Its been a while

Back in business...

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Weekly Impaling Stick 2009

That's right, the stick is back in business!

Crazy Cat Lady - She has made several appearances in this blog thus far, so I see this as somewhat of an effort to find closure. If I don't have to mention her again it will be too soon. But her latest statement was a corker. She was discussing how she would react when her cats eventually died, and how she would feel. She has the funeral organized already. That's right, funeral. But the Cat's wouldn't be buried, oh no, they would be carbonised and crystallized. "I'm going to make a pair of earrings and a ring out of them when they die" she said. How lovely! Wow, Crazy cat lady, that's a lovely ring, where did you get that?" "Its my Cat."

Christmas Flu - This represents not just the sneezing, coughing and shitting fits you get every Christmas, but every cold and virus you get every time you are going on any kind of holiday - be it a bank holiday, Christmas, Easter or annual leave. You or your partner or someone in your office is bound to get something and gleefully pass it on to you. I somehow avoided it this year, which probably means I'm going to get a double dose when next I go on Holiday.

Lavish Proposal's - A few of my friends have got engaged recently and it seems to be a case of one-up-man-ship. It started with a nice silver ring with a diamond and a bended knee proposal in their favourite restaurant. This wasn't good enough for the 2nd friend. He went to Paris, took her up the Eiffel Tower on New Year's Eve and proposed to her amidst a back drop of fireworks as the clock struck 12 with a white gold ring and a diamond the size of my fist. The Gits! This makes everyone of us who hasn't popped the question yet look inadequate. What do we have to do to top that?
"If you would just peer out of the port side window my darling you will see I have arranged for the children of China to hold hands and light candles to spell out 'Will you Marry me?" Of course, I arranged all that before we took this shuttle to the moon to coincide with me presenting this Ring fashioned by St Valentine himself from platinum arrow heads which the King of the Cherubs donated and adorned with a diamond the size of a child's skull."

So hurry down the chimney tonight...

After several discussions over the festive period with certain family members, most of which were held over several pints of ale, we are yet to come to a conclusion with regards to one of life's eternal questions..."When and how should a child be made aware that Santa Claus doesn't exist?"

To bring you all up to date, several theories have been batted about so far and even some serious suggestions, believe it or not. A common age that keeps being brought up is 7. At 7 you have been at school for 2 years, have made the break out of reception and free playtime milk and are firmly on course to learning joined up writing, pasta art and your 9 times table, which lets face it are all the life skills you will need to cope with learning that Mr Claus isn't real. By the age of 7 you have lost that facade of innocence that allows children to repeat the rude word their Grandad said when he stubbed his toe and be found cute and adorable. It has been crushed out of you by the realisation that you have at the very least 10 more years of school, homework, detentions, playground politics, 'see me' comments and lumpy mashed potato before you can start making something of your life.

Equally, by the time the child gets to 8 or 9 shockingly, they are only 1 or 2 years away from going to High school. High school leads to Teenagers which as we all know, leads to Hoodies, weed and ASBO'S. 8 or 9 is also the age where you realise that belief in Ol'Kringle is inextricably linked with the quality and indeed quantity of the presents that you receive. At this age the more switched on kids have seen the episode of The Simpson's that deals with the existence of Santa Claus, or some such TV programme and have continued the pretence in order to make the most of his bounty. It wont be until they hit High School or a year before, where it becomes 'uncool' to believe in St Nick that they give up the charade and call you down.

So, we have established the optimum age to disclose the lie you have been telling your child for all of their short life. But hang on, there is a worry here, something we haven't taken into account. What if the child finds out before you tell it? His (for the sake of this argument, the child is male) whole life you have been telling him not to lie or cheat, whilst at the same time continuing to insult his intelligence year in year out at Christmas, Easter and every time one of his teeth falls out. Oh the irony!! No wonder we have bred a generation of Hooligans. Myself, I was told when I was 6 by my parents whilst I was still young enough for it to hurt, but not old enough to associate the realisation with my parents telling me lies every Christmas. Had I been older however, it would almost certainly have been different. If they had waited a couple more years before they either told me or I found out through the Box, there would have been hell to pay...

"So you are telling me, Mummy dearest, that in actual fact a fat old man wearing red pyjamas with a penchant for having small children sit on his knee pleading their case as to whether they have been a naughty boy or not, does not creep into our house either via the chimney or as smoke that passes through the letterbox and dish out the huge mounds of presents that you have actually been buying me because you feel guilty for lying to me my whole life? So I assume the fairy that builds castles out of my teeth in exchange for a 50 pence piece's and the giant bunny who shits Easter eggs all over the lawn every spring are out of the window as well?!?!?!?!" I would of course be livid, as would any child, so timing is crucial.

The next question is, how? How do you tell them? The best suggestion I have heard so far (apart from the ethnic cleansing of all make believe children's annual characters by some evil tyrant (if you want to indoctrinate your child further then make the bad guy something that will reflect on him in later life; Graham Norton, Gordon Brown and Jim Davidson for example, would ensure that you child grows up to be a Heterosexual, ethnically friendly Tory)) is 'The Car Accident'. The Reindeer are tired after a hard Christmas of flying, the global population of children is increasing and Rudolph is getting on a bit. Santa has dropped them off at home and is the designated driver for the annual Make Believe Christmas Party and has picked up his good friends, the Tooth fairy and Easter Bunny. On route, they are all having a sing song, with the Bunny providing some chocolate snacks and the tooth fairy paying for the red bull at the service station with a big stack of 50 pence pieces. From nowhere an 18 wheeler full of Petrol driven by the Bogeyman ploughs into Santa's car, killing the lot of them in a blazing inferno. This achieves two things - No more midnight calls to check under the bed and in the wardrobe for signs of the Bogeyman, as 'no one could have escaped that crash son' and most importantly in a kind of Ocean Finance style lie; it cancels out all of the little lies you told your son and replaces it with one big one. Here's hoping your son doesn't cotton on until he is old enough to realise the irony in this and think kindly of you for creating such a humorous story. Otherwise he is going to hate your guts. And rightly so.

I suppose one thing is fairly obvious in all of this. Belief in these characters is linked to innocence and naivety, a quality that soon disappears from our children these days to be replaced by Hood's and WkD drinks on a park bench. If you let it take its natural course, I assume the idea of a rabbit that not only defecates chocolate, but does it in egg form as well, would be the first to go, closely followed by the Tooth Fairies dental turrets. Santa will always be the last one to go, and whilst he is perhaps the strangest and possibly most disturbing idea of them all, his death will also see the death of your young, smiling happy child and will be the dawn and herald of the terrible teens.

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.