BLOGGOTH Page 4

Bloggoth Mission Statement:
     We aim to never raise our sights above the gutter and preferably to stay much lower

A much better use

I seem to have seen an exceptional number of hearses recently. Must be the cold weather. Odd things, hearses. Funny that the one thing we would all rather avoid is the thing we seem most keen to display.

I can think of a much better use for a hearse, What an absolutely perfect vehicle for going dogging in. Left is my artist's impression of a couple dogging in a hearse surrounded by a typical collection of perverts.

You may wonder why Blunkett would go dogging. If you look closely you will see that that particular couple are having sex in Braille.

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World resources

Another thing the press seems to have suddenly woken up to is the fact that world supplies of energy and other commodities cannot possibly meet the demand if China and India attain Western standards of living. It took them long enough, I said this on CUK about two years ago but I suppose one cannot expect my sort of far-sighted genius among the population at large. We should nuke the bastards while we still have the chance; that would solve the problem. What is the point of having nuclear weapons if you never use them? If I was PM I would nuke anyone who looked at me in a funny way; it would be a much saner world if I was in charge.

I suppose our namby pamby leaders will not contemplate such an obvious solution. Never mind, I have other solutions which do not involve killing any one at all, not even horrible foreigners. You will find them in my science and technology column.

Crisis in the NHS

More bad news this week, the increasingly desperate plight of the NHS. Supposedly. Actually, as a percentage of total NHS budget the shortfall facing NHS trusts looks very small, but nevertheless, many of them are having to postpone surgery or cut staff.

For once I do not entirely blame the current government; (although they have had long enough and quite enough of our money to address the problems) much of this was due to the phony internal markets introduced by the Tories. Free market principles are the best but only if the criteria to make them work actually exist. Above all else, there must be a genuine economic incentive for the companies and the workers in them to provide a better service to the customer. Without that, faith in the free market is no better than belief in magic and you may be better off with a dedicated public service. Calling something a cost centre and giving it a budget, on its own, does nothing at all.

I saw all this bollox in the CEGB when I used to work with it. Training centres that used to provide low cost training for the entire organisation became cost centres and told they had to charge realistic rates. Result? they were so expensive that departments in the CEGB, which were cost centres themselves with limited budgets, could not afford them and went for cheaper and less relevant courses outside the organisation. As a whole, the organisation lost money.

And some solutions

Never fear. The giant brain of xoggoth is here to assist our beloved NHS. I have accordingly thought up a number of schemes which should bring money flooding back.

Take paying spectators. We all know how popular those gory operations are on TV so how much more would people pay to see the real thing? Posh people will pay enormous amounts for a ticket at the Opera and I reckon some would easily pay £200 and upward for watching an hour of open heart surgery. For those with less money perhaps just a paid tour of the A&E wards so they see broken limbs being set and eyeballs pushed back. A snip at £25. And what would some perves pay to be present at births or gynaecological examinations? To preserve patient privacy they could have those peephole things like they have in Soho. Good for £40 a time I reckon. Zero running costs apart from the necessary Kleenex. Psychiatric hospitals can play their part too. In previous centuries, a few hours at Bedlam was a great day out for the kids. Bring that great British tradition back with open days at all our psychiatric establishments for just £15, kIds under 7 free. Naturally on "Bedlam Days" they would have to ease up on the medication a bit to provide the punters with some proper entertainment.

And let's get away from this stuff about the NHS being for essential treatment. Some people love being ill, nothing makes them happier than boring their friends and families rigid with tales of their suffering. In return for an enormous joining fee and a very hefty charge for each treatment, you could join a special Hypochondriac club at your local hospital. All your ridulous little complaints would be taken seriously. Come in with indigestion and you would be told you only had hours to live unless you had an immediate operation to remove your spleen. Rich hypochondriacs could be milked until either their money or their organs ran out.

And what about all that hospital "waste"? I think it was the unsavoury but highly original film "Fight Club" that showed the way there, all that body fat makes marvellous soap. But why stop there? The waste could be sorted into categories, the fat rich waste could go for soap, the meatier waste for dog and cat food. The really profitable stuff could be processed in workshops and sold to individual collectors. Tattooed limbs into lampshades, painted skeletons you could stand in your dining room. Let's not go into further details here, but there would be even more profitable uses. They could sell wholesale to Anne Summers.

I reckon that pretty soon we would have a self-sufficient NHS to be proud of.

A total arsehole - it must go with the name

Just watched the news about the comments by Sir Ian Blair that the press is "institutionally racist". What a dickhead!

Why did the Soham murders attract so much attention? Because they were cute little girls in Man United tee shirts. I bet we had at least as much coverage of the Damilola Taylor case because he was another cute little kid. It went on for weeks. And that Asian guy run over trying to stop his car being stolen? I seem to recall there was a similar case last year involving an old white bloke and that was not a major news story either. Why? Because being run over while trying to stop a car being stolen is not the sort of "violent Britain" news that sells papers; it seems too much like an accident. AND... they were both ugly old blokes.

Of course I cannot say for sure that Sir Ian is wrong; like him, I am just basing my opinions on half remembered facts and impressions. The difference is that when a nobody like me makes a statement, no matter how wrong or offensive it may be in principle, it affects nobody. When a well known figure in a position of authority like him makes a statement it has a major impact, not just on the parents of the Soham girls as in this case but on race relations in the country in general. Unlike me and other mouthy nobodies, he has a duty to check his facts thoroughly before he makes public statements.

I see he is well in with that other Blair and the government. That government of half-baked ideas and ill thought out initiatives and sound bites and back-of-an-envelope laws. Why does that not surprise me?

Unbalanced Hoo Hah about Galloway

Bad enough that Mrs Catflaps and her fans bang on about Celebrity Big Brother but it has been impossible to get away from this week. Even the Times had more than two pages about this drivel yesterday. Although some very intelligent people of my acquaintance do seem obsessed with BB and all the similar reality crap, I still find it hard to believe that anyone with more than two brain cells can watch it. I bet, if scientists ever identify the area of the brain that watches BB, it will turn out to be some damp little bit at the bottom where dry rot has set in. It was different when the gorgeous Jade was in it of course. A woman who combined the bottom of Dawn French with the face of Miss Piggy, who could resist that?

Mixed feelings on Galloway. I liked the way he stood up to the Senate sub-committee. In his own words the committee had traduced his name around the world without asking him a single question and it was quite true, they did. The claims against him, so far and after all this time, remain unproven. Remember that he has just won a libel case against the Daily Telegraph so clearly they were unable to come up with convincing evidence. Remember too, who his chief accusers in the UK and the US are. That's right, the same honest people who took us to war in Iraq to neutralise all those weapons of mass destruction.

On the other hand, there is one very clear and undisputed reason to dislike him. Let me think. Is it because he was nasty to some little twat who got paid a fortune to appear on a show where nastiness is positively encouraged to boost the number of halfwits who watch it? Or is it because he was a voluntary apologist for one of the most brutal regimes in recent times, even laughing and joking with a sadist and known torturer like Uday Hussein?

