Things you can do when you should be studying #1

Have The Hills on TV with the sound muted and the video for My Sharona playing on your laptop.




In your jocks, obviously.

Buzzkill

Wasp, what are you doing in here? Yes, you want to get out now, I can see that from the way you keep banging your head against the glass like a fucking moron. (Incidentally, why doesn't that kill you, like it does to birds?) But what made you come in here? There's a whole big world out there, wasp, yet time and again you and your ilk come strolling into whatever building I'm in, your inflated sense of entitlement blazing in the sun. Except there's only ever one of you - what's that about? Do you fancy yourself as something of a lone wolf, wasp? I've met wolves, I've sung and drank with wolves, and you're no wolf, wasp, you're a wasp.

I think you simply have no friends. Do you expect me to be your friend, wasp? Do you think I'd like it if we drank coffee together and said things like "Ohmygod, I can't wait to see The Killers at Oxegen!" I don't think I'd like that at all. I already have a friend, wasp, and they don't buzz as incessantly in my ear as you do. And if they want a bit of my muffin they fucking well ask, instead of plonking all fours on it and doing a tiny little poo, as seems to be your way. That's the behaviour of a dickhead. Are you a dickhead, wasp? You lack a sense of propriety anyway, that's for damn sure.

No, we shan't be friends. I've been burned by this kind of thing before, wasp. A promising relationship with a bee came to a most regrettable end during an ill-advised pillowfight. Jemima made honey, glorious honey, wasp. You can't even offer me that much. We shan't be swapping books and sharing earphones, you and I. I care not for that "what happened you man, you used to be cool" rhetoric that you always bank on in such circumstances. I am unmoved. So you can just sit there staring balefully at me whilst you bop your stupid stripey distended arse up and down. And I, I'll bide my time, wasp.

Now she's a little boy in Spain, playing pianos filled with flames

It's been a while now since I've been tagged with any kind of a meme. Normally anyone who does do this to me deserves to be kicked up the hole with a pair of size 15 hobnails. But when the man who tags you is Blazing, one of the true gentlemen of the blogosphere, it'd be rude not to.

The rules of this particular meme are:

1) Put the link of the person who tagged you on your blog.
2) Write the rules.
3) Mention 6 things or habits of no real importance about you.
4) Tag 6 persons adding their links directly.
5) Alert the persons that you tagged them.

I'm inclined to think that my blog is already all too full of information of no real importance about me, but I'll fire away anyway with some tasty nuggets y'all may not be aware of.

1. I once bumped into former US secretary of State Madeleine Albright outside Dino's Takeaway in Athboy, Co. Meath. We had an illuminating chat about the impact of leopards upon coastal erosion. Minimal, apparently.

2. I auditioned for one of the leading roles in Ang Lee's Lust, Caution. I was turned down for being "excessively lustful, not cautious enough." Yeah, Ang, and The Hulk sucked.

3. When I leave the house with either no boxers or no socks on I like to imagine I'm a pornstar.

4. When I'm playing Football Manager I occasionally fantasise that my peripheral, squad rotation players are slightly attracted to me. But only in a way they can't quite comprehend.

5. I have a paralysing fear of starfish.

6. I devoted the entirety of the middle seventeen years of my life to perfecting the formula for barbeque sauce flavoured candyfloss.

7. I believe 7 to be an infinitely superior number to 6. You know the way there's 7 days in a week? I came up with that.


Now, the shitty part: Tagging.

1. Darren. Because he needs to stop pretending he works for Empire magazine and get back to his own blog.

2. Meadow. Because she's new enough to this game to probably never have been tagged before. And why worry about jobs when there are memes to be done.

3. Radge. Because it will annoy him but he could make it very funny.

4. Colm. For precisely the same reason.

5. Uncle Dick. The possibilities are endless.

6.Green of Eye. Because she might use nice pictures to illustrate it.

The option to tell me to go fuck myself remains, as ever, a viable and appealing option.

What others were Feeling Like Today #11

1989

The ninety-eight Liverpool fans crushed to death at Sheffield bring back memeories of a similar disaster at Bolton in 1946. We never took a Sunday paper at home but sometimes saw the News of the World when we went down to Grandma's on a Sunday night, and I think I knew at eleven years old that there was something wrong about the gusto with which the tragic story was written up, and something very prurient about the way I gobbled up every word. Today I read very little, and because of being at the theatre see nothing of the live coverage on television. But already the process begins whereby terrible events are broken down and made palatable. They are first covered in a kind of gum: the personal reactions of bystanders, eyewitnesses giving their inadequate testimonials - 'It was terrible'; 'I'll never forget it'; 'Tragic. Bloody Tragic.' - and then wreaths inscribed 'You'll never walk alone.' Then the event begins to be swallowed, broken up into digestible pieces, minced morsels: the reaction of the football authorities is gone into, then the comments of the police, the verdict of the Sports Minister and so on, day after day, until by the end of the week it will begin to get boring and the snake will have swallowed the pig. Then there are the customary components of the scene - the establishment of a memorial fund (always a dubious response) and the bedside visits by the Prime Minister. I find myself thinking, it would be Liverpool, that sentimental self-dramatising place, and am brought up short by seeing footage of a child brought out dead, women waiting blank-faced at lime Street and a father meeting his two sons off the train, his relief turned to anger at the sight of their smiling faces, cuffing and hustling them away from the cameras.

