Andrew Reid: Curb Your Enthusiasm

Another episode in the ‘you couldn’t make it up’ life of Andrew Reid.

My good mate rang me tonight to say he’d a met a girl at the station. They got chatting and she says she’s doing a something for charity tomorrow night at the Walkabout pub on Deansgate.

She’s dressing as a Roman and oil wrestling other girls.

She needs someone to film it and with my ahem, equipment, we’re well suited. So my mate has her number and she’s going to give him a call tomorrow.

I, however, am in Buxton tomorrow filming a girl having her head shaved for charity.

I told you ‘you couldn’t make it up’! So, there goes a moral dilemma - whether to leave Buxton earlier than planned to film the oil wrestling girls or whether to stay up there with good friends drinking  the night away?

Today I was woken in the morning by the most incredible red sky. Red sky in the evening they say, shepherds delight, red sky in the morning shepherds warning. One has to think those shepherds were taking too much LSD.

I decided to email my photo of the beautiful sunrise to North West Tonight and hatched a crafty plan for my flat mate James to put in a good word.

Sure enough when the lovely Diane announced the weather forecast I fell forward off my sofa in excitement at the beautiful red sunrise on the TV - submitted by Geoff McMillan. It seems I wasn’t the only one awake at 4am today. Maybe James putting in a good word was seen as an insider job, and what with all the phone-in controversy recently he was promptly sacked? If so, sorry James!

Another moral dilemma happened yesterday. At Cash Generator, the gold mine which just keeps on giving (and accepting from criminals), I bought a Macbook Pro for £500 worth about £1000 on eBay. When I got it home I realised it had someones documents, course work, photos and most interestingly - naked videos of his girlfriend on it. Now - should I copy it all onto a DVD and send it in the post? It might save the guy’s university education, but then again he might think I’M the criminal. Then today I went into the store again and they had a 26 inch LCD monitor for £100, worth £500 so I bought that too and forgot all about my moral dilemma.

I’ve penned a new Cheeky Girls song.

He’s not sure what he should do
He’s 48 she’s 22
She’s from venus, he’s from mars
She’s a bit blonde, but got a nice tight arse!
 
Take her back x3
Take her back boys!

He’s got an intellect, hers is undeveloped
He’s a man of power, she can’t open envelopes
He’s a man of riches, she thought she’d give him a go 
She’s a bit blonde, but nice voice though!

She’s got everything he wants
He’s got everything she needs 
Take her back x3
Take her back boys!

What would her mum say if she knew?
Oh tell it all to the national news!
She’s on her knees, he’s 52
I don’t think he knows the difference!

Ohhh. Take her back.
Take her back to her bed.

Here is a preview of the comic I am drawing at the moment. It must be said I don’t even like comics and I get on with super heros about as well as Moss Side has aquatinted itself will the Pakistani community. So I don’t really know why I’m doing this. I just had an urge. One of those urges I couldn’t control.

Super Twat Bat

Here to fuck up the day!

Slide 1

Super Twat Bat, framed from behind his pointed ears, watches the television.

Slide 2

A close up of the TV reveals the news reporter talking about a city wiped out by a nuclear bomb.

Slide 3

Super Twat Bat, jumps up and then pauses, realises its too late to save the city flattened on the TV.

Slide 4

Wide shot of TV, news reporter begins to receive an incoming message.

Wipe divides slide

OH NO! Close up on news reporter’s face, another city faces the bomb.

Slide 5

Military control room - 5 minutes to detonation.

Diagonal line divides slide

Super Twat Bat jumps up

Slide 6

Super Twat Bat flies across the sky to reach the military installation in an attempt to stop the nuclear missile launch.

Slide 7

The count down reaches 5 seconds, Super Twat Bat manages to disable the missile JUST IN TIME!

Slide 8

But the missile goes off anyway.

Slide 9

Super Twat Bat wrestles with the missile in the sky, managing to divert it to an empty desert. BOOM!

Slide 10

Super Twat Bat IMAGINES a street parade, where he is the hero. Confetti rains down on his pointed ears.

Slide 11

Super Twat Bat flies to the city and on reaching it sees that it is very quiet and deserted.

Slide 12

Everyone in the city have topped themselves in anticipation of the bomb falling.

Slide 13

A man pops out of a bunker and blows a party horn in Super Twat Bat’s face.

Episode 2

Slide 1

Super Twat Bat is driving his car, framed from behind his pointed ears as he turns the wheel.

