MOST ANNOYING PEOPLE 2009

Just been checking out BBC3's review of the year - which contained a nice round up of the tabloid year, particularly if you read The Daily Star.  (You don't actually have to read to be able to digest that spewspaper -  just look at the pictures...)

I had a couple of thoughts.  The programme itself was called "The Most Annoying People of 2009".  Well, now - newsflash!!!! - you are only annoyed by people if you let them annoy you.  It's like picking at a scab.  DON'T DO IT!  Shimple.

Number 2: I only saw the top six.  And frankly they were mentally ill and I will stand up and defend myself in court on that one.  I promise.

Some were not properly mentally ill, just the sort of toddlers that will do ANYTHING to demand attention.  A couple of them "had jobs in the media". I.e. they thought they exploited the media for their own gain (mentioning no Berry Batona or BOREDOM (pronounced "£ordan".  Others were, like Susan Boyle.  And "Jedward".  Hopefully that is such a small noun that no-one will notice.  And not sue me.

DICTIONARY:  "Jedward: a man's  impotent member.

                   CONTEXT: "Oh my God, love, are you all right? Jedward's looking a bit bashful tonight.""

Number one annoying person of  2009 was  Jordan whose career is f*cking up in public  and making money from it:  i.e: having the mental age of a 16 year old who hates her mum and dad with a vengeance.  She could learn a few lessons from working in Tescos - such as: stop drawing attention to yourself and just put those cans on the shelves and then we will pay you...

In short:  if you don't want them to annoy you, don't give them the satisfaction of  looking.  Do yourself a favour and turn the other cheek.  Your ulcers will thank you in the long run.

MERRY CHRISTMAS & A HAPPY NEW YEAR! xx

SPRINGHEELED JACK STRIKES AGAIN

Just a little festive thankyou to the t*thead who decided to break into my mother's car last night.  You are an *rsew*pe who obviously has nothing better to do than opportunistically break into cars and ransack the glove compartment.  Perhaps it is compulsory, a form of Turette's for thieves and you cannot help yourself when presented with an opportunity.

What I don't understand is how a f*ckwit  like you made it across the black ice that the car was parked on, since in order to leave it where it was I and my mother had to tie each other together and virtually belay each other across to the pavement.  Either you are a fantastic former Olympian speed skater with burglarising tendencies (God bless America for inventing another stupid word), or, as I prefer to believe, you are a:

blackhearted, evil, beetle-browed SH*T with long pointy legs and a Victorian top hat who springs into action and then bounds away laughing like Vincent Price on the Thriller album.

You didn't get anything though, because we ARE NOT STOOPID.  Leave anything worth stealing in a car? You must be joking.  Oh, by the way, thanks for leaving the window wide open on a night when it was p*ssing down with rain.  Really appreciate that little touch you thoughtful thieving g*t:

"Wa ha ha haaaaaa, now their car will smell of damp dog for the next four months.  They will only be able to drive by miraculously levitating their bum 2 inches above the wet seat. I am a spiteful genius! HA ha ha haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!"

THE CAT THAT WANTED TO BE THE VIRGIN MARY IN THE NATIVITY PLAY

PHONE APP TO KEEP TRACK OF XMAS DRINKING

The government are thoughtful.  I opened my laptop this morning to find that they have developed an application for your phone which will track how many drinks you have over Christmas.

Well, what a miraculous invention.  It will calculate how many units you consume, and give personalised feedback on your habits.  Drinking habits, I hope.  Not picking your nose or scratching your belly button - as a tinny, Stephen-Hawking-type voice screeches out: "You are unhygienic and disgusting!" in front of someone you are trying to impress.

However, this miracle is not what it seems.  It relies on the user to input how many drinks they are consuming as they consume them.