Oooh. That's a hard one.

Shut up, shut up 2

As reported in last, BIG mistake last week, lulled into a false sense of security by always having found decent places before, I booked into a B&B for the whole week by phone without seeing it. Bad enough it was in the middle of nowhere but far worse, it turned out it was in the house of an old couple. FFS!! Every bloody morning at breakfast I had to endure inane and pointless conversation. Look, I don't WANT to talk about bloody boring crap like the weather and where I live and how long it takes to me to get home and what my job is like etc etc. SOD off!!! I am paying you, so why the hell should I be expected to talk to you as well? I don't suppose they can read my writing but I signed their guest book with the comment "The house is full of cannibals".

The lucky jumper, Metallica and smoking

It's one of no 2 son's castoffs, but it must be my lucky jumper. Black Sweater Shop and a bit too small, but again, like that disco before xmas, just minding my own business and a much younger woman comes up and starts talking to me. She had a husband and kid in the bar so there was nothing more to it than friendliness, but just having some female conversation's nice.

Horrible mistake this week, I booked into a B&B for the week, one I selected at random from yellow pages and it's in the middle of nowhere. I really want somewhere within walking distance of some restaurants and pubs. If you have to spend the evening on your own, a few vodkas helps it pass, and you can't do that if you have to drive. But as it turned out, the one pub about half a mile away did reasonable nosh, had some friendly sorts and played heavy rock. That and three or four large vodkas, what more can you ask?

Funny stories people tell. Apparently her daughter was once very ill in hospital and this lady was told to sing to her so she rocked her around singing extracts from Metallica and all her daughter's tubes and catheters fell out. She was a nurse too, but psychiatric, so maybe they have different priorities. I think when I snuff it, I would like it to be while headbanging to a bit of heavy rock.

Everyone was smoking like chimneys, seemed to be a bit of a political statement as all the barmats were ads for freedom2choose so I decided to join them and brought a packet of Benson & Hedges from the machine. £5.20???? Good god! I expect a holiday in Barbados for that sort of money! No chance of me taking it up again. My meanness far outweighs all my tendencies to vice.

Except vodka of course. A man can only take so much reality.

Wait for it

It's coming

It's coming

It's coming

It's coming

It's coming

It's coming

It's coming

It's coming

It's coming

Here it comes

It's here

What you've all been waiting for - the picture of my severed knob

I promised I would and here it is in all it's gory glory. I am sorry the picture is a bit small, no 1 son has taken my digital camera on a trip to Hungary so I had to use my phone. This picture is therefore only about 300% of actual size when I was hoping to show it at 500%, but never mind.

Prophecy and holes

Had a dream last night that there was a huge earthquake in Britain. A whole lot of us were standing on a lawn outside some rather plush steel and glass apartments which had collapsed at one end and somebody had set up a big screen TV that was showing the news. Although there were the usual dream-like elements, people were laughing and chatting as though we were at a garden party and the news reports of a rescue from Peak Cavern placed it in Bristol, most of it it seemed remarkably real. I just thought I would mention it in case it is a prophecy. If you see lots of little comic dragons looking in your windows, be aware that a huge earthquake will certainly follow soon after.

Peak Cavern? A lot of the dreams I remember most vividly seem to involve abysses although they are not usually natural. I either seem to be wandering precariously in a world that is an endless building site with flimsy planks running from one pile of crumbling masonry to another across horrible black holes with glimpses of water far below or in some concrete channel with an immense water flow disappearing through a nightmarish aperture in the ground.

Caves and holes in the ground are fascinating. One of my ambitions is to have a huge garden where I can create my own underground labarynth. I did do potholing at university for a term but it was a disappointment as it was treated as a competitive sport and the idea seemed to be to rush along, get to the furthest reaches and rush back in the shortest time possible, there was no time to look around. And even in the winter it was a bit like a popular golf course, you were always hanging around waiting for some other caving club ahead of you to get out of the way.

When I retire, assuming we do not have another stock market collapse before hand (maybe due to an earthquake in Tokyo) perhaps I will buy a plot of land and spend my time excavating a huge maze of tunnels, But I shan't let anyone else into it, it will be mine.

Wasteland world

Looking in a bookshop in the week. I leafed through Brian Lumley's Vampire World but it did not appeal. It's a common theme of horror and SciFi books and films, a rump of mankind living a furtive existence on an Earth conquered and dominated by another species. Just off the top of my head, apart from Vampire world, I can think of Dragon World, Spider World, Day Of The Triffids, Terminator 3, Land of the Dead, William Hope Hodgson's almost forgotten classic Night Land and a few others I can't remember the names of.

One day this future will come true, not by conquest but through our own stupidity. We will not control our population, slow our rape of the Earth's resources, moderate our poisoning of the environment, prevent our alteration of the Earth's climate, halt our extermination of the Earth's other species or stop meddling with nature's rules. The fate I see for us holds a deformed and diseased mankind picking over an endless rubbish dump on an almost barren wasteland. There will be few other animals in the world with us because only the most adaptable and resourceful such as foxes, seagulls and rats will have survived.

The main threat to this pathetic remant of our species will not be vampires or dragons or huge spiders or poisonous plants or intelligent machines or zombies or nightmarish eldritch beings. It will be huge packs of voracious and disease carrying rats.

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whisker

Came across some things while looking unsuccessfully for similar film/book themes for the above. I spent all of two minutes on it, what do you expect? in depth research? Also for that poetry quote (It's The Hollow Men, by TS Eliot). Not suitable for the above but I did find another "world" story that appeals to my revolting sense of humour, where everyone has to live out their daily lives under a constant shower of spunk. Mike Philbin's Bukkake World.

You're free. No you're not

I see the Turkish chap who shot Pope John Paul nine years ago but failed to kill him was released from jail then promptly sent back again. Quite right. That will teach him to aim a bit better next time he tries to shoot a pope.

Unlike the entire rest of the world apparently, I was no fan of the late John Paul II. The last thing we need in an overcrowded world is a right wing Christian pope preaching the sinfulness of contraception. Where did this dogma come from anyway? I was brought up as a Catholic and endured twelve years of RE before I kicked over the traces and never once in any of the gospels did I read of any pronouncement by Christ on contraception. A search on the internet finds no such reference either, the earliest mention of contraception by the Christian church appears to be in 96 AD. But as god's appointed representatives on Earth they can say what they like and naturally it has all the authority of god himself. How convenient. Maybe the faithful of all religions should get back to the roots and try to find out for themselves what their founder, whether Christ, Muhammed, Buddha or WHY, actually taught rather than blindly accept man made ideas which are often no more than the relics of political power struggles.

The current pope is just as bad, indeed, I understand he was the power behind much of the late pope's dogma. The main differences between the two men are the current pope's hideousness and his lack of charisma. I very much prefer him for those reasons, they make him less influentual. All leaders should be chosen for their ugliness and lack of personality in my view, then perhaps we would judge them properly, by what they achieve. If the appalling Blair had looked, spoken and acted like John Prescot he would rightly have been out of the door at the second election.