Slide 2

He pulls into his drive way and calmly walks to his front door.

Slide 3

The moment he opens his door he hears a loud BANG behind him

Slide 4

A man has been run over by a Viennese pastry van.

Slide 5

He screams in agony, legs trapped underneath. Super Twat Bat rushes to the rescue

Slide 6

He lifts the van but as he does so his nose quivers

Slide 7

He has smelt the delicious Viennese pastry

Slide 8

A second man rushes to pull the man out from under the van, but as he does so Super Twat Bat drops the van on them both

Slide 9

Super Twat Bat, eyes wide, yanks open the back of the van to find another bat inside eating the VIENNESE PASTRY 

I have allusions to it already.”Hey mate, hows it going. Just got back from the shops and I bought the Crystal Skull! When you look into it’s eyes, you gain fantastic insights into the universe! Do you want to come round and see it?”

“Nah mate, I’m watching Eastenders with my wife”.

Not being the luvvy duvvy type, I don’t know what the fascination is with settling down, wife with kids in tow, stupidly expensive mortgage hung round your being like a non-kinky chastity belt, and endless nights of sitting on a sofa with the same ‘wife’ watching crap television, if it comes at the expense of adventure and excitement, especially of the crystal skull variety.

That some people I know actually yearn for this situation to arise in their life half way through their 20’s tells me there must be something seriously wrong with their ambition sensors.

Do you know those yuppies who go to Africa to ‘find themselves’ only to be delighted to find their only purpose in life to be love and children? What a discovery. Yes - it is our ultimate ambition for our squidgy biological beings, our ultimate goal - to reproduce. Without that, I wouldn’t be here to moan.

But it’s boring isn’t it?

At least from the outside peering in, it is so bone crushingly fantastically boring, that it makes me want to regress into my teenage years, for the rest of my life. Its only chemicals. You fall in love - it’s chemicals. You have sex - it’s chemicals. You have kids - it’s chemicals. You bring them up - it’s an ego trip.

Another thing I gleaned from the TV the other night while watching the program about Africa was this:

The African men sat around controlling things, protecting things, building things and shagging things (their 12 wives) while the women did hard labour, chopped down trees and fed the animals. The kids were brought up by a community rather than a mum and dad - that way if mum and dad didn’t want to shag any more they wouldn’t have to go through the separating and divorce hearings presided over by a judge.

It all sounds rather good. I began to think what it would be like if we in England could apply the African way of living to our own humdrum, confused lives.

Why just this morning, I had the urge to build an electric fence around my flat to keep out chavs. Why should I be stopped from acting out my male instincts by the police? And come on women - it’s not so bad to ’share’ your husband with other women. That way the husband will get bored of you at a slower rate, and when you don’t feel like doing the washing up your husband’s other wife will do it for you.

Nightclubs would be much more enjoyable. Everyone would dance around a fire on the floor, and the men who jumped the highest would walk off with the best looking girl, until there was just one bloke and one lady remaining, jumping for all it’s worth. (Come to think of it, that’s a bit like it is now)

Then they’d go home together too. Our dwindling birth rate would jump through the roof.

But the male and female circumcision is a bit hard to take, so to is the pointless dismantling of your sister’s mud hut to make way for a cow pen. The spiritual sacrifices are troubling and the religious clothing rather cumbersome. In our version of Africa I propose an alternative way of keeping the faith:

The killing of…and ritual stuffing of: chavs (to then display in museums behind glass).

The God we would worship and tell stories about over the camp fire would be me. Because I started it all. So that clears up the religious grey area.

And yet - when these 20 and 30 somethings come out of their relationships, turn and look at life square in the face, they feel the mid-life crisis urges not of building a new type of civilisation but of splurging money on a Porsche or a motorbike. This must go down as the biggest waste of money since the tax payer covered John Prescott’s food expenses only for him to sick it all up again. What they should do to solve their crisis is to dump the boring wife and fall in love again, like an excitable teenager. And there lies the human dilemma. We have this damned virus hard wired into us. Without it we are nothing, with it we are completely bonkers.

Can someone explain what the fuck the new Batman film was about? OK I admit it. I went into the cinema slightly drunk but instead of sobering up enough to understand the story, it twisted me into a black hole of bollocks.

Heath Ledger, let me be clear, is the best thing about The Dark Knight by far. And also: the batmobile and it’s crafty motorcycle are utterly spellbinding. But the story is complete pseudo-intellectual psychobabble with clichéd characters and boring posturing.