Has the inventor of this gadget actually watched any drunk people?  One by one, they lose all their faculties, which, in its early stages, is quite amusing and is actually the point of the drinking exercise.  Many people are going to wake up the morning after with a mouth that feels like a birdcage bottom, check their phone and discover to their delight that they only consumed 3 units of alcohol the night before and a message that says: "Congratulations, you have the liver of a 6-month old."

Let's be honest, the only people who will have the wherewithal to operate this device are people who don't have a drinking problem.  The people who have will be none the wiser.

FAST FOOD...

I was in a fast food restaurant today.  I am not proud of my behaviour, but I was hungover and working, never a clever combination and I needed some carbohydrates and transfats to carry me through the afternoon ahead.  I have half an hour for lunch, the takeout joint is 30 seconds walk from my shop.  Perfect.

I should have known when I read the sticker on the door that said "pull", but actually you had to push it...

No matter, I would persevere.

There are 5 people in front of me.  It takes 20 minutes to serve them.  I have no idea why.  I think maybe I have wandered into a unique space where gravity is stronger here than on the rest of the planet.

In comes the local serial killer - turns out he works here.  He has a name tattooed on his neck.  Is it his, or somebody else's, I wonder..?

He works on a till, relief all around since the queue is out the door now.  His first customer pays with a card.  Our serial killer can't get the card into the card reader, the magic box of electricity seems to confuse him.  Collective hearts are sinking. 

It occurs to me that if I had driven the 20 yards from where I work into the drive-through, I would have been served in 2 minutes instead of 25...

I did receive my order  -  I had 5 minutes in which to eat it.  I am so glad no one saw me as I hysterically stuffed my face in the canteen...I have a feeling it was deeply unattractive.  I don't think I made any noises...

Of course, I can't tell you the name of the fast food restaurant.  Suffice to say it rhymes with "KFB".

I'M A VIEWER, GET MY TELLY OUT OF HEEEEEEEEEEEERE...

What was Katie Price thinking of, really?  I do believe she was blinded by the massive cheque she was promised for airing more of her dirty laundry - this time quite literally.

After years of reality tv shows following her every move, did she really think she could just sit on her *rse and pontificate about the relationship she had with Peter Andre for three weeks and the public would change their opinion of her?  And what does it matter about the publics' opinion anyway?  Katie Price is one of those charmless unfortunates whom people love to hate.  Her demeanour is such that I can imagine people buying her work just to burn it.

"I'm here for closure," she opined to anyone who would listen.  I'm no expert, but there is no such thing as closure.  It is just a buzz word that people use when they do not know what they are talking about.

If there is such a thing as closure, it involves not harping on about the painful times in one's life anymore and turning one's mind to more productive things.  However, Katie Price/Jordan is a commodity.  Katie Price's divorce is all she has to sell right now - that and her relationship with her cage-fighter other half, who is a cross-dresser no less, but "strictly for sexual purposes".  

No doubt there will be a book released for Christmas about her time in the jungle.

Peter Andre is a moron, but he means well and is good with children - this has gone a long way to boosting his public image.  Katie Price's image is that of a flint-hearted woman who sees a £ sign on everything, a black widow that would eat her sexual partner for breakfast.

Three weeks in the jungle will never be enough to scrub that image from her public's collective unconscious.   She may need an incredibly inventive, creative PR agent...

WOMEN'S PROBLEMS

It turns out I committed the ultimate, ultimate sin this week as far as women are concerned.  No, I did not get off with someone else's man when I was a bit the worse for wear. I am talking about the other sin.  The party/occasion sin.

I chose the same dress as somebody else in a desperate attempt to get a dress for a wedding that was taking place in 6 days' time.

I DIDN'T KNOW!!! I was in a terrible panic, running around the local massive shopping centre on a Sunday afternoon like a contestant out of Supermarket Sweep - I had checked out all their shops in an hour.   From Monsoon to Primark, all you could hear was a wailing: "Why are people moving so slowly?"  Then I discovered it was coming from me.

It wouldn't be so bad but I was actually a bridesmaid.

