some time, I just put my face against the mossy rock where I lay and breathed in the smell of life!

This evening we ate a great feast and I recounted what the Great Squirrel had told me, I covered my face in soot so I could feel the elements of the earth against my skin and we danced the dance of life till the early hours, now I must sleep for I am tired from such an exciting day.

Day 5: Ha bloody ho – apparently these hills not only teem with the electricity of life, but also magic mushrooms. Very funny – spike a man and give him a gun. I could have hurt someone. Going home, head very fuzzy, not sure if I can take London without some kind of meltdown.

So the squirrel lives on, in what I think you'll agree is a rather idylic setting, good luck to him I say, him and Father squirrel.

via For your Entertainment

Today I’m off on my trip to Snowdonia, where if you don’t know I’m being asked to help remove a problem squirrel from a friend’s attic. Now in the past I’ve been rather gung-ho about all this, but more recently I’ve had a slight change of heart and decided that it should be done with proper decorum, procedure etc.

For those of you who think we don’t have to kill the squirrel I’m afraid ‘The Squirrel Must DIE’ – no seriously under section 14 of the 1981 Wildlife and Countryside Act it is illegal to release a captured Grey Squirrel as they are an invasive species, so even if we were to capture it in the attic we would be unable to release it into the wild without breaking the law.

So, if we are to kill the beast we must know how we are able to do this. I’ve called the Country Side Council for Wales who, after some deliberation (they say they’ve never been asked this question before) told me that I am allowed to shoot it. The law basically states that the killing must be in a reasonably swift and humane manner in the course of legal shooting or pest control. (Wild Mammals Protection Act 1996) This is what we intend to do, but the law does specifically prohibit some actions so I’ve created the following chart to illustrate some of the things we can’t do and I shall be pinning it up around the cottage to ensure that no one is tempted to stray. Click on the picture for a bigger version:

There has been a fair bit in the news recently about the squirrel problems:

Captured squirrels live to nibble again
Grey squirrel hunting
Patrolling the squirrel frontline

I love this graph making meme. I have made another graph, which is below. It is basically a play on the exclamation large African American ladies say in films when home girls are spitting Your Mumma jokes. I submitted it to Graph Jam, they do not yet deem it worthy of inclusion on their front page, it needs to be voted on first: Graph Jam Voting

Here are some other great meme sites:

FAIL
Passive Aggressive Notes
Indexed

Oh look I made it to the front page of Graphjam, hooray for me.

The calamities have begun, so far we've been spared the slap stick, but by good luck more than judgement. We've borrowed the air rifle from Pete's little brother, but this meant getting the rifle from his house in the midlands to our house in London. We now have the rifle safely in the house, but it could have all gone very wrong. Bungling Pete brought the thing to London on the train and then took it on the TUBE. He took a gun on the tube! They shot that Brazilian fella on the tube because . . . um . . . they just shot his face off because . . . so you see my point, basically Pete nearly had his face shot off by the Met and we haven't even got in the car yet. Pete's plan to prevent his face getting shot off: he had wrapped the gun in T-shirts from a well known human rights organisation demanding the closure of guantanimo bay. Stop don't shoot, he's a liberal, as if that would work. One week to go people, keep tuned for updates.

Previously:

Update 1
Initial Story

So house prices are on the slide. Bad news for the economy. What caused it? Credit crunch, sub prime, lending crunch, maybe? What about the chancellors eyebrows. O.K. bear with me. The current chancellor is Alistair Darling. He's got right weird eyebrows. Shocking white hair with a couple of bushy, jet-black, forehead caterpillars munching on his eye sockets. He looks like he's passed out at a party and someone has gone to work with a marker pen. So what, the chancellor looks like a dick, he's a politician. Good looking people do proper jobs. Take a look at this statement from the BBC website:

House prices fell by 2.5% in March, the biggest monthly decline since September 1992.

Who was the chancellor in 1992? Norman Lamont and check out the mans face wings.

Once again we see white hair with prominent black eyebrows. Now this demonstrates a correlation and correlations are what economists use to predict the future. I hypothesise that the health of the housing market is inversely correlated to the contrast between the eyebrows and hair of the chancellor of the exchequer - and on that measure people we've got a long way to slide. No scientific paper is complete without a graph so:

Worst. President. Ever.

Can you guess who it is yet?

I’ve had a couple of comments recently that I may look a bit like Jeremy Clarkson from Top Gear. I’m pretty quick to dispute this, but this particular statement has been made by two people on two separate occasions (though the other person was on drugs when they conceived of the notion.) Still I feel this is enough of a reaction to warrant a scientific web poll, vote or never mention the similarities again!

I was out in Camden on the weekend and this fella was stood outside Camden Town tube station, so I had to get a picture. He was nice enough to pose.