I guess you either buy into these comic book films or not. I just don’t buy them. I have never liked comics or films like Spiderman, Sin City or even Banana Man. The original Superman maybe, and not just for the skin tight spandex. For there you can relate with the struggle between a normal man and his other role of Superman - his great responsibility of saving lives. How the hell is any other super hero film any different?

Ah yes. Superman was a man while Batman is a man, but in a bat costume featuring pointy ears. Spiderman is a stupid looking man with a mask. And there lies a tedious but relevant difference. It leads me to ponder: what is the point of getting an actor like Christian Bale and covering everything but his chin with black latex? This isn’t a condom advert, this is a £100 million film with the finest actors in the world. Batman is a generic gloss which you pour over the whole thing rendering it boring.

There Will Be Blood is the kind of film about madness I like. It’s real. You can follow the story in all it’s naked rawness. It doesn’t need bombs and silly costumes to get it’s point across. Dead Man Shoes, also.

The irony is, if The Dark Knight was a proper boys film, with lots of car chases and explosions I’d have enjoyed it a lot more than having to sit through, like I did, 2 hours of posturing just to get to an exciting scene. 

Superhero films are, for me, like going to a party where everyone has their head screwed on backwards. You go up to someone hoping for an entertaining chat and realise you have to side step their entire being to see their real face. And then they spout some profound nonsense about being ‘human’ just to overcompensate for the fact that they’re clearly not anything of the kind.

I don’t need to be lectured about morals by a man in a bat suit. If you strip that away what you’re left with is just a clichéd mess, full of the same old characters, sidekicks and love interests. All the style in the world can’t rescue humourless characters dressed up for the night.

The joker had humorous moments, where the general cinema going crowd chuckled out loud in sick-group-think-agreement at his greatness (they wouldn’t have if he wasn’t dead in real life) but his performance is so unnerving it kills the (intended) humour for me. How do you laugh at a dead actor dressed in a pink nurse costume, with a clown face walking away from the mushroom explosion of a hospital he’s just blown up. It’s not as if he even has a good one liner either, like say, The Terminator.

Somehow the shot of Heath in the nurse outfit after blowing up a hospital sounds a lot more exciting and darkly humorous than it actually was. I didn’t care for Batman or any of the other characters, which in turn made the threat of the Joker a complete moot point. There was no simmering tension or build up of excitement like in, say, Jaws. There was just Batman pouting like a condom about to burst, and then enter stage left The Joker grinning like a madman. It’s simple stuff. The violence is watered down. I suppose they had to in order to get it a PG rating. The irony there is that it’s waaay to violent for kids, still.

I never liked Star Wars either. Someone tell me what’s interesting about a costume drama set in the future, based on psychobabble.

I have made a poem:

I don’t care for Batshit or Spiderwok.
The Hulk looks like the man from the advert
Sweetcorn in the 1980’s
The jolly green giant but more alert.

No I don’t care for hobbits or spaceships
Unless together than its alright
Thats whats needed in The Dark Knight
A bit of originality

If Ziggy Stardust got his cock out
But the spiderman from mars chopped it off
That would make for real drama!
No costumes required

I wish the camera would linger
For longer than it takes for Spiderman to flick his finger
To build up some tension
Enough to burst Batcondom

No more bat ears or spider lycra
Please no more spandex-clad righter 
No more Potter and his fucking wand
Fuck it all. Give me James Bond!

Glasgow.

It looked pretty shiny last time I was there. It has certainly changed in the past 20 odd years, when there just so happened to be a Labour council there.

Now there isn’t because they lost to the Scottish Nationalist Party.

A poor person was interviewed on the news. She said she didn’t vote for Labour because nothing has changed in the past 20 years. She spoke as if she was expecting the government to cajole her out of poverty into celebrity stardom, despite the fact that her and other thick lazy arse holes like her have the genetic makeup of farmyard animals and the intelligence of a pitchfork. Unfortunately for her, the zoo for celebrities who are thick and worthless is ultra full.

So apparently, Gordon Brown is now a failure. A tipping point had been reached, they say. I say, the tipping point was reached about 3 weeks after he became prime minister but that went ignored because at the time, he was putting on a brave face due to some terrorist incident or other. But after that we all began to notice that our shiny new prime minister had nothing to offer but a general ‘uh’.