All the accessories and no dress.  See, I was on a diet and you have the same accessories whatever weight you are.  Anyway, I had a dress from a previous occasion (always the bridesmaid but never the bride, but that's another story for my counsellor) - it's just that 7 days before the wedding I had to be cut out of it because of a dodgy zip (honest).

So there I was in woman hell, something I take great care not to normally immerse myself in - have you ever tried fighting against your hormones?  It's a losing battle...When - THERE, what's that?  In the first shop I had gone in, the only party dress in my size IN THE ENTIRE shopping centre, twinkling at me and whispering "You know it's the right thing to do..."

Panic over.  Try the dress. Buy the dress.  But, 50 minutes later, who's this on the phone?  A well-meaning mother of the groom asking if I had sorted my dress out.  I innocently explained the situation, only to discover...

SHE HAS HAD THAT DRESS FOR WEEKS, SHE EVEN SHOWED ME AN INTERNET PICTURE OF IT THE NIGHT BEFORE, DON'T YOU REMEMBER?

(I had been quite drunk at the time)

AAAARRRRGGGHHHH!!!!!

And then my mood ring exploded.

ENTERTAINMENT OR BUSINESS?

Who are these clowns "John" and "Edward"?  They look like they belong to a cult - or they've come down from space to see how we do things down here and are reporting to their leader who goes by the Earth name of "Simon Cowell".

The trouble with Saturday night on ITV is that it is a self-perpetuating cartwheel of hurtling nonsense.  It only needs a tiny push: 

"Are you a Nobody who wants to be a Somebody? Not got the family onto Jeremy Kyle  yet?  Or even The Trisha Goddard Show?  Come and see our self-appointed, self-important gurus who will belittle you  ON THE TELEVISION."

You can hear the stampede to the auditions from inside the double glazing. Pictures are jolted from the walls as the masses scramble for validation of their existence.

If I am in of a Saturday evening, I prefer to use this time to clean the bathroom.  I WOULD RATHER BE STARING INTO THE TOILET BOWL THAN THE SMUG CAPITALIST FACES OF THOSE WHO EARN HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF POUNDS A YEAR (conservative estimate) by contractually obliging the winner to sing and dance for a comparative pittance -

Sorry, got to go - my keyboard is on fire....

AAAAAAARGHHHH!!!!!!!!!!! 2

Once upon a time

I had a glass of wine

And then I was quite squiffy

For about one hour fiffy

Once upon a time
I was feeling fine
And then the world came in
With a great racketing din

Once upon a time

I ran out of a rhyme....

Fin.

NO ONE EXPECTED THIS TASTE OF CHINA...

It would seem my small, but perfectly formed, local Chinese has been closed down.

Because it had the worst infestation of rats in an environmental officer's 11 years on the job.

Here's a taster of the menu I was inadvertently ordering:

• Chicken and sweetcorn and rat soup.
• Prawn and rat toast.
  
• Vegetable and rat fried rice.
• Prawn crackers and essence of rat.
• Pan-fried rat with a side order of rat satay skewers and rat sauce.

You get the picture. Suffice to say, the environmental officer declared there were between 6 and 12 rats in the takeaway building at any one time.

A good way of getting rid of vermin is to have a cat, but there wasn't room to swing one....

THE HOME SECRETARY'S BRAIN IS MISSING...

Today, David Blunkett, the former Home Secretary, pledged to leave his brain to dementia research.

I leave you to write your own joke..............

THE HUMAN RACE

I am doing my best.
I am following all the rules I was taught at school and home, and a few more besides. I am polite. I am nice. I am clean.
I am educated.

I have grammar. I cannot stand the greengrocers who spell "vegetables" with an apostrophe.

I do not have a mad glint in my eye. I do not have bombs strapped to my body.
I want to work.
Still I am unemployed and write my blog.
I do lots of vacuuming and washing up.
I put myself out for my friends.
What the hell is going on?
Who am I?

I think I will become...