When Benedict XVI took over I could not think where I had seen him before. Ah yes, it's Grandpa from the Munsters. The hair is whiter, after 40 years even vampires will have aged a little, but that is him without question. What a pity he doesn't look like Herman, then people would take even less notice of the ghastly old twat.

PS. Wish I could get to be pope, I would immediately issue a papal bull stating that it is god's will that Catholics could only leave their houses if they had a dead squirrel stapled to the end of their nose. What fun I would have. We don't get nearly enough silly people in charge of the world. Nearest we ever had to a silly world leader was Mandela, never afraid to be photographed doing a stupid dance. Think that's one reason why people like him.

What's wrong with holocaust day? what???? Yeh, it's a rubbish idea

Saw a bit of "30 minutes" on TV just now on the subject of whether we should have it.

I really don't agree with this nonsense about needing to remember these things so we don't repeat them. Are you kidding? with the right propoganda from the top, especially given that a modern day Goebbels would have far more sophisticated techiques at his disposal than the original ever did, we would both remember them AND happily repeat them. Nobody should ever overestimate human nature.

All the same, I can't see any problem with a special day if that's what some people want. Then a Jewish bloke argued against it because it perpetuated the victim mentality. Hmmm. Fair point. Let me think about that one. Then a Sikh bloke came on and pointed out that we had got along happily without holocaust day until Tony Blair introduced it. It was Tony Blair's idea.

That's it, I'm convinced! We should scrap it immediately.

Sex offenders in schools, poshification, my website and goldfish

Usually buy the DT but the headlines seem to follow the tabloids at the moment; this week it's been all the ridiculous hysteria about those on the sex offenders register working in schools. Why not in some cases? How is a man who has a consentual affair with a 15 year old girl necessarily a threat to young children? One does not actually have to be a pervert to fancy underage girls if they are physically mature and the idea that a bloke who shags a girl of 16 and one month is an upstanding citizen while one who shags one of 15 years and 11 months is a dangerous paedophile is absurd.

So I have switched to The Times. Darn good paper, I may stick with it. Lots of proper news, decent columns and some interesting odds and ends too. Among the interesting snippets is a bit in the Times 2 "thebulletin". According to a Canadian psychology professor, internet user make up their minds about a website in less than half the time it takes the eye to blink. Without even looking at the content??? How shallow can one get? Ok, any of you with the attention span of a goldfish can sod off right now!

When I used to keep goldfish I was always amazed at how they could do a long stringy shit, swim up the tank, swim back and mistake it for a worm, eat it, spit it out, swim down the tank, swim back up, mistake it for a worm, eat it, spit it out, swim up the tank, swim back, mistake...

I'm sure that you morons who don't like my website can find a variation on this theme that will keep your limited intellects satisfied. Or perhaps the concept is too difficult. Listen carefully, walk to the centre of your fireside rug, now do a...

Iraq war, tax and waste

Also in the Times this week. Acccording to the OECD, Taxes in the UK are now higher than in Germany. Except we get none of the social benefits that they get. Where the hell is it all going? One clue is a report (admittedly disputed but in a difference between the Bush government and anybody/anything else whatever, who are you going to believe?) that the US government spends more on the Iraq war in a week than the greatest box office film the Titanic took ever. 10 times more than original estimates. What is it REALLY costing the UK? Then there's the ever growing army of parasites in the public sector, the growth in which, by 637,000 since 1999, is the only thing depressing the increase in the unemployment figures.

Not that unemployment figures of 1.5 million these days are on a comparable basis with the figures back in the 70s anyhow. Unemployment nowadays does not include the huge and ever growing number of those on dubious "disability" benefits and those excluded from welfare by their savings under the current means tested system.

Overwork and self mutilation

I feel sodding overworked at the moment. New contract during the day. At least this one is fairly interesting, but quite hard. Brain hurts. Then come back to B&B. Hour off, and then it's the darn satellite work for occasional client. Mod should be easy and the values in the sodding intermediate file are exactly what I'm expecting, so why is Washington still all red & green stripes?? I blame Bush. At weekend got to do VAT returns for two companies so I have to catch up with two big box files of invoices and expenses. Then sister wants me to do some labels for a mailshot for our ed. s/w company. Think she thinks it's easy. Probably would be if we paid £500 a year for address lists, but as it is, I have to use my web ripper prog to extract pages from the net followed by an even more complicated thing in Excel/VBA to extract the addresses from the webpages. Trouble is, the bastards keep changing the format so it's always a reprogramming exercise. If it takes 40 mins per county, I am doing well.

Also this blog is getting very boring and I haven't finished a xoggoth tale in ages. Why can't people just leave me alone? Genius doesn't need this pressure and I feel my artistic side is being crushed. Van Gogh famously cut off part of his ear. I am so upset I have decided to emulate this act of self mutilation and to follow through on my promise to cut off my willie and post a picture here. After I've done my sodding VAT returns that is. Don't miss it.

Going blind

In the local TV news tonight, an elderly lady called Joyce who suffered a heart attack and went into a coma. Against all odds she came out of it, but wierder still, she could see properly for the first time in decades. What a nice story.

Brings back memories. Back in 1992, following redundancy, I had just got myself a new job. Late Sunday night and I started on Monday. My eyes felt really tired and I rubbed my eyes. Horrors! When I opened them I couldn't see properly. Everything was a total blur; I could barely make out the furniture. I rinsed my eyes with Optrex several times, thinking I might have something in them, but it didn't work. I could see light and shade and general shapes, but otherwise I was blind. Despite my panic I eventually managed to get to sleep. In the morning, no problem whatever.

Wierd

Here we go again

Nothing like starting the day in a state of total exasperation. The B&B I'm at has the TV on in the breakfast room so I was watching the news. Christ no! Not yet another fucking stupid half-baked ill-thought-out sound-bitey waste-time-and-money achieve-nothing "initiative" from that stinking egotistical fuckwit Blair, why can't somebody stab the rancid human turd in both eyeballs and put the rest of us out of our misery?

This time it's another "crack down" on street prostitution and curb crawling. If it is a major problem to the residents of an area, then like any other activity that can cause a nuisance, it needs to be addressed by the local police, but get a grip, in general there must be much better uses of police time. What was the clear up rate for burglary again? About 12% I believe. For crimes in general, including violent street crimes, it is under 25%. So police should spend their time picking up prossies and their clients engaged in an activity by mutual consent that affects nobody else, rather than tacking burglary and violence?

They say it is a problem because it is associated with crime, especially drug crime. FFS! Yes, it is associated with such activities but will somebody please send these dipsticks to logic school to study elementary cause and effect. Prostitution is associated with crime because:

a) It is a criminal activity and therefore running it is an employment that will only appeal to those prepared to break the law. viz, criminals. If it was a properly regulated lawful activity, like those other lucrative vices, gambling or drinking, part of the link would go.

b) Many of the young women sell themselves because it is the only way they can get anough money to feed a drug habit. Note this sentence is not reversible in meaning. Prostitution does not cause drug dependency, drug dependency causes prostitution. It would therefore be more logical to tackle the root cause of both rather than try and treat the symptom, and since almost all drugs are imported and the trade is largely foreign controlled, maybe it would make more economic sense to restore proper control of our borders.