Gordon is less a Gordon and more a George. The George from Seinfeld. His credibility is as low as when George was caught masturbating by his mother, who as a result of the shock fell over and had to go to hospital.

Whilst visiting his mother in hospital, George is berated. “Imagine the shock! Imagine coming into your house, to see your only son using his body like an amuuusseement park!”

Put simply, we all view Gordon / George as an idiot. 

Now, much as it is inappropriate for me to point out the problems with the world from shiny Manchester city centre sat at my shiny laptop in a shiny flat with actual drinkable running water, I will however do so because it needs to be said that Gordon Brown’s dreadful aura of failure and general lack of personality is a very small fish in the sea of world problems. In reverse order of importance, here is my list of world problems:

5. Terrorists. They blow people up. That can’t be good. But in the long run, because they mostly kill themselves while doing it, they will die out.

4. Global warming. Our summers have turned into a tropical version of England in the 1920’s when it was covered in soot and smog. We still have the slate grey skies all year round but in the mix now are the occasional monsoon, sweltering muggy nights and flowers blooming in January. It has to stop. In other countries, like India, if it was allowed to go on it’d kill a lot more people than all the terrorist related incidents put together in the history of time. That’s why its higher on the list.

3. The media industry. Music is very important. But there are greedy bastards who want you to pay £9.99 for 10 songs. This has to stop. Also the papers are becoming too influential - which wouldn’t be such a bad thing, but for the fact they’re all liars. Lastly, the case with the tabloids seem to be that they ruin people’s lives in the most vile way possible in order to make money. If they were people they’d be locked up, because they would be peeping toms, hypocrites, moral preachers who murder in their spare time, psychopaths and sensationalistic drama queens. Basically a bunch of nutters. But at least if they were people they’d be weak and uninfluential. Together as journalists they’re a dangerous force.

2. Capitalism. It was good for a while but now it’s broken and past the point of no return. We have companies literally killing children to make a few more dollars. Witness the cigarette companies in Africa selling single sticks to kids. Meanwhile in England we are slaves to it. We can’t even eat without lining the pockets of some supermarket boss or another. It’s a soul destroying way to lead our lives, and even worse for the people who work for these companies. Have you ever seen a happy checkout assistant who wasn’t a mentalist? Eventually every last grain of individualism, of pioneering spirit and every last green field will be removed from the planet, in place of the giant robot called capitalism.

1.  Consumerism in young people. Cigarettes were fine until we found out they caused us to die. Consumerism is the next disease, but because its a disease of the mind nobody will notice until it’s too late. I see the effects though, all the time. The people who feel shit because they’re ugly. The people who spend a fortune on expensive stuff to make themselves feel better. The poorer families who feed their kids easy fatty food while indulging them on Playstations they can ill afford. The kids who believe the only things that matter are money, looks and material goods. Celebrities, glamour models. If you want the next generation to fix the 5 big problems here, then don’t motivate them with the ambition to become a glamour model. Soon we’ll be looking back on our scientists and boring politicians and saying “where are you when we need you? We’re stuck in a world full of brain washed cretins, and hell I know, because I’m one of them!”.

A CSS blog special.

What I love about CSS.

1. Lovefoxxx. Beauty has imperfections. If she was a Barbie doll or Posh Spice look-a-like, CSS wouldn’t be half as much fun. Instead she’s a half-German half-Japanese Brazilian singing alien. The imperfections go right down to her lyrics, who’s angry line in Alcohol was reduced to a slightly more nonsensical “I’ll slide your face”. She meant ’slice’.

2. Adriano Cintra. The musical genius behind CSS’s compositions, Adriano is a tall but stocky gay man who treats his female bandmates as sisters. He’s the driving force the band, a protective shield for his sisters. On the new album his song Rat Is Dead features the heartfelt lyric “He will never hurt you again”, which is believed to refer to the band’s manager Edwardo who concealed huge debts under a mountain of lies.

3. The guitar girls. At their core CSS are a rock ‘n roll band, the guitar riffs have never sounded better or fresher. Have you ever seen that Brazilian film City of God, with it’s raw energy and gun fighting in the slums of Rio? That film is to Hollywood what CSS is to the music of most other bands.