A "Chav"......!!!!!!!!!!!!!

HOW TO QUIT YOUR JOB

It helps if you have a coherent, thought out plan of just what exactly you are going to do with your life once you have leapt off the treadmill of money that helps you, at the weekend, make your life just about bearable.

It does not help to walk in one day after 6 and a half years of loyal service and hand in your two week notice because you feel your head might actually, in reality, explode if you don't do something - anything - to alleviate the craziness you feel in your brain.

Employers don't like you trying to explain that to them, either.

A couple of nights of good kip later, ooooh, the most relaxing, best kips you have ever, ever had, comes the creeping voice: "What are you going to do for money?" it whispers in your ear as you drop off to sleep.

Then you start selling everything that isn't nailed down on e-bay...

BEER

Last time the media and the government (aren't those words interchangeable sometimes?) had an epileptic fit about the amount of alcohol people were drinking of a weekend, two things occurred to me.

The first is, that having studied British history at school, it became clear to me that ever since the Industrial Revolution (i.e: putting adults and children in factories and having them work extremely long hours for a pittance), a large swathe of the working population has always got p*ssed. To be fair, they didn't have many other options to pass the time on - most of them couldn't read and there was no telly. Their other pastimes were Church (because no one wants to burn in Hell) and to beat the wife - and isn't violence always easier and more fun when you are p*ssed?

These days we have more ways to spend our free time and more time to do it in. But people are still going back to their roots and spending most of their time drinking. But how can that be? We live in this wonderful age where we have more pocket money than ever before and more things to spend it on. Whatever you want to do can be saved up for (how quaint!) - I mean, charged to the credit card - and bought. Go and see the pyramids, the Aurora Borealis from an aeroplane, skydiving, stock car racing, diving on a reef... Whatever floats your boat, the possibilities are endless and yet the population can still only see as far as the weekend and how many drinks it takes to send themselves into oblivion.

So the answer cannot be as simple as making drinks more expensive or criminalising the ones who enjoy a glass of wine at home, banning happy hour and closing pubs. It must be a more fundamental change that's needed.

Could it be that nearly 200 years on from the Industrial Revolution, the majority of jobs people work are still boring, tedious, and in some cases against human nature altogether?

Hang on...Something's coming to me...

HOW ABOUT MAKING SOCIETY A PLACE WORTH LIVING IN?

Just a thought...

JEREMY VILE

Jeremy Vile - sorry, Kyle - is in the news again following reports that a judge has "slammed" his television programme (how is that possible?) after sentencing a man who attacked his girlfriend after they appeared on the show to "save" their "relationship".

Despite not viewing the show, the judge described it as involving "an element of cruelty and exploitation". Exactly right, Your Honour!

Now message boards are humming with discussion: "Is the show a form of exploitation? Should it be taken off our screens?"

Yes, it is a form of exploitation. No, it should not be taken off our screens. If stupid people who would rather be in a sick relationship than try living happy and alone are queuing up to be on the television, let production companies film it and we'll all watch it.

The trouble is, we are talking about people who see this as a chance to be on television, their fifteen minutes of fame, and then they can boast about it in the pub when they get home. 9 times out of 10 the problems dealt with on the Jeremy Kyle show are situations that people with half a brain cell would never have got themselves into in the first place. You would be surprised how many times ugly people with a personality that would make Hitler recoil in horror have slept together and spawned offspring. The number of times a condom has split, or the pill hasn't worked is astronomical. Honestly, there must be something wrong with those statistics - 90% of people who claim to have used contraception are getting pregnant...

You may think me patronising. The ones who are patronising are those who demand that these people be protected from themselves and the programme be banned. That is insinuating that they cannot think for themselves. OK, most of them can't, but who are we to judge?

DENTISTRY...

Why is it that we are in the 21st century and yet dentists are still allowed to practise using their mediaeval torture implements?

