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Its funny you forget how brilliant going to places like the zoo is. They had monkeys, crocodiles, lions and ants. Brilliant!

From my friend Ashley

Because I know that that you all come here for nuggets of wisdom and not the silly stuff about willys.

In the battle of the sexes men can point to a great many achievements to back up their claim to be on top. In the world of sport men outclass women in all arenas; a list of the most influential scientists would be an all out brodeo; and a top ten of history’s greatest philosophers has more cock in it than Socrates’ favorite student. Of course women are not totally absent in these fields. In the world of sport women are unequalled at topless darts, in science they have the chick who got cancer from radiation, there by proving radiation gives you cancer, and in philosophy there is Ginger Spice, but in one area of human endeavor women don’t even represent: the field of sticking your dick in things.

Today’s news brings us this story: Michigan man sentenced to 90 days in jail for having sex with a car wash vacuum cleaner.

Previously in this blog I’ve reported on men having sex with a bike, a park bench and a picnic table. While a steady drip drip of ‘man sticks dick in . . .’ stories appears in the news the female equivalents remain conspicuously absent. Where are the: ‘woman found sucking off a fire extinguisher’, ‘women caught dry humping a statue’, or ‘women tit wanks a bollard’ headlines? Until the women of the world stop darning socks and wake up to the challenge it seems that publicly fucking inanimate objects will remain one for the boys, those brave, brave, boys.

The summer of rage is here, though technically this is still the spring of bad temper, the dawning of the age of moodiness. The people are on the streets and they’re angry, grrrr. I’m talking about the protests in London ahead of the G20 summit. The protesters are already getting plenty of news coverage, but the weird thing about the media response is that nobody seems to know what the protests are about. The protesters are described as either anarchists or activists and are reported to be campaigning against poverty, climate change, globalisation, and capitalism with a bit of anti war thrown in for good measure.

In the past I have criticised these types of organisations for their lack of a coherent message. In my experience they celebrate the fact that they make collective decisions (this process genuinely involves waving your hands in the air a bunch of primary school kids during story time) and consider leadership to be crypto, fascistic, oppression. This tends to mean that they come across as a rag tag group of unemployed, ne’re-do-well, agitators who want everyone to wear more wool, live in converted school buses and play hacky sac, rather than a credible political force. The reason I think this time is different is due to a convergence of factors, the financial crisis and the climate crisis combined means big changes are inevitable, what these changes will be is up for grabs and anyone shouting loud enough is going to get heard.

Take off shore tax havens, institutionalised corruption. Everyone knows they exist and six months ago everyone accepted them as an unfortunate but necessary part of the system that bought you the wide-screen HD telly. Everyone likes wide-screen HD tellys; and decking and patio furniture; and digital radios; so we’re O.K. with off shore tax havens. Roll it forward six months and the off shore tax haven now seem like part of the system that bought you the pay freeze, negative equity, stock options that are worthless and a pension that will only keep you in granny nappies for a weekend, and hang on a minute aren’t off shore tax havens just institutionalised corruption; I’m against that sort of thing!

When I attended the Climate Camp’s Kingsnorth power station protest in November 08 I wrote, in response to a speaker’s calls to bring down capitalism:

600 people are not going to bring down the multi trillion dollar international banking system regardless of how unjust it is. (600 was my estimate of the number of protesters present.)

Since then the international banking system seems to have fallen on their sword:

If you fail to take away a strong man's sword when he is on the ground, will you do it when he gets up?

Nigerian proverb

I think I may have just mixed my metaphors but you get my point. I think London 09 has the potential to do for the British what Paris 68 did for the French. I know little about the Paris Student Protests of 1968. I don’t remember the protests, I wasn’t born (the injustice), and whenever I see them portrayed in films or on television they don’t seem to be about anything in particular other than general left wing narkyness. A bunch of rag-tag, unemployed (student), ner-do-well, agitators who wanted everyone to wear more wool (roll necks), but despite the protests being vague in purpose (reform of the bourgeois university system, end of the ‘police state’ and fall of the government) and the protesters being largely defeated, Charles De Gaulle was re-elected by a landslide, the protests did have a considerable effect on the French psyche, that ‘we don’t have to take your shit’ psyche that the French have.

They may be a country of sheep burners, but they also work a 35 hour week compared to our 42, have 11 national holidays to our 8, have a minimum of 25 days holiday a year to our 20, and have a minimum wage of £8.10 per hour compared to ours of £5.73. Why? Because they won’t take any of their shit, a man needs Wednesday afternoon off!