4. Their image. The band name means ‘Tired of being sexy’. To be sexy isn’t to have to try, in other words. CSS formed as a joke, and still don’t take themselves seriously. In a room at legendary record label Sub Pop (of Nivarna fame), they simply couldn’t stop laughing while signing their contract. More importantly, is that the band members are people I identify with. Outsiders, not part of the jocks but too sociable to be part of the geeks. Art students from San Paulo, they have a vibe and creativity that immediately connects with me. I admire Adriano’s soul and I’d like to sleep with the girls. I also like Lovefoxxx’s Brazilian accent. It comes across strongly in the lyrics, further setting the band apart from their numerous American and English imitators.

5. Live. Lovefoxxx dances as if her soul was on fire with enjoyment.

6. Their quiet, simmering intelligence. CSS may be the heart and soul of the party but there is real depth to their songs, cutting wit and brilliant word play. And best of all, even if the music is often jaunty and has a party feel, there is a heart of darkness beating within.

7. Their growing popularity. I told you so.

8. The drama.

In an interview with NME singer Lovefoxxx broke down in tears as she recalled the events of last year, behind the partying. The split with bassist Ira was just the tip of the iceberg.

But it partly explains why when Ira met me at the gig in Manchester she scowled down the camera so severely it broke, meaning half my head was cut out of the picture.

Drummer (now bassist), Adriano Cintra, the driving force behind the band, explains how cross dressing session musician Jon took over on drums when Ira left, and the band were to rehearse together in Brazil. Unfortunately Lovefoxxx, now living in London with her boyfriend from the Klaxons was too sick to attend the first week and a half, so Adriano had taken his computer with him, on it a click track and her voice playing off it.

At this point in the interview Lovefoxxx breaks down in tears. Ira was going out with their manager Edwardo, who later became ‘the rat’, nearly driving the band to an oblivion of debts.

On the day that the band found out about their financial woe, trusted confidant Edwardo was outed as the rat, Ira split with him, for reasons you can probably guess. Then in April this year, Ira called time on the band as well, to follow up her fashion interests and also because “she was concerned over global warming - people should fly less”.

When quizzed on the global warming comment, Lovefoxxx rolls her eyes. The band don’t miss her, saying that she was a crap bass player, whom would rather spend time on learning French than improving her bass skills, and with whom their latest album would not be possible - as she wouldn’t be able to play the bass tracks.

Adriano, who composes and writes most of their music, says it was strange for the band to be classed as electro or nu-rave, playing sets amongst DJs like some kind of arty electro-funk project.

No, CSS are a rock band, with all the agony, love and anger that goes along with being a rock band.

They are destined for great things.

By the way I am absolutely disgusted at Ian Curtis’ gravestone being stolen. 

I recently read Jeremy Clarkson’s blog about how these days you’re not allowed to do anything without getting told off for it. Jeremy, you see, is a bit bitter about having been bollocked several times, most recently for having a drink in a car at the North Pole.

Presumably the health and saftey twits were worried he might run over some school children on their way to the great Ice Palace in their imagination.

I get a constant feeling of dread while alive. Generally it involves the feeling that there is a little munchkin paired with a keyboard sat behind the scenes, collecting data about your every move, ready to pounce when you step out of line.

It’s a bit like the recent thing with Virgin Broadband, snooping on what people download and then sending them a snotty letter in the post saying they risk ending up in jail for downloading an episode of the Two Ronnies.

I have a tip for the media industry: if you leave the door open to your warehouse, don’t expect your stuff not to be nicked. Furthermore if you prevent the sale of your stuff online, through sheer laziness and yesterday’s thinking, don’t expect people to pop down to HMV rather than download it for free in the comfort of their own homes.

In the old days people used to make mix tapes and share them. I imagine this will soon be off limits as well. Not that it won’t be allowed. Here’s the thing… The Man will allow it to happen as the days and weeks pass, but be secretly collecting data in the background. Once he has all the names and addresses of your friends, he’ll arrive at the door with two burley security guards and take you off to jail where you will be bent over a chair and have episodes of Friends rammed up your arse until you bleed. You will never lend Friends episode 12 ‘The One Where Big Brother Shot Me In The Mouth’ to Dave ever again.

It’s a bit like Jeremy Beadle, gluing a £20 note to the pavement outside Woolworths, and laughing as people try to ‘nick’ it. When it finally comes unstuck, rather than reveal himself from behind a wall wearing a mustash and gently prodding and teasing the ‘victim’ in a light hearted Saturday night TV manner, Jeremy instead stays hidden behind the wall, wanking. He then turns into the world’s worse phscyhopath, and follows you home. He puts hidden cameras in your living room and bathroom and the next day, video tape in hand, gives the footage to the police. Then he follows you to McDonalds with an axe, and just as you are about to spend the ‘lucky find’, leaps up behind you with a scream, slicing your skull open.