Surely to God there must be something out there that can make having a tooth filled/pulled actually painless. Isn't there? Isn't there? Purleeeeeeeeeeeease!!!!!!!

I only ask because I have recently had a tooth pulled and I thought the dentist was going to have to put his feet either side of my head in order to extract the little f*cker. Then I thought maybe he was going to wrench my entire lower jaw away from my face.

I decided to tell him that I had changed my mind, as obviously my tooth didn't want to leave my face anytime soon, but that is quite tricky when you have a mouth full of metal and a face full of cocaine.

"Won't be long now".

And I, like a fool, believed him.

On my way out of the surgery I nearly fell over. Aren't there any drugs they can give you that will make you feel happy to have had surgery, and not shaky and hysterical?

"I don't have to shign anyshing, do I? Becaushe I can't hold a pen..." I flobbed like the Elephant Man.

If I was a dog and I saw my dentist in the street, I would race over and bite him viciously in the leg. For a long time...

NEVERLAND - THE NEW GRACELAND

It's the story of the mimmenium, folks. A really, really famous person has died. Cue lots of confused and stupid people crying in the streets and the media clambering over each other to film them and get that soundbite.

My favourite soundbite is of the girl outside the hospital, hysterically crying: "I'm so confused, I don't know who to trust right now..."

Doesn't that sound like the reaction you might have when your entire family has been needlessly and suddenly murdered for no apparent reason? An earthquake survivor perhaps, or someone involved in a "terrorist outrage"?

Well, this girl has just heard that Michael Jackson is in hospital.

I think the world might be over reacting just a tad. We didn't know him, we didn't own him - well, some people owned his records. As a race we would all be lying if anyone said they didn't know one song by him that set their toes a'tapping. But does that give people the right to behave like their world has ended?

This is public grief on a scale unprecedented since Princess Diana's sudden death, and I found that distasteful and hypocritical also.

We must prepare ourselves for what crawls out of the woodwork in the coming months and years. Giant mountains of paperbacks purporting to tell the "truth" about life in the Michael Jackson camp by people who never got past the gates. Unfinished recordings by Jackson released by people claiming to know this is what he would have wanted - the mediocre hummings waiting to be turned into masterpieces that will now be forever lost to the mists of time. Tabloid interviews with the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker - or in Jacko's case: the surgeon, the bleacher, the vitamin-injector...

Once again, an unhappy man with too much power and a refusal to listen to advice dies an addict, virtually alone at the mercy of conniving "yes" men, quacks and leeches.

The real tragedy in all of this is that three innocent children were brought into this freak show when all else was failing and Jackson needed to look like a family man. Instead of passing on his Peter Pan philosophy of childhood being an endless wonderful dream, he has brought these children nothing but pain and confusion, which is, in the end, all Jackson seemed to know himself.

IF GOD WANTED US TO FLY, HE WOULD HAVE GIVEN US WINGS...

So yesterday a pilot actually died whilst physically flying a plane between Holland and New York. He actually died. Now, that is a very serious story. I hope they checked. He may have just been very, very stoned.

Knowing the press these days and their headlong chase for ratings, the pilot may just have had a headache. Nice to know the co-pilot actually earned his money though.

- What on earth did they do with him?

- "Get his foot off the pedal, get his hand off the steering column, we're on our way into the sea..."

- "I don't want to touch him, I've got a thing about dead bodies..."

- "This is your co-pilot speaking. And as we bank and dive at 700 miles an hour, on the left you can see - the reflections of your terrified faces in the water...Soon the stewards will be passing through the cabin with a range of luxury gift items and scratchcards - right, jam him into the trolley, we'll put him into the toilet..."

- BING BONG!!!

- "Stewardess, what did he just say?"

PANDEMIC ALERT

Today, we are officially on a Level 5 pandemic alert. The WHO organisation (run by Doctor Who himself, no less) has advised this. H1N1 is now extremely risky indeed.

All I want to know is: when do I go and buy a gun?

