He's the most tip top - Top Cat...

I used to actually quite like our feline friends. Cat's, I've found tend to fall into two categories, those who spit and scratch at you and those who like to wrap themselves around your legs as you are trying to walk down stairs.

Crazy cat lady has killed it for me. If I never hear a story about her Cats again it will be too soon. Now, pictures like the above leave me in fits of giggles. After the 4Th morning in a row with nothing but endless, 'You'll never guess what Molly was up to last night, or Tilly has chewed through my Christmas tree wires again..." I have had enough. She seems to have spent huge amounts of money constantly buying new mobile chargers and Christmas tree lights because her cats have chewed through them. As they were pedigree cats (which I assume means they are even more stuck up and up their own arses than normal cats) and cost £600 each, and, I have heard her mention 3 new sets of lights plus 4 phone chargers, I estimate that with food, injections, insurance and toys / collars etc these cats cost her over £3,000 a year. THREE GRAND A YEAR!?!?!?!?!?!?! (Insert your own Pussy related joke here). If you want to spend £3k a year on something that will give you undying love, constant dependence and undying affection then have a baby. Or are you too socially inept, fat, ugly and jaded to find someone that is crazy enough to want to conceive a child with you in the same house that is covered with tiny cat Santa outfits and bits of chewed wire, where you can never charge your phone and have to put up with constant cat facts and miaow based ring tones?

So, in order to channel my anger into something useful - here are my 'top 5 ways to kill a cat'

(5) Impaling Stick - What kind of an Impaling Stick Aficionado would I be if I didn't make sure the Stick made an appearance in this list. The only difference being that It would be 3 meters high and I would rough up the side so there was maximum splinterage on impact. You could get about 30 on there if you tried hard enough...

(4) Psychology Matters - A vaguely remembered Psychology A-Level lesson in which Kittens were put on minimal surfaced plant pots in a bathtub full of water and kept constantly away to test the results of sleep deprivation. If the cat fell asleep it fell of its perch and drowned. One of the key hypothesis was - "Will cats learn from their fellows mistakes".

(3) Chicken - Put a cat in a basket. Take the basket to the side of the M1 motorway. Spin the basket around as fast as possible whilst placing bets with your Friends on how many lanes of busy rush hour traffic the cat will make it across when you suddenly sound a fog horn and open the basket...

(2) Herro? Chi-neese Tek-away? - Quite simply, tie the cat up to a bush outside a Chinese takeaway. Come back the next day. In the meantime order a Sweet and Sour Chicken. When you come back, if it has survived, take it to the next one. Have bests on how many it will last.

(1) Real Life Whack - attack - What it says on the tin. Plus you can take out more than one. I recommend a sledge hammer.

Of course, I genuinely do like cats. But I couldn't eat a whole one.

Weekly Impaling Stick (back to normal)

This week, after mixed reactions when I changed the format to people only, I am going back to general annoyances:

Christmas Ringtones: ARGHHHHHH!!!!!! When the revolution comes, Christmas Ring tones will be banned. Its the usual suspects...Remember Crazy Cat Lady from a few weeks back? She's got one. Jingle Bells, as sung by her bloody cats. All your Gay friends? Walking in the Air. The receptionist? Slade. Even normally sane and cultured people succumb to it and spend £3 downloading their favourite Christmas tune onto their phones and then attempting to foist it off onto Friends through bluetooth. NO! I have noticed a new trend this year as well. One that has shocked and appalled me to the core. You know the dial tone you get when you pick up your phone and dial a number? On their side, the person you are callings phone is belting out 'All I want for Christmas'. In your ear instead of the normal dial tone you get, all you can hear is a chorus of "When the snowman brings the snow". Those of you who spend their days ringing people will no doubt have heard this new phenomenon, where people aren't content for only those around them to hear their ring tone, they also need to inflict it on the person making the call. These people need shooting.

Bernard Madoff: He has just timed it wrong. Obviously in the eyes of the law, that's the least of his crimes, but in my eyes it was genius. Had we not been in recession and up to the eyeballs in doom and gloom over the constant direness of the current economic climate, then I think the general view regarding this once respected co founder of the NASDAQ would have been one of 'fair play'. The higher you are the harder you fall. He has managed to screw the vast majority of the worlds 'leading' financiers out of BILLIONS of pounds. Private Investors, Celebrities, Charities, Councils, Banks, Corporations and even Government's have fallen victim to his scheme. It has become officially the worlds biggest fraud. And it was a master stroke of genius. You just timed it wrong Bernard, that's why you are on the stick.