Queen xoggoth

I got my security pass for work today. As usual, the photograph almost lives up to the magnificent reality. Still looks as if I have a decent head of hair too. How is it photos you have to hand back always turn out well, but photos you take yourself or in a booth for your own use always make you look like a Biafran with a jaw deformity? I remember trying to get a decent photo from a booth some years back to send to a lady in her 30s who had advertised she wanted to meet a married man in his 40s or 50s for adult fun. (Whatever that is, I think it means being into chess and Panorama). I must have gone to every sodding photo booth in Bristol before I found one that did not make me look like a deformed Urang-utan. I never did hear from her, I expect she got hundreds of replies.

BUT. Although the pass photo correctly shows me as incredibly handsome, it also shows that terrible transformation that often befalls really good looking men when they reach their 50s and 60s. Roger Moore for example. The looks are still there but somehow a dreadful QUEENY look is creeping in. I am turning into Quinton Crisp!

Overwhelming force, squash matches and the continuing search

Excellent program earlier in the week by Martin Bell on the subject of recent wars. I agree totally with his contention that some recent wars and particularly the Iraq war were totally unecessary. There was no urgency on the matter of Saddam Hussein whatever. Any program that demonstrates further to the British public what a fucking lying egotistical bastard Blair is is ok with me. I am not sure I agreed with Bell's comments on the Gulf War about unecessary use of overwhelming force.

I used to play squash some years ago; I was never very good but it kept me fit. Sometime we had a new joiner in the league who had entered far to low and it was very one-sided game; on one occasion the bloke's serve was so unreturnable I lost 9-0, 9-0, 9-0 and hardly touched the ball. I was really annoyed. a) Why didn't he enter himself into the right division? and b) Since he was playing someone nowhere near his standard, wouldn't it be better to ease up a bit and make a game of it? On other occasions it happened the other way round. I found myself winning the first game 9-0 against an apparently much weaker player. So I made a game of it and eased off. And on a couple of such occasions I ended up losing the match even though, when that possibility was apparent, I tried to step up my game again. It was too late, they had the impetus and the confidence and had got the hang of my game.

I wonder if this works with war too? History of too many wars suggests it does. It is inconceivable that the ill-equipped Iraquis could have defeated the Americans and Brits if we had eased off to avoid inflicting more casualties, but I think it quite possible that we could suffered many more casualties ourselves. Regardless of the rights and wrongs of a conflict I see the primary duty of a commander as putting the safety of his own troops above those of the enemy and if that means excessive enemy casualties so be it. See also A Decent Man

On the ghastly Blair, my unsuccessful search to find anyone who admits voting for him (other than on the first occasion before they knew what he was like) continues. Not a one so far. Most of the people of my acquaintance tend to be middle class or IT types so maybe it's not a fair cross section, but it's the same with the working class/non working types I met during my voluntary work between contracts and the cabbies and others I occasionally talk to about politics. You should have heard the cabbie last week ranting about him, made my comments on this blog seem polite. Everyone HATES the bastard*. What is going on? Is the entire general election rigged?

PS Apparently there is a Martin Bell Syndrome:. A syndrome comprising X-linked mental retardation in children with macroorchidism, prognathism, hypotonia and autism, and a characteristic but variable facies. Appears in boys (homozygous in the first year of life). In puberty there is pronounced growth of testes. abnormal speech pattern, large ears, long face, high-arched palate, and malocclusion. Additional abnormalities may include lordosis, heart defect, pectus excavatum, flat feet, shortening of the tubular bones of the hands, and joint laxity. OR a pronounced tendency to wear white suits?

PPS *Apart from the wierd Ms Flaps of course, but I think she only fancies his body

Saturdays, stubble and ways to make money

Saturday morning. Like Saturday mornings me. Join the missus in bed. I never actually sleep with her anymore, having spent too many nights alone on contract I can't put up with all the snoring and fidgetting. I wonder if other contractors have that problem. Friday was dress down day and I had to get up early so didn't bother to shave, so come this morning "ooh deperate Dan". Nothing like sandpapering one's beloved.

Got to thinking about the designer stubble look. Can't say it would suit me, my stubble is more Albert Steptoe than George Clooney, but if one did, how can you always look as if you have not shaved for four days? People use sideburn trimmers, barber's hair clippers and even nail clippers apparently, there seems to be no such thing as a designer stubble device. Maybe a gap in the market there?

That chap who sold ads on his web page for a pound a pixel was in the news again this week, nearly sold the last few. Good luck to him, but it sounds such a very unlikely idea. After all, what is the difference between what he has done and what everyone else has been doing for years? Nothing, other than he calculates the advertising fee for space on a very crowded page in a quirky manner. Plus managing to attract attention by doing so and that is the nub of it; any page that attracts a lot of worldwide attention, crowded or not, is very good advertising space.

Wish I could have some brilliant money making idea. All of mine are either idiotic or uncommercial. When I was twenty something I was sure I could make money from farming Elodea, that slimy green stuff that grows in ponds simply because it grows so fast in the right conditions. What use is it? Well none, as far as I know, that was the slight flaw in my business plan. I would have been cornering the world markets in something that nobody actually wanted to buy. But it is a very nice pale green colour, much prettier than lots of other cheap slimy things that nobody wants to buy. That was going to be my advertising slogan "Buy yourself a big bucket of Elodea, so much nicer than huge piles of hospital waste". I would have had slick adverts in which forlorn blokes with bottles of sewage were ignored by all the girls while they all flocked to fawn over the chap with a big jar of Elodea. Then I was going to add "Because you're worth it", but I see some other bastards have nicked that one.

Some of my ideas could work, but they would no more be easy money than my current job. I did think of starting an IT Feng-Shui consultancy, where I set up computers and re-designed software in accordance with ancient Chinese principles of harmony and well being. Or my own variation of it anyhow, the chief principles of which are:

• Always use lots of orange
• When you can't use orange use purple
• Orange and purple together are even better
• Pictures of zombies fit anywhere
• Put things on the left and right alternately
• Introduce stuff about pervy sex, slugs, baboons, excrement and killing politicians and civil servants into all text content

I have used these principles liberally in this website and I can say proudly there is nothing else quite so harmonious or tasteful on the world wide web.

Just to totally soothe any viewers, the picture at left was one I took of my bed in Derby. Look what some of you missed. Actually, the walls were pale blue but I am sure you will agree that purple goes so much nicer with the orange.

Judas wuz innocent. God, atheism and idiotic Christians

News in the week, reported here, that Judas is to be given a makeover by Vatican scholars. It is an old argument, dating back to ancient Coptic versions of the bible, that since Judas was a necessary part of god's scheme for the resurrection he wasn't an evil man at all. But for this idea to be given credence by the Vatican? Are they mad? I will get back to this shortly.