Do I have to wait until there are bodies in the streets? People with H1N1 clawing at my front door? "Let us in...please let us in...We won't sneeze, honest..."

BIG BLATHER

It has begun.

The tedious three month, brain-numbing experience of watching morons talk drivel and whinge and whine about their ridiculous, headlong chase for 15 minutes of fame. I would rather have my fingernails pulled out slowly, one by one while Hazel Blears and Anne Widdecombe duet to "Islands in the Stream". These non-entities who have absolutely nothing worth boasting about with their huge, sick egos and their tiny, miniscule talents, I have enough trouble avoiding these people in the pub without inviting them into my house every night at 9.00 to see who does what to whom, with what and for how long.

These are people I would not piss on if they were on fire, and the entire country is coerced into wasting money voting for their favourite, not realising of course that the entire programme is edited and rigged so that the person the Big Brother team want to win, well, wins. Big Brother makes headlines. It provides jobs for people in the media who would otherwise be unemployed because they cannot string two sentences together, but they can voice an opinion about the antics of some pea-brained freaks. The papers make money from these stories, magazines make money from these stories, the bookies make money, everyone's a winner!

And where do they get the audiences for the live broadcasts from? Are they paid lots of money and bussed in. or do they actually go there of their own free will?

I can feel my brain closing down, cell by cell, tissue by tissue. By the end of summer, I won't remember my own name, but that's ok, because I will know the winner of the most pointless waste of time in the entire world. Thank God guns are illegal in Britain...

Roll on the day I can afford to go to a desert island for three months every summer and talk to the trees...

To paraphrase a genius: 'Tis all sound and fury, signifying nothing.

MOST TEDIOUS

Ah, the darlings of Living TV: Yvette Fielding and Karl Beattie. A remarkable pair of human beings, whose deceptively simple idea to run around in the dark and film themselves doing it has earned them obscene amounts of cash. They want you to see dead people, they call it ghosthunting. I don't want to see people who are old enough to know better behaving like teenagers at a slumber party when their parents are away.

They trail around in the pitch darkness with a loud-mouthed so-called "historian" - someone who is not afraid of anyone or anything during the day and who would have no compunction ripping men's b*ll*cks off, but at night mysteriously turns into a screaming, apparently terrified woman - and a medium who can barely pick up any details of the living, never mind the dead.

However, the phrase that strikes the most dread and fear into my own heart is this one: "And now...on Living TV: the first night of Most Haunted Live!!!" This began as a 3 hour experiment as the gang trailed around a castle searching for ghosts, a la Scooby Doo. They even took a dog on one or two of their live investigations, going by the oh-so scientific principle that if it barked, there must be ghost in the place. Cue 3 hours of barking. Which viewers actually watched...

Since then it has evolved into a - sometimes - week-long endurance test of who can take the most: the ghost hunting team who blunder around for 3 hours until midnight every night in the pitch darkness, or the viewers at home, straining their retinas as they stare dry-eyed at the green and white broadcast for signs of death.

(Make up your own mind about that last sentence...)

The show thrives on its Interactive thread, in which moronic half-wits with barely a grasp on reality are encouraged to text in their psychic impressions, e-mail, or even fax in their psychic art. Sometimes I don't know whether to laugh or cry. The number of crazy people allowed to live freely in Britain without any sort of home help or permanent medication really is the most frightening aspect of the entire programme.

Is there anybody left in the country who is able to exercise any type of critical thinking at all? Even the skeptics that are employed to give the other side of the argument - that there is no "other side" - are so biased in their opinions that i am surprised that they can walk in a straight line. One of them, who shall remain nameless, is actually scared of the dark. How frickin' scientific.

Don't get me wrong. I love a good mystery. However, the only mystery here is how this show became so popular in the first place. It's like tuning into the potters' wheel for 3 hours, the longest intermission on Earth...

SHOULD STUPID PEOPLE BREED?

Of course, the answer is no.