From Wooster Collective

One of my favourite books is Catch 22. The hero Yossarin starts off the book in a military hospital in Italy in a bed next to a man wrapped from head to toe in bandages. As an invalid he is given the job of censoring letters home for anything sensitive. A job he does with the appropriate level of seriousness i.e. none at all, blacking out whole passages on a whim. You might hope that Yossarin, who lives by the way, might have had something to do with the overzealous ‘redaction’ of this CIA document detailing ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ i.e. methods of torture for the USA’s ‘war’ on terror. Sadly, like Colonel Cathcart, I’m rather inclined to assume the worst.

From ACUL via BoingBoing

I had a little cycling holiday this weekend on the Isle of Wight. We got really lucky with the weather while most of the country got soaked our rain was confined to the night which meant that on Sunday we sat in the balmy sunshine outside a pub by the Solent watching the big black rain clouds giving the south coast a watering while getting a bit of a tan!

The rest of the holiday involved cycling around not very taxing cycle paths wearing a fez, drinking in pubs, having a BBQ in a gale, going to an Eco fair and an art gallery with two people playing guitars in a cupboard; artists hey. At the Eco Fair there was a stand about squirrels, a subject close to my heart. The Isle of Wight has about three thousand red squirrels and no greys. It was manned by a very bored looking lady, she perked up when we asked her what the best way to kill a grey was. “Shoot it, trap it, put it in a sack, smash it on a head with a rock” (the last one is against the law) she had a real passion for Grey killing. She should have come on the road trip. She gave us a sticker. I wonder if she’d like a copy of my wall chart.

The cycling didn’t go without incident. Even though we only biked about 10 miles in two days on the island and hardly even attempted a hill I still managed to injure myself. In fact I have two quite large bruises. One from on my shin from a collision with my pedal and the other one, well in the words of Oliver Reed, it’s on my cock. To be more precise on my cock and balls; I have blue balls!

The accident itself was fairly innocuous. I tried to go down a steep bank, which was peppered with rabbit holes in what I thought was mock extreme off road when I realised it was a bit more extreme than I was comfortable with and hit the brakes, shot forward and landed groin first on the cross bar. It hurt but, my voice didn’t go all squeaky, I didn’t fall on the floor clutching the jewels, I wasn’t sick in a hedge, no I’m a trooper, so I just winced and carried on. It did make cycling a bit uncomfortable, which wasn’t helped by the fact that my bike was completely shit.

The saddle, the one thing I really needed to work, wasn’t bolted on tightly enough so you couldn’t sit on it without the back slipping down levering the front pointy bit into the damaged areas. Needless to say I didn’t sit down on it. This was all fine on the leisurely little rides on the island, but when I got back to the mainland to discover that Southampton train station had flooded and that I would have to cycle six miles to Eastleigh, not so fine. And when I got back to London and the back tyre exploded on Upper Street and I had to push the piece of crap the last mile, by this point I was feeling a whole lot less smug about the tan.

As an aside did you know that Anthony Mingella the Oscar winning director was from the Isle of Wight? He even mentioned the Isle of Wight in his Oscar speech and they love him for it. His family is in the ice cream trade, they have a shop in Ryde, and you can buy Mingella ice cream all over the island. Now this gave me an idea. How can the Isle of Wight and the Mingella family continue to trade on the Hollywood connection now that their most famous son has sadly passed away?

I’ll tell you how, inter his body in state, just like Lenin, Moa and Evita, embalm his body and put it on public display for respectful pilgrims to revere, but with a twist. Embalm the body with Mingella ice cream. The benefits are obvious the publicity generated will attract numerous tourists at the same time as promoting the ice cream brand. Nice idea hey!

From The Comments:

Row The Boat has made the suggestion that perhaps I should embalm my balls in Mingella Ice Cream, plum flavour. I’m not sure that this would be much of a tourist draw, but with the right marketing and product placement perhaps a ball soothing lotion could be a lucrative sideline.

When I was a kid I remember going to playschool. You do pretty much the same thing everyday at playschool, which is probably why you have no definitive memory of it. Everyday we’d paint a picture and everyday I’d try and create something usually involving He Man. The problem was I was four years old and frankly I was shit so all my paintings came out as a brown swirly mess. In my defence the brushes were really fat, which made detail tricky, and the palate was at best limited.

When I showed these pictures to my Mum she’d ask what they were, at first I told her, but she’d ask questions like, 'is that his leg?' and I’d have to say, ‘no actually that’s his sword’ or something tiresome like that, so eventually I just started saying that they were all monsters. As a monster is enough of an abstract to have no definitive shape I didn't get anywhere near as many questions, which was what I wanted, though in hind-sight this may have been because my parents were rather worried. Anyways, the reason I’m bringing this all up is that this amazing Korean artists has taken children’s pictures and tried to realise them as photos and the results are just amazing.

Yeondoo Jung

Day two of being Veggie and today I ate Stuffed Peppers from a recipe kindly supplied by Emsbabee; recipe at the bottom.

“Are we going to eat soon” said stomach to mind.

“I am completely wasted round here you know. I can do maths, well I can use spreadsheets, and I can write, well I can’t spell but we’ve got a computer. Oh and I do crude jokes. Sometimes I wonder where this is all going, oh great existential angst, come on Penis lets go, walkies!”

"PARP" said arsehole.

So being Veggie is going OK. I've not eaten meat, but I am pretty hungry. I’m hoping it gets progressively easier.

Chess champion Gary Kasparov is now a political activist in Russia standing in opposition to Putin. The man is undoubtedly very intelligent, so when some pernicious trouble maker flies a radio controlled rubber (I assume) cock fitted with helicopter rotor blades into one of his rallies do you think he was clever enough to come up with a witty name (in English) for this new type of flying machine? No, well who's clever now chess boy!

LINK

I recently watched this lecture and it's made me want to go veggie for a week.

Why? well I've tried to summarise my reasons:

1 - people that eat a diet high in vegetables matter live longer
2 - more fibre equals a better pooing experience
3 - a meat rich diet causes a greater carbon footprint so is bad for the environment and globally it is unsustainable
4 - I can pretend I care about the welfare of animals to impress women with my caring
5 - it's good to experience new things, walk a mile in another man's shoes, steal another man's car, that kind of thing
6 - smugness, what if I didn't have something to be smugly self satisfied about!
7 - I really hate vegetables and I want them all to die horribly
8 - vegetables are more colourfull than meat, my cupboards,fridge and plate will all benefit from a splash of colour

With such comprehensive reasons, why only one week?

That is a good question, thanks. What I hope to achieve during the week in addition to improved intestinal tract functionality is to improve my vegetarian cooking skills. Right now I've only really got one good veggie recipe which I picked up from a girl I lived with at uni. (To be honest I've only got about five or six recipes in total, though I'm dam good at them).

If I can get down just one more recipe it will be worth it as I will keep repeating the recipe for years to come, so in the long run I'll have reduced my meat consumption, I'll live longer,shit better, and save the planet.

So any recipe ideas greatly appreciated. I'll contribute my recipe for Veggie lasagna.

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?