Reunions: Take That did it. Spice Girls did it and failed. Boyzone did it and failed. East 17 tried to do it and couldn't get over the fact that they were far to Chavy to do it. And now, glory amongst glories, S Club 7 are doing it. Sort of. They are now S-Club 3. Talk about jumping on the 'band'-wagon. Blue are talking about reforming, as are Stone Roses. We all know there is one that everyone is waiting for, the comeback to end all comebacks - Shawoddywoddy.

X-mas Greetings - Pass this on...

The world, apparently, is a better place since the Internet was conceived. You can now access your email, invest money into a fraudulent hedge fund, buy a useless USB cup warmer and sell your old football stickers at any time of the day or night from your laptop. You can look up the winner of the 1972 World Darts Championship, learn the fate of the last fishing trawler to be lost in the Bermuda Triangle or find out who had an international hit single with 'Hold Me Now' in 1983 (It was Thompson Twins) - all surreptitiously from your mobile phone under the table at the Sunday Evening Pub Quiz. There are millions upon millions of educational sites and the internet doesn’t sleep, drink cups of tea, suffer from stress, demand pay increases or take industrial action because of longer working hours, so teachers could soon be on their way out.

So, what could possibly be wrong with such a wondrous invention? One word. Christmas.

That’s right, as if the festive holiday hadn’t become commercialised enough, we now have 'E-Cards'. The polo neck wearing clean air yoghurt knitting mob have said "Enough, no more trees will be cut down in order for me to write Christmas Cards and letters to my loved ones, no longer will our leafy brethren suffer at the hands of a worn out tradition! Christmas has become too commercialised and impersonal anyway!" They drew together as a collective consciousness and came up with a way to blanket spam their entire contacts list with tacky, obnoxious festive greetings cards. I am receiving up to 3 or 4 a day, and it seems in their haste to save a tree, the only made 3 versions of said card, Jolly Santa, Frolicking Reindeer and Sparkling Christmas Tree. You know the ones I mean. They say 'Xmas' instead of Christmas. They utilise a similar technology to those musical birthday cards that the clean air mob haven’t gotten the mitts on yet, to belt out a horribly scratchy 'We wish you a merry Christmas' in the time honoured tradition.

Yet, as bad as they are, its what they herald that is the real crime this Christmas. You know that once you receive that first E-Xmas Card that you are almost certainly about to receive the Christmas period chain letters.

I am sure that like me, you will no doubt have received several of those chain letter emails this year. They fall into 2 categories, the 'money scam' or the 'quick pass this on'. Either a rich old man in Botswana died and his lawyer, unable to locate any next of kin, has selected your good self to act as a broker in order to transfer funds, which you will be able to keep 20% of. Or a poor little boy in eastern Mongolia who was born with 5 extra lips and feet instead of ears needs to have corrective surgery in order to stop the people of his village sacrificing all their animals to him in the hope that he can make the rains come back. Then there’s the 'quick pass it on' style. They are perhaps the most annoying. It will be a series of pictures of various baby animals, all of which would look far more appetising on a plate with some chips and gravy, followed by a message saying something like, 'If you pass this on to 10 people you will get a surprise'. The surprise is that the next time you email these 10 people to see if anyone wants a drink, you find that you are on their ignore list because they were sick of receiving that bleedin' spam off of you. Or it's the other way around, 'If you don't send on this chain letter that was started by Winston Churchill in 1945 in celebration of the end of the war, but was actually carried in secret throughout the war by children who were members of the French Resistance that were captured and sent to POW camps where they had to keep the letter in their arse for 5 years before being rescued and presented to old Churchill, then you will be murdered in your sleep by the ghost of these children...'

There is always some berk who compiles a list of these and sends them out to everyone saying - "Remember these funny ones..." Like you weren’t annoyed the first time they went around. The one that gets me every year is the one that goes, "A recent scientific study found that men with small penises are highly likely to have read the whole of the above with their hand on the mouse...To late to take it off now" It just got you didn’t it?