Over the Christmas break I got stuck with somebody who insisted on having an "intellectual" discussion about the existence of god. Nature is so wondrous and complex, how can it possibly have happened by accident? etc etc. Shit! that sort of stuff bores me these days, it's for adolescents and imbeciles.

1. The argument is nonsense. We see laws governing everything, order is the norm, it is what always happens. Yet because we see man also can create an order of his own and man is an intelligent creature, ergo, all order is created by an intelligent being. It's "all coal is black therefore everything black is coal" logic. It's crap, ridiculous second rate and unsound logic. It's MORONIC! I did Catholic apologetics at school, including the so called "proofs" of god and they are all equally crap. Take causality. Everything we know comes from something else, plants grow, animals eat plants, animals excrete and die and provide nutrients for plants etc. therefore there must have been some start of all this process. Why? The more logical conclusion is that the same process of cause and effect has gone on forever. Why invent a beginning, a nothingness, a concept that is something we have never experienced? In the same way the order argument could more logically be explained by assuming that order and laws are natural. Why hypothesise an external originator?
   
   
2. The argument is utterly pointless and irrelevant anyway. What is the point of arguing about the existence of a creator if by that we mean one that has simply created and then has no further interest in us? It's just as good an explanation as any, and while I think the "proofs" are flawed I have no particular axe to grind for a more scientific explanation. The main point is, it just doesn't matter. Vague belief in some creator without the other elements of organised religion is pointless. If you think it matters then toss a coin. Heads you believe, tails you don't. Without faith it's the nearest to certainty you will ever get.
   
   

The only god worth thinking about is one in the Christian/Jadaic/Muslim tradition, a god who makes it clear that your fate for the rest of eternity depends on your own thoughts and deeds in this life. It is in the sense of belief in a god like that I call myself an atheist. Agnostiscism is a nonsense; you could spend an eternity in hell and you go "ooh I don't know really" as if someone has asked you what you want for tea?

My objections to that sort of god are practical. For us to be entirely responsible for our actions we must have complete free will and complete freedom to act in accordance with that will.

1. The first is untrue because we are all prisoners of our own natures and personalities. Although we have freedom to change ourselves to a degree, it is no more than a freedom to build ourselves a slightly bigger cage. Certainly we can make the effort to be outwardly better people or to consciously think in a more positive or tolerant fashion for example, but some things that religion seems to demand, whether or not we can truly believe in something for which we can find no evidence, whether we can feel true love for strangers regardless of their behaviour, seem to me to require much more fundamental changes than we know how to make.
   
   
2. A bigger problem is circumstance. If Christianity were the true religion for example, then how could someone brought up in the Muslim faith and living in a Muslim country ever be expected to know it?

So if someone is excluded from heaven because he was never able to find the capacity for faith in his character or never even had a chance to know about the true path, how does this square with the idea of a loving and forgiving god? To explain that, we have to fall back on the idea that the details of belief are not important, that all that is demanded of us is that we do our best with the nature and circumstances life has handed us. Fine, but then we are back to the idea that religious belief is not necessary since atheists and agnostics do that too. But we are continually told by the adherents for religion that the details ARE important and from an infinity of conflicting details, how can the seeker after truth ever be expected to find the true path even if there is one?

Back to those idiots at the Vatican and Judas. The whole concept of Christian redemption is based on the idea that we have free will and are responsible for our actions. If Christianity's greatest symbol of evil was only a tool in god's great plan, it runs contrary to that central idea. And why should we assume he was unique? Thanks for the let-out chaps. Maybe the rest of us are somehow unknowing pawns in some great scheme too and not truly responsible for what we do.

This sermon has been brought to you today by xoggoth and is a part of the universal plan. My place in heaven is assured.

Only Saints die young

Watching the news earlier about the funeral of the young policewoman who was shot in Bradford. Don't they talk a lot of crap about the dead at funerals? Everyone who has ever died was always generous, brave, spirited, kind, friendly, full of life, would do anything for everyone, loved by everyone who knew them etc. etc. etc.

Nobody mean, miserable, cowardly and generally loathed by everyone ever dies. Hey! I'm immortal!

Oh well

Half way through first week of new contract somewhere in England. Not sworn or got ratty once. Prefer programming, this job is just writing specifications but compared to the last pile of shite the work is ok as is the working environment. Downside is it's a bit isolated, small half empty office and I'm stuck in one corner away from anyone (maybe I should change my underpants more often than once every month) and they all seem to sit in front of their PCs without a lot of conversation anyway. What there is sounds rather dull, they're all old farts here. Most no more ancient than me I expect, but at least I have the mind of a five year old.

Hate the first few weeks in a new place. By the time you have got back to the B&B and changed, then gone out to find a restaurant, sat there on your own feeling like a social outcast among all the groups and couples and wandered back, there's FA left of the evening. Much better when you have a rented place. Phoned up about two places last night, one had gone, the other was owned by an incomprehensible Chinese bloke. After he gave me the address I couldn't find it on the map. Then thinking about the description he gave, by a bridge over the river, I realised it wasn't in this city at all as it hasn't got a river. I suspect he was trying to lure me into white slavery; I get really tired of fighting off international sex trade criminals after my body.

Hey, that's my son in your peat bog

Two very well preserved very early iron age men have been found in a peat bog in Ireland. He say's its not him and the "diminutive" description does not fit as he is 6'2", or 6'9" with the gelled hair, but I think thousands of years in a peat bog must shrink people, because that is definitely him. The lifestyle fits too because his room is rapidly turning into a peat bog.

Advice please - telling the age of socks and underpants

I don't know if others have this problem. When I got up this morning I found it hard to tell the difference between my clean underpants and socks, i.e. the ones that I only started wearing on January 1st, from ones from previous months that I had unfortunately left lying around. Last June's underpants were particularly similar in original colour and in personal decoration. The sniff test tends to return similar results after about week 1 so that's no help. I did think it would be less confusing if I wore them for a complete year instead but I wouldn't want to be thought unhygeinic. Does anyone know if there are iron-on date tags available for this purpose? or would carbon dating work?

Stupid impractical styles

My good mood did not last long. Decided to get my van ready and that involved replacing the non working Ford cassete player/radio with my CD player. Right. First problem was I needed some special DIN remover to get the old one out. Why?? Surely stereo thieves are going to to have all that equipment, the only ones inconvenienced by this are the rightful owners. Still, only a problem if you have a working unit you want to get out in one piece. Soon sorted with a hammer and woodchisel. Then went to Halfords, spent a fortune on an adapter, front plate and tray. Tray was way too small, adapter said Fiesta but was all wrong, connectors all crap, diagram in manual bore no resemblance to reality, front plate fitted but retainer immediately snapped off.