He then picks up the £20 from the pool of blood, puts your skull on a stick, hammers it into the ground, and warns all the shocked onlookers that stealing £20 from the pavement is just the same as stealing it from a till in the shop.

The police arrive and they all go to lunch together.

If you would like to live in a society like this, just carry on as you are…

Next Monday CSS release their new album Donkey. In a vain belief that some of my money will get to the band, I will happily trot down to Fopp and by the album, jewel case art work and all. I do this for all the bands I admire. R.E.M, Air, Radiohead (via a small donation, because they’re already rich). Recently I even downloaded REM Live in London from iTunes, actually paying £4.99! But these were but a treasured few purchases. Here is a trick the music industry can use.

Rather than rely on a few fans to buy a few CDs every month, why not give every single band’s music away for free. Then, when it comes to people paying their monthly broadband bills, just add £2 on top of every single person’s bill.

Then, when it comes to merchandise, t-shirts, posters, live gigs, etc. watch yet more money come flooding in.

When will the music industry wake up to the fact that selling expensive CDs to only a few thousand fans is the wrong approach in the digital age, and that most people could not care less about most bands, other than a treasured few. And then there is another issue… 

In order to hear the amount of music I want to explore I simply can’t afford to buy 20 CDs a month at a grand total of nearly £200, to fund a music industry whereby 70% of the general public hardly ever buys music. If everyone in the country paid a small amount toward it via their telecommunications bill, wouldn’t this be more productive? Plus, downloading for free allows me to select what my new favourites are from a huge range of bands and so the industry gets back 10x what it would ever make from me buying the occasional £9.99 CD when I buy merchandise and gig tickets for Radiohead, MGMT, REM, The Editors, CSS, etc, etc. Hell, even CSS endorsed milkshakes and rollerskates would be pretty high on my list. It’s the brand effect personified, and I feel closer to a band than I ever would a Puma or Apple.

For the enjoyment CSS and REM give me, I’d happily cough up. To download (without any album artwork) simply some MP3s does not do proper justice to your passion, especially when you wait 3 years in between albums in the case of REM. Some things will always be worthy of my heart and soul, my affection, time and money.

The business interests of out-dated record companies will never be one of these things. 

Do bank staff get annoyed at themselves when they need to use the bank?

Do they have to cue for 50 minutes before they can speak to themselves about loans, credit cards, insurance or soul sales?

A new branch of my bank has opened in Manchester, replacing the old one. It looks suspiciously like the new Barclays on Market St, another new branch in Manchester. A sparkling glass testicle of chandeliers, rounded edges and generally full of piss. Gone are the days when the foyer of a bank was literally full of piss, from homeless people. These new branches are going with the times - they’re now just metaphorically full of piss (and shit).

One of the ‘floor mongs’ walked over to me, pissing as he went. ‘Hello Sir what can I do for you today’, he said in a raspy pissy piss tone. I said I wanted to speak to someone about my credit card interest rate, which has been charging me every month for the past 9 for some money I took out of an ATM in Germany. I said I wanted it back.

Then he brought up the Twat Console. This was like something off a spaceship dashboard (Starshit Enterprick?) and out came the dreaded ticket. First experienced at Vodafone, these twat tickets are basically a corporation’s way of showing what you’re worth. You’re worth a thin bit of paper with 50 minutes stamped on it in cheap ink.

Beforehand, when the bank was a run down palace of plywood and piss, you just walked up to a person and began talking. Now the staff have been given ’self worth’ they sit up stairs in a fancy office playing Snake.

I told him that I wasn’t going to wait 50 minutes, so he went and fetched a woman. The woman stomped over like she was going to be very generous - and spare 5 seconds. I had barely a chance to pause between one sentence and the next when she was walked off, thinking I’d finished. The outcome of that encounter was me sat in front of a phone kiosk with a card in front of me about insurance which I thought had the number for a credit card department on it.

She did at least admit that my interest rate ‘didn’t sound right’.

Oh baby, it sounds right to me. It’s just another day light robbery con trick rip off, the sort the banks do every second of the day* (*apart from Saturday & Sunday). 