Alan Bennett


Taken, as ever, from The Assassin's Cloak.

I'll section you, so help me

The Bro and I were chatting over celebratory post-football pints earlier about general bollocks and he mentioned how you kind of see everything a bit clearer when you're drunk.

"I think you're almost certainly very well slightly right," I said, "that's why all the good writers and philosophers are boozehounds. But it might also be why people become alcoholics. And that's not good."

Still, it got me to thinking on all the important things in my life right now. Like whether Oasis are actually still worth listening to, whether anyone ever before has been fortunate enough to find such a match for themself as I have managed to in a fair-looking member of the opposite sex, and whether people ever start producing those big black Guinness poos even before they've stopped drinking for the night and have gone to bed. Whether I'm going to be physically capable of putting on a duvet cover right now.

Yeah. Stuff like that.

G'night.

Fibreglass Links

Buckfast and cider on Sunday makes Andrew want to cry on Monday.

Right, after that awful, whinging last post about how shit everything on the internet is, I thought I might as well link to a few of the things out there in the last few days that I do really like:

Meadow is a newish blogger some of you may not have read. if she was a footballer people would be saying she's "bang in form right now" and suchlike. We need more bloggers who take the time to properly tell a story, whether fictional or true. I particularly like her three-parter, 'Sam'.

It being Easter and all, here's your own personal Lego Jesus.

Colm is offering to send anyone who wants one a postcard with a specially composed short story, just for you. He's a talented bastard, is Colm, so inundate the fucker with requests.

David Mitchell, he of Peep Show and QI fame, writes a blog for the Guardian that is always highly readable, and often pretty bloody funny too.

Slaminsky's postcard.

Fuck you, bunny.

Not quite enough monkeys

After being on something of an impromptu country break for the last few days I sit awake now, late at night, catching up on the many things that I might or might not have been reading over the last week or so, had I been online at all.

And I despair at so much of it, I really do. The vacuous nonsense that accumulates over a six day period is truly terrifying.

Not because I think I'm above it, but because I realise how much time and ever-crumbling brain space must be stolen from me every single day by this mulch.

italics for emphasis

It has come to my attention here at Chancing My Arm Towers that there is a growing fondness for classing the readers of any particular blog as one distinct group, easily referred to by some humorous plural noun. It works beautifully for summarily dismissing any large number of people.

Bock's readers are Bockolytes (but not, I repeat not, minions). Twenty, being special, gets to have both Bootboys and Lapdogs. Gimme's readers are, I dunno, Dickheads, probably.

So now I have come to the realisation that you, my dear readers, you who unerringly read my every utterance with nary a moment of doubt in your mind, you, too, deserve a collective title to properly indicate your full uniformity of thought and venom. You have earned this right through your regular attendance, haphazard commenting, and steadfast, unswerving agreement with everything I say. Because you only read my blog, right?

But what to call you? The Chancing My Army? Too obvious. Andrew's Arseholes? No, no, no. Should I call you Legion, for you are many? Hmmm...you're not that many. From today and forever more I christen you Andrew's Elite Death Squadron of Crack Robot Warriors in Pursuit of the Upholding of Truth, Justice, Righteousness, Global Hegemony and All-Round Superbness and Excellence. It was only one of a number of submissions from a think-tank (oh, how I love a good think-tank) consisting of Kofi Annan, Former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds, Dale Winton and Senator George Mitchell. I chose it for its concise expression of all that I stand for.

You will, of course, all be given ranks within AEDSCRWPUTJRGHARSE (for short). Expressions of your warm admiration in comments will not help you gain a favourable commanding position in AEDSCRWPUTJRGHARSE, as I know you all already harbour such thoughts toward me (I really must thank you for those, I use them to heat my manservant's quarters at night). But I am now ready to reveal that you, Bloglines subscriber in New Delhi (yes, you, I see you there), shall be awarded the rank of Starboard Admiral. And you, mystery reader in Fethard, Co. Tipperary whom I contemplated popping in for a cup of tea, slice of brack and an old chinwag with in on my way down to Cork a few months ago, you can be Wing Commander (I don't know which wing yet).

And you all, from now on, shall be expected, nay, ordered to excoriate, eviscerate and email any other bloggers whose opinion differ from those stipulated in the contract you all signed up to when you agreed to read this blog. And, naturally, write nasty posts about them on your own inferior blogs, should you have them. But only, only on my command. Heel!