Then nowhere to put the sodding compass. People sneer at car compasses but if you are always going to strange cities like most contractors do, they are really useful when you get lost in some suburb with no signposts. All I wanted was one of those things with a magnet in you could stick on the windscreen, I only want to know I am facing about the right direction, I don't need some sodding compensated electronic thing accurate to 1 degree thanks, I am not heading a fecking expedition to Uranus! No chance, I have looked for months and you can't get those anymore so I end up paying £30 for this electronic thing. The compass has a base that also holds the battery and only swivels 90' from it and this van, like all modern cars, is all wierd rounded arty fart styling, and beyond sticking it where it obscures your vision or other instruments or will get knocked off, there is not a single place you can put it where it does not end up facing downwards or away from you. You can't even just put it on the dashboard when you need it. Change the vertical orientatation and the whole damn thing needs recalibrating. I daresay I will end up doing what I usually do with everthing I buy new, voiding the warranty by modifying it so will actually be of some use.

Bloody modern styles. My old van had nice flat door panels and boxy door pockets that you could get loads of stuff in. Not this one. Everything is rounded and styled with tiny little compartments you can't even fit a can of screen defroster in. The lovely curved glove compartment is full with a pair of sunglasses and a packet of aspirins in it. Look Ford, I want a practical working thing, I want a VAN, not a pimpmobile or a fecking part of an H R Giger set from "Alien" thanks very much!

Days off - planned and unplanned

I was supposed to be manning an exhibition stand today but three people on a little stand was somewhat unecessary so have an unexpected day off. My sister loves doing that sort of crap and is good at it. I don't and am not. I mostly acheive negative sales by snarling at anyone who comes close.

It feels great having an unexpected day off. When you have a scheduled day off it is often a disappointment and I think this is because you look forward to it and you plan to do this and that and anticipation and planning are not the ingredients of relaxation. When it's a freebie, as it were, you don't feel you HAVE to do anything and what you do do is so much more enjoyable. Moreover, if you choose to, you actually do seem to get those same things done so much quicker than you ever manage when you planned to do them and enjoy doing them a lot more.

I have always found this, some of the nicest days I have had have just been summer days when I have looked out the window and thought "sod it" and taken a totally unplanned day off. Lovely relaxed day wandering in the country, drink in pub. It was the same back when I was a permie, once the nasty bit of phoning in was over, sickies were so much nicer than holidays, they were worth feeling ill for. Am I unusual in this? I suspect not. Maybe companies should not give employees holidays at all. If you want to take your family to Corfu, you have to ring in and convince them you have Leprosy. Employees feel good at having got one over on the employer, employer claims back NI from the stinking government who only waste it anyway and everyone is happy.

Run - the lady's bits are coming

Somebody mentioned fibroids on a blog. I was not really sure what they are except that they are one of those women's things and tried a search. About first reference contained this picture of a woman's bits. Yuck! That's hideous. They should show that in schools to discourage promiscuity. On second thoughts it might just turn all the blokes gay, like in Tom Sharpe's Riotous Assembly. If they remake "The Quatermass Experiment" they could do worse than base the monster on that picture.

PS Darn. Just checked and they did remake The Quatermass Experiment on new years day and I missed it. Always wanted to see it.

That's a new one - haunted TVs, children and odd experiences

Just been told by someone that this chap he knows has photographed faces in the TV. Funny how one never hears these things first hand, could it be that this chap he knows actually heard it from a chap HE knows and so on and if you traced the story back it would be something from a TV program or film? Yeh I'm a cynic!. Anyway, according to this impeccable and verified source (!) if you take photos of the TV, most times you will get a photo of a TV with your own reflection, but sometimes you will see a figure standing behind you. Thought "photo apparition TV" would bring up too much to find anything on Google but I did find this.

Odd things do happen even to atheists and engineers like me. Most of the things I have experienced have either been in childhood, during times of stress/drunkeness or just on waking, so I tend to discount them as anything more than imagination or dreams.

Children do imagine things so vividly they can seem real, it's what we really mean when we say children are imaginitive, that they can immerse themselves in things so that they appear real, not in the sense that they have original ideas. Children are very unimaginitive in that sense, ever tried playing "let's imagine" with a small kid? Very dull! While you are inventing being imprisoned in a light bulb by a robot herring, all they can come up with is cowboys and indians in the garden. I suppose imagination in the sense of innovation takes lots of real life experiences for our brains to rearrange.

So what have I seen that I discount? There was the tall pale figure that kept dragging my bedclothes off when I was at a cheap flat in Bath. That was a good old traditional Dickens type spook, very thin and pale, deep set black eyes. It should have scared the hell out of me, but I simply found it annoying and for that reason I know I could not have been fully awake, even though all the details of the flat were real. Then there was the odd slipper shaped creature with two long straggly tails that floated accross the road in front of me when I was walking to school. It was about three feet long and covered in what seemed to be dirty matted fur. I was with friends at the time and although I said "what's that thing?" and pointed nobody else saw it. I was also on my way to my first A level exam, hence the stress link. A few years later and the afternoon before my final exams I saw what looked like something from one of those overhead car assembly lines going round and round, all lit up in rainbow colours.

Then there's the deserted world. In my twenties and in the right mood, I had the knack of turning some strange cinema on in my brain, but it only ever ran the one film. In the film I was always flying over a world covered in forest, there was no human habitation. There were animals, I recall flying low over a bare hill and a huge stag being startled and looking up at me. There was no effort involved in any of this and it was as real and vivid as if I was actually in some silent aircraft flying over a temperate forest world. This knack has largely gone but very occasionally I still find that the vague shadows we all see with the eyes closed will suddenly resolve into a crystal clear picture of some object, often something totally mundane like a chair. It did not have quite the same clarity but I even saw the forest world for the first time in years while on the train a few weeks back. The green was gone and there was nothing but twisted bare branches. A meaning? I have no idea.

Other things probably have simple explanations. The deep breathing in my bedroom that terrified me as child was probably an owl on the gas fire cowling. It conducted all sort of noises into the room. About four years ago back in Birmingham I had a rented room and there was one corner near the ceiling where I could often see bright pin points of green light when the light was off. I did look for holes in the ceiling, something reflective in the wallpaper and found nothing but I suspect it was something like that.

Two things not easily explained. When we first moved into this house it was always full of odd noises, strange cries like a child and sometimes brief running. We heard these things coming from other parts of the house even when our own two were with us. Nothing that could not be explained as expansion, noises from outside etc. Until the time me and my youngest were sitting at the foot of the stairs watching the goldfish and a very young child's voice started babbling from thin air a couple of feet in front of us. We both heard it and it went on for about half a minute. The occurences stopped after we had some major building work done.

The other thing was the Inn. In my second year at university I hitch hiked with a girl I was dating to a party near the North Wales border. The party was ok, but trying to sleep on the front room floor afterwards was so uncomfortable that we decided to set off in the early hours and try and hitch a ride home. Big mistake, there is not much traffic in those parts at 5Am and it was freeezing. We were so cold that when we came to an old boarded up inn we went round the back. It wasn't locked. The place was derilict and unpleasant and only a trifle warmer than outide. Worst of all it was creepy. It sounded like somebody was coming down the stairs towards us although they never got to the bottom. We decided to move on and surprisingly got lucky with a lift in a short time.