Back in September I got my travel money stolen while in Munich, and so got 300 euros out of an ATM in a zoo. I should have paid more attention to the monkeys at the time, waving frantically at me with looks of horror on their faces as I walked over to the machine. The giraffe craned it’s neck over the wall and wailed ‘nooooooo!’. But I did it any way.

Already I had a debt of £2000 on the credit card from buying two cameras to sell on eBay for a profit of £700 each. But for various reasons since those 9 months ago I have never quite coaxed the credit card to zero, never quite strangled it’s neck so it stops breathing, never quite let out all of it’s blood until it shrivels away. Now - despite having paid off around £7000 since then, I have got into the habit of using my credit card as a debit card whenever my bank account is at it’s wits end toward pay day. So for various reasons I’ve probably spent the same amount on it since then, and abracadabra - the debt now sits at £2000.

At the bottom of that stash sits my 300 euros - untouched by the 9000 euros paid off it over 9 months like a crazed dieter who avoids Jaffa Cakes but piles back on the pounds with truffles.

Not only that, but the 300 euros has a much higher rate of interest than the purchases, haunting the card like a bad version of Slimer from Ghost Busters. It just won’t go away.

I had no idea I was creating an invincible ghost when I used that ATM - of course, the banks don’t tell you what will happen, they simply make it up as they go along.

Back to the spangly testicle I went, and this time a man greeted me, who (through some kind of 6th sense) believed the twat ticket console to be ‘wrong’. He said it’s not 50 minutes this time, it’s 35 minutes. “Come back later and bring your ticket code with you”. So I went shopping.

Later I returned. Exactly 30 minutes later with 5 to spare. “Hello, I would like to see The Man”. But apparently I had missed my place. Apparently because I didn’t suffer the torture of staring at grey carpets and pot plants for 30 minutes, I was no longer worthy even of my demeaning twat ticket.

Upstairs I had to go regardless - as they told me to - like a naughty child. I waited and waited and got so impatient I came back down. A different floor mong was there this time. He told me I had lost my place. In the lost place cue.

But he told me to go up again.

Yet another man was up there with a clip board this time. He was checking people’s tickets. He checked mine and said I had lost my place in the lost place lost place cue, and please would I stop shouting and go back down stairs.

I stomped back down and told the man downstairs to go upstairs himself, and explain to the clipboard cretin what was going on. By this point I had wasted an hour out of my day. He came back down and told me to go up. I spoke to the clipboard man and he didn’t know what to do. So I explained everything I’ve just written in this blog….and left.

I am going to have to ring the call centre to ask about my evil credit card shenanigans. After all that, I suspect they won’t give an inch. I also suspect that the reason you have to wait 50 minutes to be served in a branch twice the size as the old one, with twice the staff, is because 80% of the staff are serving Premier Customers who give blow jobs to their bank manager (and pay a monthly fee) while the remaining 20% are standing at the door with clipboards.

Meanwhile the twat ticket console whirrs. 

I had duck for tea tonight. Bought it from Tesco. On the packaging was a sticker. This organic duck was “protected by the RSPBB”.

Well they obviously didn’t do a very good job.

Not since Max Mosley’s bratwurst was put on video had someone been so humiliated, me taking that fucking duck to the checkout. Here it was, organic, protected, Duck Rights and all that. But it was sliced and diced in a plastic box.

Why, in order to make their products look much more worthy than they actually are, do we have to have all these bloody marketing tricks. 

Yesterday I went into a pub. No ordinary pub, it was The Angel. Run by a renowned Manchester chef with a double barrelled name, he goes out and shoots duck at the weekend, serving it on his menu the next day. They had an impressive range of beers to.

And a refreshing lack of marketing.

He goes out with his gun, shoots the fucking duck, eats it. 

It’s an approach which is missing from just about every alleyway of modern life. Unpretentious, under hyped, no tricks, no small print, no packaging, no salesman will call.

The new iPhone came out today and I was looking forward to it but not any more.

I seriously considered reaching out, fingers out stretched, grabbing the iPhone 3G box and running off with it today. But not because I really wanted it - just to level the playing field a bit.

Because the iPhone 3G is the biggest con trick ever played on the unsuspecting British public.

In fact not since Max Mosley was caught with his umbrella up in dry conditions has someone acted so stupidly - that so many people are suddenly iPhone fanatics is beyond belief.