The British might pride themselves on their level headed pragmatism, but with a weak government and a nose diving economy we can do more than just tut. The bottom line is that if the middle classes find that they can no longer afford the pouches to put in their espresso makers there’s going to be trouble – trouble wearing a 100% organic merano wool cardigan.

Cory Doctorov over at Boing Boing has challenged his army of readers to remix the Metropolitan Police’s latest attempt to intimidate the populace. It turns out the Met, in response to the Government’s assessment that a dirty bomb attack in the UK is “highly likely”, have, for want of a worthwhile plan, like a bunch of sixth-formers brainstorming for their end of year project, decided to make a poster, and because it is the Metropolitan Police, they’ve decided to make a sinister fear mongering poster.

Check out Cory’s original take on the posters here, and here’s my response:

See it in Big on Flickr.

And see what the other Boing Boing readers came up with in the comments of this post.

The frequency with which I post on this blog is inversely proportional to the health of my sex life, so it follows that my recent lack of posts can mean only one THING.

This is something to celebrate. The internet doesn't need me, this is the Hollywood ending everyone was waiting for. The guy gets the girl so we can all go home. I was starting to think that way, but then on the front page of Digg, one of the biggest web pages on the net I found this article:

13-worst-lara-croft-wannabes-on-web

and I realised. The Internet still needs me (actual pictures of me):

You just can't have a Hollywood ending without a late entry that blows the competition out of the water.

The audience stares, mouths agape, momentarily in silence, then simultaneously bursts into wild cheering and whooping, spontaneous high fives proliferate, your author is carried from the auditorium, high on the shoulders of his adoring crowd. Truly he is the Worst Lara Croft wannabe on the Internet.

I wrote a letter to the Scottish Sunday Express this weekend. I’m a follower of Graham Linehan’s Twitter feed and he had brought my attention to an article they ran on the front page. An article that prompted me to write to them, I can recall the contents word for word:

Dear Sirs

RE: Scottish Sunday Express Dunblane Exposé

You pricks.

Regards

MJohnson

Graham Linehan takes up the story on his blog.

Update: They printed an apology, who wouldn't when faced with my tsunami of an argument. You can't argue with the facts pricks. An awful apology. I'd hate to be the poor sod who had to type this crap.

Isn’t it marvellous when the sun comes out and the whole country momentarily comes out of their palsy of collective depression long enough to sip a half in a beer garden and have an argument with their spouse about whether or not they’d promised to go to the garden centre that afternoon because now they really want to watch the rugby.

This year the odes of spring seem particularly well timed. Friday is a doubly auspicious day; it is both pay day for me and the Spring Equinox for the northern hemisphere (the autumn equinox for the southern). This is my favourite day of the year. The day the Sun rolls back over the equator into my Northern Hemisphere and he won’t be leaving for six whole months. We’ve suffered while he was away bathing his other family with his warm affectionate glow, while we freeze in the gloom of his absence, but he’s back now and all is forgiven.

This year large parts of the southern hemisphere will be happy to see the back of him, I’m referring of course to those bits of Australia he set fire to, naughty sun, and of course there will be plenty of people fretting about the Greenland Ice Cap and Arctic Sea Ice. They’ll be hoping for a cold summer, but despite the prospect of imminent global climate disaster, smoky fiery death, or skin cancer, I’m praying for a scorcher. I just can’t get enough of it.

Did I ever tell you the story about the time I saw a pigeon lay an egg on a man's head. No, well are you sitting comfortably? Then I shall begin.

I was once stood in an alleyway beside a small office block behind Wind Street in Swansea. I was with a bunch of guys I had met that morning, I can't remember if I was smoking a fag, they were, I very possibly was, I was trying to fit in. It was my first day on a new job and this was the start of our lunch break.

The man in question was quite tall and either bald or he had a skinhead, I don't remember which. He was Welsh, rough Swansea Welsh. He was one of the best performing sales guys on the job, you could tell he was a bit of a bully, all the best salesmen are. He was smoking his fag when something hit him on the head.

It was an egg, it broke on impact. A small egg, it broke, but I saw the shell. It was smaller than a chickens egg, about the size of a quails egg and the only place it could have come from was one of the pigeons that were perched on the steel rafters up above. I'd seen a pigeon lay an egg on a man's head.

The job I had started that morning was telesales, selling mobile phone insurance over the phone. Cold calling with a suspiciously good insurance offer. It was quite clearly a scam. I knew pretty quickly that there was something not right about the operation. Firstly they'd give anyone a job. I was in need of a job and I'd been put on to it by my Irish friend. This guy mumbled so badly you could hardly make out what he was saying most of the time. Regardless of his severe problems speaking they had given him a job, in telesales.