So old inns are noisy, shutters creaking in the wind. (Not that there was much) What's spooky about that? Nothing at all, the spooky part came thirty years later. I had been to a meeting with a client's client at Connor's Quay, right near the North end of the Welsh border. Coming throgh a small town nearby I took the wrong turning and passed the same inn. I am certain it was the same inn. That estate road leading to a larger road at the same angle. The trees and parking space further on. And the pub was the same. There was a small car park to the left and behind the pub itself was a small triangular brick courtyard. The condition was exactly the same, no worse, no better than it had been 30 years before. Was that possible? I did not go in, it gave me the creeps. A few weeks later I went to another meeting and decided that I should check inside just to be sure, I would remember the bar at the left of the back door and the dark entrance to that noisy stairwell at the right. I couldn't find it. What if I had gone in? Maybe I will find it again some day and maybe it still will not have changed. Maybe, if I find the courage to go in, whatever was trying to come down those stairs will reach the bottom.

NEW - a brand new xoggoth public service

All articles in the xoggoth economy sex aids series have now been gathered into one handy online reference magazine. Dildos from old newpapers, using stuffed animals as sex dolls, cheap BDSM equipment, gatecrashing funerals and "borrowing" the deceased. All these and many more will be available for all you fellow perverts with an eye for economy. The xoggoth DIY guide to cheap sex aids

Happy new year to the government

I see now they are now planning to spy on our houses using satellites. There are already plans to photograph inside our houses. Everywhere we go, CCTVs monitoring our every move, revenue raising speed cameras all over the place. We must be the most spied on people in the world.

For what? So they can take even more of our money to give to the feckless, pay for pointless wars opposed by the majority because the PM is an egomaniac, foot the bill for every sort of useless parasite that can make it here from the third world while our own elderly struggle, support an ever increasing band of civil servants and local government officials to do pointless beurocratic jobs, to pay for tackling terrorism we never would have had if we had not imported hostile fifth columnists by the million and pursued an idiotic foreign policy.

And despite all the multitude of hidden tax rises, we in the private sector alone are expected to work longer for worse pensions while the public sector retire early on inflation proofed ones. And although they have given away most of their powers to the EU and paid huge sums of our money for the priviledge, still the parasites in parliament award themselves huge pay rises each year.

Here is my near year message to everyone in the government. I hope your brains explode through your arses. As it is a time of good will I have toned down my intended message considerably.

Unwelcome visitors

On previous occasions I have supplied some practical tips regarding economy sex aids.

• Cheap BDSM equipment
• Sex toys
  
  

I have received many emails of appreciation from others like myself who enjoy a wide range of erotic pleasures but also like to be be economical with their wealth, my fellow astute erotics. I pay no attention to those who call me a mean old pervert, I am above such abuse. I would therefore like to turn this into a regular series for like-minded souls.

Before I do, I just want to make one thing clear, yet again. All my tips are for refined educated people like myself, not for common sorts. After all my stipulations regarding that hand crafted butt-dildo, I still got emails from people who insisted they had made very serviceable items from copies of the Sun or the Star. I'm sorry, I am sure you are very worthy in your way and have your uses, like cleaning toilets and other things that common people do, but I am not interested in hearing about your disgusting practices. If you want to exercise your orifices with inferior reading material then keep it to yourself. Please leave now.

I see you are still here IP: 84.31.27.241. And yes, I do know, to within a probability of 89%, that you are a Sun reader and have voted for New Labour twice. Perhaps you have not grasped the extent of my genius. The movement of your mouse cursor, both over the visible buttons and links and over some carefully placed hidden image spots, has been tracked since you entered this site. In the same way as graphology can reveal the character and personality of the writer, so too does my new science of cursology. I know more about all of you than you probably know yourself. And you, IP: 84.31.27.241. are a CHAV. Please go.

At last. I am sorry the rest of you have had to wait. Now we can get on with the item you have been waiting for.

Cheap and discrete

Nothing improves onanism quite like the delightful feel of lots of little spikes sticking into your bum cheeks. Up until now I daresay most of you have got by, as I used to, with a length of bramble for this purpose. While this can be very effective, it is difficult to keep clean and the thorns soon tend to get broken and blunt. Also greenfly on the arse can be a major problem. Here is a recipe for a simple and very effective bum spiking device that will cost you very little.

What you need.

1. At least thirty short mapping pins or drawing pins. Mapping pins (ie the sort with the small plastic heads you pin things to notice boards with) tend to be sharper and provide more exquisite pain, but it is a matter of taste.
2. An A4 sized piece of very stiff and dense card. For this purpose I find the cover of an old but good quality ring binder is ideal. In some types the plastic cover stays bonded when cut and these are ideal.

Take one long edge of the card and insert it into your crack. Men do not have any choice but if you are female you will first need to decide how far forward you want your spiker to go; marking the top of your thigh with a washable felt tip pen at the front edge of the card helps in relocating. Push in and feel where the card touches, remove it and trim back that point using a sharp Stanley knife. The idea is to cut one edge so it conforms as closely as possible to your body shape. Several removals and trimmings will be necessary. Once you are happy with the inner shape, and not before, you can trim off the rest of the card so that the whole thing fits discretely between your cheeks without any obvious protrusion. With normal anatomy the final shape will be a sort of crescent, tapering towards the back end. See diagram below. Try not to make the card too narrow or it will lose rigidity, about one and a half inches over most of the length is ideal. Now insert the pins through the card in a zigzag pattern at intervals of about a quarter of a inch, alternating the direction. Continue along the entire length or to taste.

Voila. You now have a perfect bum cheek spiker. Pull open the buttocks, insert the spiker so that is nestles against your body and CLENCH. Aaaaaah! With practice you can wear one of these to formal functions. I have it on good authority that a certain actor wore one when he received his knighthood from the queen a few years back. From her expression I have my suspicions that the queen herself often wears one although I daresay hers is an expensive model from Fortnum and Masons bondage wear department.

Forthcoming topics in this series will include: converting old power tools or blenders into vibrators; tips on using stuffed animals that your children have outgrown instead of buying expensive blow up dolls.

Foxhunting

With boxing day, foxhunting was back in the news again. There are legal ways round it and it is widely ignored when no police are around. As always, our appalling lawmakers have given us a totally unworkable dog's dinner of a law. The motives are the same as usual, appear to be doing something for the sake of appearances, avoid losing too many votes, waste as much public money as possible.

The ban should be total. I am not in favour of restricting individual freedom without good reason, but in this case there is very good reason which I shall get to at the end.

Let's look at the most common arguments of the pro lobby.

1. The ban is just about class envy The implication being that any arguments against it are phony and therefore not worth answering. Foxhunting is the pursuit of a lot of rich toffs is it? Where do the people who say that live? Not all in the country is my bet. Of the people I have talked to in the village and elsewhere, some actual supporters, I have generally found it is the ordinary people in the farming community and the working class who are pro, the middle class more likely to be anti. Don't know about toffs but I think you would be hard pressed to find too many earls and barons in the average hunt. I cannot say there are not some who think in those terms, (I know one person who does) but in the community as a whole the division does not appear to follow class lines.
   
