Figures from the World Cancer Research Fund show that in the UK 74% of cancers just happen*. They just happen, regardless of the amount of pomegranate juice you drink or blueberries you eat; regardless of how long or when you sleep, or laugh, or socialise; regardless of the paint you use on your walls, or the type of light bulbs you have; regardless of how much of your life you spend sitting down, or standing up, or running round, or on a bike, or riding a unicycle with a chimp on your shoulders, or kite surfing the Sahara while eating wham bars, or tap dancing in Chernobyl while sad – cancer just happens - regardless of how many studies you read about in the newspapers cancer happens and it’s a right shitter.
*as long as you don’t smoke, smoking is pretty much prolonged suicide.
You know when you put something off for ages and it weighs on your mind, all the time driving you slowly crazy. Then you bring yourself to make one phone call and suddenly this big weight is off your shoulders and you’re thinking, ‘Why did I put that off for so long, that was fairly painless’. That’s kind of my life.
Regular pancake won't be enough I'm afraid because there is a revolution in the air following my latest discovery. I've just invented a brand new type of pancake. This discovery could make me rich and fat in the mouth like Jamie Oliver, but I can't keep it to myself. It would be wrong.
Here's the deal it's simple I won't need a shiny hardback book to get the message across, so in hindsight it might have been quite tricky to get a lucrative book deal, but regardless, this is my gift to the people.
You're making pancakes in the usual manner, but you've got some sliced almonds. Get them, bash them up a little bit, but not allot, and put them in the frying pan - before the batter! Yes before, you heard me.
There should be very little oil in the pan because you want the almonds to toast. When they start to go brown just pour in the batter on top and whip it around in the usual way. It works, you get an almondy nutty pancake. Great texture, I spread them with Nuttela for extra nutty goodness.
P.S. this has the added advantage of adding one more innuendo to pancake day:
Jeez what’s the deal with them Zionists, I mean jeez, you’re not gonna get planning permission to rebuild your dam temple get over it. Also Macs are much better and user friendly than PCs, but at nearly a grand a pop you’d hope so wouldn’t you. I mean come on how much money have you got graphics people? Not the kind of argument you’d be able to fit into 140 characters, this is in depth, unlike Twitter. I mean come on – I done a poo LOLZ - Stephen Fry you’re better than that. Also the credit crunch who saw that coming. Not Gordon Brown he’s only got one eye; it must have been his blind side. I blame the Zionists – return to top – ad infinitum.
Any comments you may have on any of the subjects raised above please leave below.
I’ve been drafted; I start the long march tonight, destination Eastern Europe. All over Britain a generation of young men are receiving the same orders. Leave your sweethearts behind, kiss your old Mum goodbye. Pack warm socks, you’re going on a stag-do. We billet in Tallin, capital of Estonia. I’m not entirely sure what’s going to happen, all I know is that it will involve shooting machine guns and it will be ridiculously cold. Never go East in the winter, did you learn nothing from history!
Ridiculous isn’t it and I’m not even joking about the machine guns. Apparently they offer this as a tourist attraction. Of course if we were a bunch of young Muslims from Bradford getting up to something similar on a trip to Pakistan they’d call it a terror training camp, thankfully we’re all white so have a right old larf you scamps. Pyow, pyow. Unfortunately for me however I have a nasty bastard cold. I think I might shoot myself in the foot. Medic!
What happens when the immovable object hits the unstoppable force? I’m about to find out. I’m currently watching two of the world’s greatest bureaucracies collide. We’ve got a government department on one side and a giant corporation on the other. The corporation is the tenant the government department is the landlord. The tenant wants out-of-hours security for their building in a sleepy little town somewhere in rural England because someone somewhere has convinced someone who filled in a form that the bogey man is real and he steals stationary.
The landlord already provides security guards during normal working hours, which the tenant pays for by way of a service charge. The tenant has been told if they want out-of-hours security guards they’ll have to pay the security company directly, but wait! The tenant can’t pay them directly because they don’t have a form for that, so the landlord is approached: can you pay for the security guards and recharge the cost in the usual way? The landlord really wants to, but sorry, there also don’t have a form for that. No forms times two – Formageddon!
What happens next? I don’t know but there is the very real possibility that the corporate suits will not have a minimum-wage immigrant in a black jacket with a name tag marked ‘Security’ sleeping in their office foyer come Monday night. Who is going to protect them from all the evils that prowl on the outside? Poor suits, it’s when bureaucracy fails to protect the innocent and their stationary that I get really angry.