The operation consisted of a load of phones in a room on the second floor of a grotty office building behind a pub and a bookies in Swansea's binge drinking district. By lunch time I'd had my suspicions confirmed by someone that had seen the contracts, the insurance offered no protection at all. I didn't go back after lunch. I didn't get paid for my morning's work. I'd managed to get one victim to sign up, but I wasn't going to pursue payment. I had a feeling it would be rather futile, and anyway, seeing a man, that scammed people out of money for a living, have an egg laid on his head, by a pigeon, was payment enough.

This was back in 2002. I mention it today because there was a story about it, the scam, not the pigeon, on the news today:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7943352.stm

I’ve got an pain in the arse people, a pain in the arse that can't be cured with fibre, or an enema. I’ve been rigorously straining my arse and now, I’ve started walking funny. I’m walking a bit like a cowboy, or an Indian, or a builder, or a cop, or any person that has been doing allot of cycling and playing badminton. Yes I have a sporting arse injury.

And you thought I’d been to a gay orgy. Gay orgy or not all this exercise has given me pretty tight buns, Greg's have got nothing on me. Time to get those chaps out.

House prices across London are falling. It’s as if the Police have discovered the bodies of teenage runaways in everyone’s basement. This was of course inevitable. House prices had got ridiculous. If you wanted to buy an ex crack den in a 60s concrete tower block in Catford you had to either, sell your unborn daughter’s virginity to a Russian Oligarch, or get a 100% mortgage from Northern Rock. The days of the 100% mortgage are over and the supply of Russian Oligarchs is limited, so a fall in house prices was inevitable.

The drop has occasionally fooled me into thinking that I may one day own my own home. This is of course an absurd dream. Currently two thirds of mortgage approvals require a 25% deposit. The average flat in London costs 295 thousand pounds. A 25% deposit would equate to £74 thousand pounds. This is just stupid money. Who has 74K knocking about? The average salary in London is 32K, before tax. This means that after tax it will take the average couple almost 18 months to be able to earn the average deposit on the average flat in London, so if Mr and Mrs Average can live under a bridge and sustain themselves on a mixture of bus exhaust and fresh piss for a year and a half they will be able to scrape together the readies to be able to pay the deposit on a flat, that’s assuming they don’t get fired for coming to work looking like a couple of average, emaciated, pissed-stained, vagrants.

So it looks like affordability remains thoroughly disconnected from earnings in the housing market. I think a very generous figure for a deposit on an average flat would be around six months of average net earnings, multiplied by two as most home buyers have two incomes, around 25K (not a figure I’m likely to get hold of any time soon). The scary thing about this figure is that if deposits stay at 25% then the average house price will need to come down by a further 65% before Mr and Mrs Average can afford the deposit. I’m expecting banks will eventually reduce their deposit thresholds, but even if they get back down to 10% (a big if) the average house price will still need to come down by 15% and this is based on average earnings staying the same, in a recession, so it looks like house prices have a lot further to go before they hit the bottom, by which time the government will be bankrupt and we’ll all be piss stained vagrants living under a bridge, a very desirable location sir.

Work is starting to get a bit crunchy. All the clients are demanding more work for less money because in board rooms across the country big over paid suits are having meetings. Faced with a drop in profits and the absence of any opportunity to increase revenue their innovative solution is to tell all their staff to spend less and make more, just spend less and make more.

Pretty much everywhere you go now you’ll be encountering people who are under pressure from above to get more money out of you and spend less doing it.

I encountered a good example of this recently when I went to get my hair cut. I’ve been getting my hair cut in the same men’s barbers just off Fleet Street for the last couple of years. It’s just a simple barber. You can go in there on your lunch break and you’re out in fifteen minutes, but this time something was different.

I noticed it as soon as I walked through the door. There was a row of men all having their hair washed. Us men don’t tend to outsource our hair washing. We don’t have much of it and unless we get it covered in axle grease or the blood of the last man we defeated in combat it doesn’t need a lot of maintenance, but today, there they were, a row of men letting other men run their soapy hands through their thinning locks and sure enough, when it was my turn, they asked me too ‘Shall I wash your hair?’

Clearly they had been instructed to ask everyone, McDonalds – do you want fries with that – style, if they wanted their hair washed, and it seemed most people, quite spontaneously, as I can’t imagine they went in their to have their hair washed, did. Selling up I think they call it in marketing speak, a vile practice. I politely declined.

ITV are loosing shed loads of money and need high quality low budget television productions pronto to save their sorry asses from having to product place CS Gas and leg irons during The Bill (the logic there is that pretty soon the police will be the only ones buying once the riots start and all the shops have closed down, invest in truncheons people you heard it here first).