   
2. Foxes need controlling 1 Dubious. Studies show that lambs taken by foxes are likely to be either dead or non-viable. The economic impact is most cases is very slight, compared to the subsidies farmers get from the rest of us in any case. If people wish to act solely in their own interests they should first stand on their own two feet.
   
   
3. Foxes need controlling 2 Let's say it's true for the sake of argument. Trouble is, hunting doesn't do that. Even the NUF admitted as such a few years back. Look at the statistics. How often does the hunt go out in any area? How often do they catch a fox? The effect on fox population is negligible. Far more are killed on the roads.
   
   
4. Far worse abuses of animals happen in the food industry Quite true. We should address those. And...? This seems to be the "lots of people get murdered so let's not worry about burglary" argument.
   
   
5. The rare kill One argument we always get to is along the lines of "Anyway, we hardly ever catch a fox". Sorry, but that totally contradicts the control argument.
   
   
6. Effect on the environment Another is "without fox hunting the contryside would be a less interesting place, farmers would have less reason to keep woodlands or hedgerows". Ah! so you encourage foxes by providing suitable breeding areas! That does not sit well with the control argument either.
   
   

I am not against what is necessary, eating meat, wearing leather shoes etc. If lambs or chickens really are being lost in significant numbers to foxes in a particular area then I am not totally opposed to taking effective steps to control numbers. But foxhunting isn't about control because it plainly doesn't. Come clean, it's a sport. And it is because it is a sport and not a necessary measure that it presents a problem which leads to my central argument against it.

Unless we start to change attitudes worldwide that nature exists solely for our convenience and pleasure the day will eventually come when the rich variety of life we still have on Earth will be just history and the world will be far poorer. Ironically, one of the few species we probably will have left will be the adaptable fox.

North West League Against Cruel Sports Website

Lickster

A bit further down here I mentioned how it was that sex toys seem to be becoming quite acceptable these days. I did not actually expect to see them on the shelves at Sainsburys. Among the biscuits and chocolates they have Lickster Body Paint. You spin the wheel, put the chocolate paint on that randomly selected part of your loved one and then lick it off. The picture did not show anything more explicit than "Beautiful bottom", not sure what is actually on the wheel. Does anyone else find this idea quite disgusting??? I do.

I hate chocolate. If I am going to lick somebody's arse, I want it to taste of arse!

The changing language

I was writing the next item in my head while slurping my cornflakes and it occured to me there has been another change to our language as a result of modern sexual mores that nobody has picked up on. We are all familiar with the loss of the word gay and that really pisses me off. There are no other words that had quite the same meaning as the original word; they should have made up their own word, like bessthoomic or crartish or elidustar or something, not plundered our rich language and made it poorer.

But there is another phrase we can no longer use in the context of sexual activity, "catholic tastes". Looking in the dictionary the relevant meaning of catholic (small c) means "wide sympathies or interests". The Catholic church (big C) was named from the general word as it was supposed to embrace all Christianity. As in the "You will embrace the true faith or be burnt at the stake" embracing sense. Don't say you never learn anything on Bloggoth.

But when most people use the phrase catholic taste they are bound to associate it with the Catholic religion so clearly if you use it with reference to sexual preference everyone is going to assume you mean choir boys. Can't say I am into small boys (yet) and thinking of the hideous little bastards of my acquaintance I think it would take some getting used to, I would probably have to work my way there slowly through something more appealing, like lobsters or stick insects. Anyway, that's another chunk of the English language that's dropped off the edge.

Trannies

In fantasy at least, although not really in practice, I have to admit to straying beyond the strictly straight. The practice is handicapped by the fact that blokes are so visually ugly and unnattractive, maybe if one could put paper bags over their heads the idea might be more appealing. Never really thought much about transexuals, and I have to say when I have, I have always found the whole idea of cross-dressers and transexuals rather repulsive, I suppose the image of some seedy old queen in a dress springs to mind.

Then I got sent a link to a very mixed bag of pictures with a number of trannies. Damn it! I rather fancy that! I don't mind men's naughty bits, it's just their ugly faces and unshapely bodies I hate and that "lady" seems to combine the best of both worlds. She's lovely. xoggoth tastes just got even wider. Choir boys, via lobsters, here we come.

Ideas and alien invasions

People are always nicking my ideas and it's really annoying. Or perhaps it's more true to say that ideas I think are original are bound to occur to umpteen other people as well. Like the idea of bansai children in the last post for example. Looked on the net for bansai techniques only to find there is an apparently well known (no 2 son knew all about it anyway) spoof site for bansai kittens. Tonight I watched Dr Who for only the second time and found it had happened again. I said on CUK or some other site a few years back it was insane to send out probes with details of our planet on, who knows what might decide to come sniffing back for the source. But there again, I daresay it's an idea that would occur to millions and I would not be surprised if it has figured in umpteen Sci-Fi stories I have never read.

The Dr is still a naive idealist I see. I am entirely on the PM's side for blowing the alien ship to smithereens; it is what should always be done to aliens, preferably the moment they poke their ugly skull faces through the stratosphere. Dr Who tonight, Independence Day, War Of The Worlds, the Quatermass Experiment, Mars Attack, It Came From Outer Space or countless other movies with conquering aliens. If we ever do get visited by more advanced intelligent creatures from another world, it is those movies that will describe the reality in the one thing that really matters. There will be no "enlightened" beings only trying to save us from our own destructive instincts, no peaceful confederation welcoming us to their fold as equals. It will be about eventual subjugation and the loss of everything we have.

Why so pessimistic? It's a matter of observation. We know the whole universe obeys the same rules of physics. So too are there rules for evolution of life, the "laws of nature" Indeed, many of the rules we know of here on Earth are simple, being basically mathematical or statistical. Every species ensures its own survival by expanding its population and it does that by grabbing as many resources as possible for itself. In a world of limited resources that will inevitably reduce the prospects of survival by other species. Sloths and pandas and other peaceful vegetable munchers may cling on to existence by exploiting a small niche, but they are not the stuff of expansion. Anything that has had the ability to conquer its own planet and to look beyond that to the stars will be aggressive and carnivorous.

I do not say they will be the utterly ruthless and unfeeling creatures like those depicted in Independence Day or tonight's Dr Who. If you think about it, that extent of aggression and contempt for other species is itself an anti-survival trait. The Romans and British could never have built their empires without finding allies among the conquered or without knowing that the softer hand can avoid total opposition. No, in all probability the aliens will be no worse than humans. The approach may seem benign or beurocratic. There may be well be good intentions and high motives, in the same way as so many conquerers here on Earth have firmly belived they were bringing the benefits of civilisation to the savage inhabitants of the lands they took.

The end result will be the same for us as it was for the Australian Aborigines, for many African tribes, for the Maoris, for the Aztecs, the Incas and the North American Indians. If they had had the sense they would have descended en-masse on every ship that came and wiped out the crew to the last man. They didn't and many of these peoples lost everything they had, some surviving today only as tiny patronised minorites in their own lands.

Loss of power and self-determination is the fate of all hosts to invasions whether by conquest or by peaceful migration. You cannot cede rights and powers to newcomers without necessarily reducing your own.