The original was the best mobile phone ever to be released and amazingly, still is. But the new one is exactly the same but for the tiniest of improvements. Useless 3G is added - you can now pay even more for downloading emails a bit quicker while walking around the park. Who actually does this? Especially if you have the WiFi capability which the ‘old’ iPhone already had!

What else is new? The back is tacky plastic instead of metal. One girl in the Apple store today was loudly admiring this fact. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple were cynical enough to plant actors around town today, because no sane normal person would be impressed enough to admire the difference between the old one and the new one. Not since Max Mosley walked through his garden to the basement had there been so many plants.

So to summarise: the phone now stubbornly sticks to your hand, picks up finger prints and scratches more easily. It’s also fatter.

And that, my friends, is that. The phone is otherwise exactly the same as the last one, runs the same software and all the ‘new’ applications available at rip off prices on iTunes. (I haven’t told Apple that I’ve been happily using applications for free since December last year, I don’t want to spoil their excitement at all the ‘newness’ of it)

O2’s part in the con trick is even worse. Last time the phone was a rip off thanks to them, but at least you could easily get around this - in a wonderfully anti-establishment way - by buying the phone in store for £169. The idea was that the phone was useless until you signed up for an O2 contract on iTunes. In reality all you did was download a little program some geek made in his bedroom, connect your iPhone, and away you went. No £600 contract for me thank you very much.

This time, O2 are getting people to sign up for the contract in store before you can take away the phone. They also keep lying, saying the iPhone is sold out to hype up demand and to give the impression that it’s the most sought after phone in the universe. They fake computer crashes saying “oh dear, SOOOO many people are buying it we just can’t cope!”. Yet the cue outside only has 10 people in it. Later in the day they’re all replaced by actors. Then they bang on about how some people might not get it till August, that 200,000 people want to buy one but they only have 16,000 phones, and that the Pay As You Go one won’t come out till Christmas. If you believe that you’ll believe anything.

Yet there they all were today, falling for the hype, suddenly believing they were getting a much better deal and a very rare phone which has sold out everywhere, signing their lives away on the dotted line. £45 per month for the next year and a half, for something you can get on eBay minus the useless bits for £200.

Want the iPhone on the cheapest contract? Don’t want to pay a penny more than necessary? Want freedom of choice despite the exclusivity deals and lack of credible competition? Well here is a perfect example of their O2’s soul crushing cynicism in black and white:

£30 per month contract, phone £99. Minutes: 75

£35 per month contract, phone £99, Minutes…

600!

Yes that’s right, for an extra fiver lady’s and gentleman, for today only (and tomorrow, and the day after that) you can get a whole 525 more minutes! And for another fiver you get this, and for another fiver you can get this, and would you like insurance with that sir?

Fuck off, and give me my duck.

Finally next month a huge experiment is to be switched on under the border of France and Switzerland. They will attempt to smash particles into each other in such a violent impact that they don’t know what will happen.

There is no precedence for this, and the amount of energy involved is larger than President Stakozy’s ego.

As the impact will create the conditions of the universe at the big bang, they hope to discover the secrets of the physical world - such as how mass works, new particles that we don’t know about yet and why people find Jordan attractive. Oh and there is also a 20% chance that a black hole will be created.

A mini black hole.

Great.

Whilst it would certainly be the most dramatic thing to happen to Switzerland since the start of the universe if the next one began under the drain pipe on Liechtenstein street, I don’t relish the though of waking up on the 16th August to find my disembodied arm sliding away into a whirling black hole next to the Arndale centre.

In short I am rather scared by the CERN experiment. You might say I have some conCERNs. But in the back of my mind, every time I feel the pangs of death on my doorstep I remember the idiots back in the early days of the locomotive whom believed that people’s heads would fall off if they travelled faster than 30mph.

I have however been looking into the facts:

Black Holes 
Several string theorists have published papers predicting that the Large Hadron Collider will produce mini black holes. In the worst case, a mini black hole could swallow Earth. 

Strangelets 
Strangelets, another potential collider product, might catalyze conversion of normal matter into more strangelets, turning Earth into a small ball of strangelets. 

Safety Factors 
CERN has published a paper asserting several safety factors. Black holes are supposed to dissipate via Hawking radiation. A collection of strangelets is supposed to be electrically positive on its surface, and therefore not attract other matter. However, new studies have put these safety factors in question.

Proper risk management requires a formal risk assessment. CERN has done this for radiation in their tunnels, but not for black holes and strangelets.

So basically we’re fucked. I bid you farewell, one strangelet to another.