Ever the public servant, I’m willing to step in and save Britain’s second shittest television channel before they drown in their own swimming pool. Where’s Barrymore when you need him? What would we do without ITV, which other channel is so adept at selling useless shit to poor people, and, Ant and Dec, think of the children.

Never fear I’ve been brainstorming:

Was That: a travel show in which my friend Brendan, and I two fairly effeminate southern fairies, (but not like Jeremy from airport) who have only been to the North of England on a few occasions learn a little more about the grimmer parts of the UK. We are to be escorted on our voyage by a guide, an enthusiastic and gregarious northerner, much like Jeremy from airport, but northern.

For this we will need:

Fifty pounds
Bus pass
Lemsip
A magician (possibly Paul Mckenna)
Raincoats times three

Jeremy from airport swims: a six part series in which Jeremy from airport, a man famed for his association with all things airborne, takes to the water with a six part series on swimming. Jeremy will swim in the sea, a river, a lake/loch, a pond, a swimming pool, a canal and a reservoir. There is scope for a Top Gear special style ‘special’ called, Jeremy swims in the clouds, in which Jeremy swims in a pool of water carried to an altitude of several thousand feet by hot air balloons or military helicopters (these will be piloted by my friend Brendan).

For this we will need:

One hundred and fifty pounds
Swimming float
Goggles
Subscription to Nuts magazine
An illusionist (possibly Derron Brown)
Hot air balloons/helicopters (only required for ‘special’)

The lost city of Swindon: travel show in which Maureen from Driving School is taken to an undisclosed location and then drives to Swindon without the aid of a map. She is accompanied on her journey by my friend Brendan wearing the traditional clothing of the Aztecs Indians. If Maureen fails to reach Swindon within the allotted timescale the Indian (Brendan) will sacrifice her to his Sun God. Should Maureen succeed she will receive a KFC bargain bucket presented by Jeremy from Airport.

What we will need

Seventy five pounds
A Vauxhall Astra
Membership of a reputable vehicle recovery organisation
A magician specialising in mind reading (possibly Paul Daniels)
Can of pine fresh air freshener

Rope – a show about rope.

For this we will need

Forty five pounds
Some rope
Time share apartment in Catalonia
The corpse of David Blaine

Ignore all honks and shouts: it is simple abuse. People will not warn you of an impending danger, they’ll just film the resulting accident on their camera phone.

Wear plenty of glow: you’ve spent close to a grand on a carbon fibre, single speed, road rocket, but you choose to stop spending when it comes to forking out a tenner on a couple of LEDs – you deserve to die. As a rough rule of thumb if you can’t be seen from the Moon get more reflective shit.

The Police are your friend: The Police have a difficult job to do and they're shit at it. I’ve ridden the wrong way down one-way streets, run reds and buzzed pedestrians right under the nose of the rozzers, they do nothing – you might as well be the Yorkshire Ripper – proceed with impunity. (Watch out for lollypop ladies, they’re the law).

Cycle shops will rip you off: in addition to this the vast majority of the staff will be stoned. If you have the balls, steal anything you want, they won’t notice. Otherwise be prepared to wait for ages to be ripped off by Bill and Ted. They suck their teeth, but only because they think they’re smoking a dooby.

Maintenance: you’ll need to know how to pump up the tyres every couple of weeks, oil the chain and change your brake blocks unless you want to pay a visit to dumb and dumber, you don’t. Seriously a bike is fucking simple; it has about eight moving parts. You’re not trying to crack the Enigma. Even a stoner can fix one.

Security: there are thieves everywhere; thieves seem to have a similar deal going with the Police as cyclists and the Yorkshire Ripper. They’re not really on the case, so you’ll need to carry your own security system. As a rule of thumb your lock should cost as much as your bike and weigh twice as much.

Death: in order of danger, taxis, white vans, lorries, bendy buses, other vans, cars, buses, scooters, motorbikes, other cyclists, pedestrians and pigeons are all trying to kill you. Keep your wits about you unless you want them to succeed. Look around and signal.

Other cyclists: At first it feels like you’re all in the same gang then you realise they’re all either mental, or retarded. Don’t be a lemming, don’t just follow other cyclists, they’re all going to die, do you want to die.

And most of all, have fun.

I fired an AK47 assault rifle while I was on a stag do recently. AK47 stands for Automatic Kalashnikov 1947. The gun is named after the designer, Mr Kalashnikov, the year it was designed, 1947, and the fact that it is an automatic weapon, a machine gun. This is the gun you see every single day on the news. The one in the hands of the child soldiers in Uganda, or the militants in Gaza, the Somali pirates, or more recently the young men firing indiscriminately at the Sri Lankan Cricket team in Pakistan.