This is an update on the post: Killing a Squirrel With a Gun Road Trip 2008.

I've been informed by a reliable source (the bloke that sits next to me at work) that when a squirrel is killed it emits a pheromone that attracts other squirrels. This could cause us a problem. If in removing the problem squirrel from the cottage in Wales we attract a relentless horde/army of squirrels bent on revenge then we are going to have to kill every last one of them, or we will have failed in our mission to rid the house of squirrels. I can see this holiday turning into a rodent version of Zulu and I'm not sure how quickly you can reload an air rifle. I think we may have underestimated our foe.

O.K. people the development of the blog continues. Today I am replacing the survey in the side bar with my del.icio.us links. More about that later, but first I must announce the results of the survey. The question of why I am such a twat has been posed by many people over the years, but this is the first real attempt to scientifically answer the question.

Unfortunately there was a tie. 10 votes for 'You Just Are' and 10 votes for 'The World Doesn't Need Another Paul Danan'. Oh well I guess we'll never know for sure. Here are the results displayed graphically:

Now to Del.icio.us, first have a look in the side bar for Mjohnson’s del.icio.us links. I'm no sure I fully understand how this all works so I'll let a bald man wearing a horrendous day-glo shirt explain it for you. He may look like a nut job, but he lectures at Stanford University about this type of thing, so I'd say he knows what he's talking about.

If you're interested in social bookmarking, sign up for Del.icio.us and join my network.

I'm going on a road trip - details are yet to be finalised, but I am already pretty dam excited. We're going to North Wales to a friends lovely cottage, with it's own peacock, and when we get there we're going to shoot a mammal of the order of Rodentia. Yes the purpose of the trip for everyone else is a relaxing fun time with friends. Drink wine, walks in the hills and by the sea, country pubs, but me, I was only 100% on board when I found out that there is a problem squirrel living in the roof which needs 'removing' and that in return for our stay and enough money to buy a gun, we are being employed to remove it.

I am never happier than when my life is running as close as possible to the script of a quirky road trip comedy, so this story has infinite appeal to me. What I want is for the squirrel to innocently cause mayhem and repeatedly out fox me resulting in hilarious slapstick scenes, it should preferably eat carrots and have some kind of catch phrase. What I don't want is for us to rock up with a high powered air gun and a little fluffy baby squirrel to come bounding across the grass in search of nuts only to have it's face blown off to a bloody stump. A rather harrowing scene; More Killing Fields than Loony Tunes.

Perhaps I should play it as a hit film. The smouldering assassin with issues. What kind of soul lives behind those dark eyes? No one knows the real him; except maybe one girl, but she's gone now. Taken from him unfairly, now he travels alone across the country (except for his twenty something middle class friends), unstopping, relentless, inevitable, a killer - is what he does wrong? Tell me, in a world in which a beautiful young life can be snatched away and young love kicked aside, do you really believe in right and wrong?

Oh, I know, I could Danny the Champion of the World it. Has anyone got a Dad spare who needs a weekend away in the country? Preferably with own gypsy caravan.

Related:
When squirrels go bad.
Squirrel update.
Squirrel terrorist training camp.
World's greatest wedding gift.
Squirrat

Hmm do you think I might have an unhealthy relationship with squirrels?

02 /04/ 08

Today's date. Can you see the pattern?

02 - 04 - 08 - 16 - 32 - 64 - 128

Just call me Rainman.

(O.K. I confess I used a calculator for 64 times two.)

Update: I saw this article about a slightly more talented and genuinlly autistic person who creates drawings of cities, well worth checking out.

Update 2: it turns out that this was world autism day. Bean Sprouts has done a nice post about it.

BELLEVUE, Ohio -- Police said an Ohio man has been arrested for allegedly having sex with a picnic table.

Police arrested Arthur Price Jr. after an anonymous tipster dropped off three DVDs that reportedly showed Price in the act.

LINK

So this guy is locked up for publicly degrading himself, while the guy who is making these DVDs is still walking the streets! Do you realise that most of these tables come from China with no money and no passport? They're sold, often kept outdoors for 365 days a year, and subjected to the humiliation of holding buns, salads and a selection of condiments at BBQ time if they’re lucky. The less fortunate ones are sold into the sex industry and the big money is in DVD sales. Films with titles such as Folding Fuck Machines, Aluminium Arseholes, The Slutty Slats, Pressure Treated Pric Tease, Big Benches and Deck Chair Orgy, depict garden furniture involved in obscene acts. They change hands in specialist garden centres around the world for big bucks. All to often in cases like this the real victims get ignored.

Related: Oi Mate What's That You're Doing To Your Chopper?

Me: Sorry I'm late my bus was hit by a comet.

Co-workers: look of puzzled befuddlement.

Me: April Fools! You guys are so gullible.

It's laugh a minute when you work with me.