The internet was created by the American Military as a way of connecting all their bases. It has evolved in something much bigger. I don't know which I would prefer, an entity that would allow every Nuke in the Americans' ballistic cupboard to be synchronised and fired at Russia in one swoop, or something that facilitates the sending of E-Cards.

Christmas is cancelled due to technical difficulties...

Is it only me that is full of nothing but absolutle respect, admiration and something close to awe, for the Jail Bird who set up Dorset's 'Lapland' this christmas?

In a culture of get rich quick schemes, Americanised 'where there's a blame there's a claim' and constant boundary pushing by Marketing companies targeting Kids and Old people, has this chap really done anything wrong? It could be argued that what he has done is merely an extension and a result of this society. It probably has nothing to do with him being a hardened criminal. Maybe.

So what exactly has he done? Put aside the righteous fury of parents who were fooled by the marketing, put aside trading standards' shutting down of the park, forget about the ethical and moral issues of the whole thing, THIS IS ABSOLUTLY HILARIOUS. It is funny on so many levels. First, lets look at what 'Englands Lapland' actually entailed. Described on the website as:

'An enticing and magical Christmas Wonderland, home to Santa Claus and all his little helpers, the English lapland has everything you need to make this Christmas extra special. Santa himself will be on hand to give out presents, make your way to his mystic grotto through our magic tunnel of lights where you will be surrounded by Santa's friends. For the parents there is a bustling Christmas market where you can get some last minute shopping done and there is fun for all on the Christmas Ice Rink."

I love how bad it was. We have all seen the pictures. In essence it is a muddy carpark in Dorset. Even the sign at the entrance is bad - It is a traffic cone, with a bit of card taped to it that says "Lap Land this way --->"When you enter, the first thing you see is a badly painted Christmas Nativety scene nailed to a fence. Santa's grotto was a shed and a fat man. The tunnel of lights was, literally a tree with fairy lights on it. The bustling Christmas Market was a 12 x 12 Marquee with some trestle tables and tinsel and the Ice Rink was out of order.

The owner had paid some agency staff £5 an hour to dress in poorly fitting elf, reindeer and polar bear costumes and built sheds which housed chained up huskies and reindeer. The best part for me was the line on the website that read "Look how cold and real the snow looks". As you can see from the picture, unless snow in Lapland is actually mud in texture and colour then this is really pushing the boundaries of 'poetic license'.

I suppose the best thing to come out of this is that in defiance of the great long held British tradition of not complaining and stiff upper lipness, some parents actually ended up punching some of the staff. As if their crying kids beautiful vision of Christmas wasn't destroyed enough by the state of the Christmas Wonderland they were promised, they then had to witness Daddy punching Santa Claus in the face before running amok amongst his little helpers. Merry Christmas.

Does not compute...

Each year billions upon billions of yen, dollars and pounds are spent on the development of robotics and the advancement of A.I (artificial intelligence). Japanese scientists, working 95 hour weeks, living in their white coats and going months without seeing the light of day have bent their incredible talents towards producing the most advanced, intelligent and cognitive machines in the world. Thus far, it seems that the crowning achievement to come out of the worlds greatest minds is the little black box that wheels around your front room and hoovers up by itself. From what I can tell its basically a hoover, with parking sensors. Brilliant. life changing.

STOP THE PRESS!!!!

A Japanese man in Canada has built the worlds first fully operational female woman replacement robot. In his basement. From spare parts. She has been built without the aid of huge governmental backing in fact Le Trung, the hapless inventor sold his house and car to pay for her - in the process nearly killing himself through a heart attack at the age of 33. And his motivation for producing this female robot? He was too busy to find love. Of course you were too busy, you've spent 5 years of your life holed up in a basement, making a robot!!!! Perhaps if you hadn't have started the robot, you could have had time to socialise.