Is all you need love or are other things such as crisps also important was the question I found myself pondering this weekend? On Saturday afternoon I found myself at the statue of Eros in Piccadilly Circus among a collection of hippies with acoustic guitars giving out free hugs and exposing their infants to cannabis fumes. This is, I am reliably informed, a happening known as Reclaim Love where I was told that all we need is love.
You can’t possibly be expected to take the statement 'all we need is love literally'. I don’t think I can envisage a future in which we all subsist entirely on love, nor can I envisage one in which we choose to do without such things as sewers, law courts, traffic wardens, or even football teams. None of these things have very much to do with love, certainly not in the compassion and desire to alleviate the suffering of others sense, but I don’t suppose the statement is meant to be taken literally. I think it is meant to mean that we should act compassionately in everything we do. If we want a better world we’re going to need a whole lot more love, in the same sense that if we want better digestive health then we all need a whole lot more fibre even though fibre had no actual nutritional value. You can’t really fault this idea, other than to say it may be a little impractical in its application, a compassionate pest controller for example would probably just be a shit pest controller, perhaps he can just smile more.
While I was waiting for my friends to arrive at the happening I passed the time by having a stress test session with the scientologists, this involved sitting in a chair, holding two bits of metal, and being asked very personal questions by a complete stranger. A complete stranger who happened to be a youngish unattractive woman wearing one of those American college-sports team jackets, the ones that have someone's initials stitched onto them. She looked like across between Richie Cunningham from Happy Days and Hurley from Lost.
She asked me to think about things in my life that caused me stress, so I did and just when I had the thought the little needle on her machine swung to the right, on one occasion quite violently. I later found out that her machine is what the scientologists call an E Meter and that what it was doing was measuring the galvanic skin response, the electrical resistance in my skin. In short I discovered that thinking about my boss actually gives me sweaty palms, even on the weekend. At the end of my little session Hurley didn’t tell me that what I needed was love, thankfully. No she told me that what I needed was a book called Dianetics that retails at £13. The book tells you how to stop having stressful thoughts and when I do this I will become a better person and all my dreams will come true.
I don't doubt for one second that the scientologists were able to correctly identify things in my life that caused me stress. Though since it was me that was choosing what to think about it was actually me doing the identifying. Whether they'll be able to make all those things disappear I doubt very much, but I have no doubt that if I had less stress I would be a better person. You can't fault them there. I am already a lot less stressed than I used to be and I am much better than I used to be - I used to be shit!
I put this stress reduction down to better time management at work: I've discovered Outlook's task manager and I use it for everything, which means I don't forget things, but also I don't have try and remember 50 things at once, which is not only impossible, but will drive you insane. That and I ride my bike into work these days which is much better for you than getting on the tube.
So more love less stress Bob's your uncle you're on to a winner, oh and don't forget it's all just a ride, just a ride man:
When I was a younger man I would occasionally get a very dry mouth. This was usually accompanied by bloodshot eyes, a fuzzy head, the conviction that I’d just had a really really good idea and the total inability to recall, expand on, or express coherently my epiphany; hazy days. Well back in those days we’d often use an expression for the sensation of a tongue like a dried out piece of leather: Gandhi’s flip flops, or a mouth like Gandhi’s flip flops (though we’d usually opt for using as few words as possible and drawing them out), so it was with some fondness that I gazed upon a photo of the real thing this morning in the paper. They look parched don’t they. They’re up for auction in New York. I trust the new owner will keep them in a suitably desiccated environment.
“Don’t do drugs, they’ll turn you into a spastic” my friend Brendan 1998, best piece of advice I never listened to.
I’ve just come across the unremarkable website of Andrew Anker chairman of the board of directors of Ebates Shopping.com and a director of SourceForge. You can visit Andrew’s website by clicking on the below URL, the one that reads Andre Wanker!
All Mr and Mrs Anker had to do was avoid names ending in W. I can just imagine them choosing, “so, we’ve got it down to Ludlow, Woodrow, Bartholemew or Andrew, we like Andrew best.”