The weapon is astonishingly simple. You can look at the gun and work out how it works in a couple of minutes. There is a lever on the side that you pull back to put the first bullet in the chamber, every time you fire the gun the gas from the explosion is funnelled down a pipe attached to the barrel, this pushes the lever back and the next bullet is loaded. It’s that simple. When you fire the gun it has a faint whiff of wood smoke mixed in with the explosives. The wooden grip at the front of the gun gets very hot and smokes a little. I was told that this is the only part that ever needs replacing.

The gun is made from pressed steel. It rattles when you fire it. Apparently this rattling acts as a self cleaning mechanism. Bits of grit that would get stuck in, and jam, other guns are simply shaken out of an AK47. The rattling steel adds another aspect to the gun; it makes it feel more like a weapon. The range we were using had an impressive collection of guns including M4s and M5s, modern American assault rifles. These appeared to be precision engineered. This gave them a high tech surgical feel in contrast to the raw brutality of the AK.

The AK is the most deadly weapon in human history, more deadly than the atom bomb. The Atom bomb and the AK have more in common than appearances would suggest. They were both created around the end of the Second World War as engineering solutions to the problem of mass industrialised killing. They’re both symptoms of the cold war. The two great powers may have squared up to each other holding Nukes, but it was the small arms they dispatched to their allies that did most of the killing, first in South East Asia, then Africa, the Middle East and South America. There is no continent that wasn’t touched by these proxy wars for global influence that spanned the globe in the twentieth century. The AK47 featured heavily in them all.

The Cold War might have ended, but the weapons live on and the same AK47s are still circulating the globe like an infectious prion of conflict, spreading from the corpse of one war into the nervous system of another. The one I fired in Estonia was brought in Finland and made in China. The owner had no idea how old it was. Who knows what horrors it has seen, if any at all.

For all the terrible blood letting the reputation of the AK47 is not entirely evil. The gun has strong connotations of romantic rebellion. It is the weapon of the underdog; the X Wing of the machine gun world; the Pirate’s cutlass; the sling of David that defeated Goliath. It is also widely viewed from a dispassionate perspective as an engineering marvel and like the long bow at Agincourt one that changed the course of history. This killing machine is both auspicious and notorious.

I can also report that firing one feels great. You may think this is quite pathetic, but the feeling of power is intoxicating. I fired mine from the hip at a wall made of wood with cardboard figures stapled to it, like a cross between Adrian Mole and Rambo. A couple of weeks later I see one on the news again. A young man in Pakistan firing one from the hip at a bus full of athletes and in the process, once again, changing the world a little bit. Change the cardboard figures for people and that could have been me. I would never do that, but when you've fired one you realise how easy it is and that knowledge itself is a fairly terrifying thing.

I came across an interesting article on the BBC today about anger at work: Anger at Work ‘Good For Career’. You heard me, good for your career. I’m sorry, but there’s absolutely nothing I can do about it. Not my problem, you’ve got to bare your teeth occasionally if you want to get anywhere in this world, so you might as well stop dribbling, tuck your shirt in, and fucking knuckle down because I’ve got news for you dick head the meek shall inherit absolutely fuck all, except perhaps a cock in the mouth - cock sucker! Now why don’t you make us all a cup of tea, this is going to take some time, oh and can you pick up my printing and change the fucking toner cartridge.

"We all feel anger, but individuals who learn how to express their anger while avoiding the explosive and self-destructive consequences of unbridled fury have achieved something incredibly powerful in terms of overall emotional growth and mental health. . . If we can define and harness those skills, we can use them to achieve great things."

Your hate has made you powerful. Sounds like something Darth Vader would say doesn’t it? Now if I could just get lightening bolts to come out of my finger tips I’d get that promotion ASAP!

I have a complete crush on Charlie Brooker. I even think that if we knew each other we’d be best mates. You know if he just took the time to get to know me. I know we’d get on, we’d probably live in a little flat together and on Sunday mornings drink filter coffee and read the papers and make insightful comment.

In the evenings he’d be shouting at the telly calling everyone cunt flaps pretending to masturbate and I’d be finishing up the washing with my marigolds on. I’d call in to the living room ‘oh Charlie you are so witty Charlie’ and he yells back.

‘Get out of my house or I’ll call the police’

But he’s only joking, so I say, ‘you joker Charlie, time for your blow job now?’

I love you Charlie:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/02/charlie-brooker-politicians