Irony aside, the robot is potentially the most advanced bit of robotics the scientific community have come across, which in itself is impressive, when you think how limited his resources were. 'Aiko' as she is known, can recognise and respond to over 13,000 Japanese and English spoken sentences. She can perform household duties such as cleaning and washing. She can read out loud from written instructions and books. She can do your accounts. And importantly for a small, rather strange bespeckled scientist who, as a child genius at 8 years old built his first robot then spent the vast majority of his adult life in a small dark basement developing 'Aiko' at the expense of any kind of 'human' social interaction - she could potentially be developed into a machine capable of initiating and responding to sexual advances and indeed, actually getting down and dirty complete with audio and physical responses. She is 99% of the way there at the moment as any sexual advancement made to 'Aiko' is answered with a curt no and a open palmed slap. No wonder he is investing so much time and effort into it. Rather strangely, as you will see from the picture, 'Aiko' has the appearance of a 12 year old girl.

Eat my shorts...

A man in Australia was recently convicted of possessing child pornography and indecent photos of children. He was fined, sentenced to a jail term and put on a 'good behavior' register. All well and good, and if anything a rather lax punishment for what is a sadly more frequent and sickening crime. HOWEVER the pictures he possessed were of Simpson's characters Bart, Lisa and Maggie.

The Judge in this case had to decide whether Cartoon Characters in essence classed as people. He did. Therefore, this chap has had his life ruined for having what some would class as 'funny' cartoon pictures. I am not defending showing images of children in this nature, but come on - I've been sent joke emails with worse content on than that. It was a misjudgement keeping them on his computer and for all we know he was sent them as a joke email. You can type in 'Simpson's sex' to Google and the first 50 images are (A) Explicit, openly sexual and degrading and (B) Attached to joke / comedy sites.

I tell you what though, somebody had better ring the RSPCA about the Simpson's too. The Itchy and Scatchy show violates every single covenant of the cruelty to animals act. Surely there is a case to sue the creators - Cartoon Animals are real animals too!!!

Weekly Impaling Stick

A change this week - as people have suggested that instead of any annoyance I focus primarily on annoying people So here goes:

Jo Brand - That's right the fat, humorless banshee who graces our Television Sets a couple of times a month either on Live at the Apollo re-runs or QI. Why not do something a bit different this time Jo? Tell another man joke or poke fun at being middle aged and overweight. She has the ability to turn an otherwise fantastic programme (QI) in to a farce.

Stephen Fry - "Why are Male Black Widow spiders particularly careful around their pregnant spouses?"
Jo Brand - " Why don't men have mid-life crises? They stay stuck in adolescence."
Stephen Fry - "OK...ha...and what about the Black Widow Spider?"
Jo Brand - "You know what, I know Ive become middle aged because..."
Stephen Fry -"Yes if we can stick to the question Jo..."
Jo Brand, realising she has no talent or intelligence and cant answer the question, sticks to what she knows - "Why do black widow spiders kill their males after mating? To stop the snoring before it starts. "
Stephen Fry - "Excellent 10 points"

I wouldn't mind but with the advent of Dave TV, Jo now appears on our screens all to regularly with her routine of sexist, irrelevant and boring gags.

Terry Wogan - The Eurovision Song Contest has been in steady decline in 'the naughties'. The general standard at Eurovsion was always bad, but Terry's constant sarcastic and deprecating commentary made for great watching. The last 10 years have seen a rise in the political vote, to the point where Terry and his regular audience could accurately account for around 60 points for 3 or 4 ex eastern block and certain western European countries. England, always a nation with mixed fans around the world regularly manages to receive next to nil poits, with even the 'home nations' passing us over in favour of Finish Rock groups or Israeli Transvestites. Perhaps the worst result to come from the War in Iraq is the effect it has had on our points in the Eurovision. The whole show has become a political minefield, and those countries that do not make a politically motivated vote instead vote for the gimmick. And Terry kept the whole thing together. He was the rock over witch waves of Europop and rock crashed, our guide through the shambolic contest of European popularity. And now he's gone, Eurovision can expect nil poits in terms of viewers.

Lewis Hamilton - I can forgive him his pop star girlfriend and multi million pound salary. I can forgive him his jet set lifestyle, permatan and sports cars. I can forgive him his sponsorship deals and tax free lifestyle in Switzerland. What I can't forgive is the fact that he has ruined the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award, because it isn't in doubt now. The one redeeming feature is that he will stop that inspiring, hugely entertaining pinnacle of entertainment that is Andy Murray from winning....snore.