Well done Mr and Mrs Anker, you chose surely the only name that can combine with your surname to create, not only the term most commonly used for self love, but also a separate first name. Possibly the best bit of naming since Benedict Wat
Since the advent of the spellchecker the BBC has been afflicted by a surge of complaints from the newly literate. In a move to prevent the corporation being again brought to their knees by a handful of whining emails, the BBC has today announced plans to surrender the margins of all television broadcasts to a live complaints stream.
Under the scheme the size of the margin will be proportional to the number of complaints vs the average viewing figures for the programme. The BBC, who claim to have profiled the average complainer, describe a typical contributor as a "male, retired army colonel, living alone on the Isle of Wight, flying a Union Jack in their front garden".
A BBC spokesperson said: "Though the complaints stream is to be a permanent feature in all future broadcasts it is only expected to be noticeable during the nightly weather forecast when temperatures are read out in Centigrade rather than Fahrenheit. We hope to compensate for this intrusion by ceasing to provide a forecast for Northern Ireland where they have better things to worry about"
The spokesperson went on to say “Our surveys have shown that the public want the BBC to represent the views of the nation, but all our attempts to give them what they want have fallen foul of the regulators".
A previous plan for a new Saturday night flagship show featuring a donkey repeatedly kicking an immigrant had to be shelved following complaints from animal rights groups.
The BBC' claims this "compromise solution will allow us to both represent the views of the public and still make television programmes for you idiots”
Despite the BBC’s claims that this new initiative will allow them the artistic freedom they require to survive, Gay right’s groups are concerned. Tony Norman of Stone-hedge said: “Every time I go on television my views are going to be accompanied by a torrent of text calling me a Gaybo.” Mr Norman said that he had written to the BBC to express his concerns with “the world’s most respected public service broadcaster's intentions to reduce itself to the level of a Youtube comments thread” he was SHOCKED when he received a reply from the BBC that read simply:
The way I surf the net is to start of with my feed reader. Here I have subscribed to a whole load of blogs. These blogs are either stand alone entertaining or I read them because they provide me with interesting links. Links that take me off on tangents down the rivulets and rapids of internet tributaries into the hidden pools of interesting, cool, quirky and ‘specialist’ web pages. The problem is that for all the times I find my self dancing in the oasis of interesting there are just as many, if not more instances, when I find myself slumped in front of my monitor, my cerebral cortex paralysed by the internet’s venom: total and utter, fucking, inanity. Held captive, zombie like, but alive. Like the victim of a parasitic wasp, feeding my captors insatiable appetite for clicks and every click I make simply salves my mind with more of the anaesthetic brain goo . . . anyway, I thought I’d save you the journey and link you to some of the best places I’ve come across on the net recently:
I was just eating my lunch in our company staff room. There weren’t many people in there and we were all sitting around being a bit anti social reading papers. Then the news came on the telly of Michael Phelps being banned from swimming for three months after pictures were published of him smoking pot. One of the other guys just piped up:
Imagine Michael Phelps stoned: ‘whooooooooah you guys my hands are like huuuuuuuuuge’
A friend of mine is going to this tomorrow, a Rioplatenses concert:
Everybody’s heard of tango, but very little is known about Argentina's “other music”. Get ready for a chance to discover it tonight!
The thing about Argentina’s “other music” is that it is performed by a flutist wearing a basket on her head.
I don’t know for sure why ‘powerful, dynamic and foot tapping’ Rioplatenses hasn’t had the same international success as the tango, though I suspect the basket might have something to do with it. I hear in Sri Lanka there is a type of trombone that is played while standing in a bucket that is having similar credibility problems.
I'm revising from my driving theory test at the moment. My favourite questions so far are:
When leaving your vehicle parked and unattended you should
a. park near a busy junction
b. park in a housing estate
c. remove the key and lock it
d. leave the left indicator on
As you approach a pelican crossing the lights change to green. Elderly people are halfway across. You should
a. wave them to cross as quickly as they can
b. rev your engine to make them hurry
c. flash your lights in case they have not heard you
d. wait because they will take longer to cross
When I showed these to my brother he told me that unfortunately there is always someone that needs to have the obvious spelt out to them. When Moses came down from Mount Sinia with the ten commandments and told the Israelites 'though shall not kill' most of them were all - duh - except Sid who sheepishly tried to hide his blood dripping axe. True I suppose, personally it came as quite a shock that it wasn't OK to clip your toenails and not pick up the clippings. What! You're allowed to leave your hair all over the place, it's made of the same stuff.
