India Sinks Pirate Mothership in Display of International Banginess

Alright, I was wrong. I was wrong, and the demon sunlight pouring through the window into my sleepy, hungover eyes is the brightest fucking thing in the whole universe. If I'm looking for a positive in this whole situation, other than the England win and the tanned retinas, it's that Jermain Defoe and Darren Bent proved once again that they are both completely incapable at international level. Oh, and Gabby Agbonlahor got a cap which means Nigeria and the Jocks can't have him, which is always a bonus, even if he never plays another game.

Elsewhere, Fabio Capello says he's delighted with his first year in charge, and who can blame him? The only really negative result was a 1 - 0 loss to France, but the finger for that can't really be pointed at him as most of the players were still under the impression they were playing for the ginger dickhead. Obviously Fabio hadn't gotten enough shouting in by that point, but he's now got that covered. Finally in terms of football news, Spurs have sacked their goalkeeping coach. An inevitability, really, seeing as he's managed in four short months to turn an £8m goalkeeper with a smattering of caps for the greatest footballing nation on earth into what can only be described as a flailing yellow octopus smothered in ghee.

In news not involving grown men in colourful shorts, the Indians have started shooting pirates. Given the apparent recent rise in incidents of piracy in the Indian ocean, operating largely out of what was once Somalia but is now a seething mass of war with borders shifting faster than a snake on a hot shovel, the Indians have apparently had enough and sent out a very large warship to blow them up. They, unsurprisingly, succeeded. Why India is having such great success while the patrolling UN vessels in the area are not shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone either - a UN mandate forbids them from firing on pirate vessels. Essentially, like in most conflicts into which they insist on sicking their blue-helmeted oar, the UN is there to watch. The Indians, however, are there to blow things up, which is an honourable and creditable new approach to the situation, which has escalated to the point of the BBC's map of piracy attacks descending into a sea of little red blobs.

That's about it from me, as I've got a busy day ahead, except for one last thing - I hate to comment on reality TV because it only fucking encourages them, but I've noticed a story about the new series of "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here" - one of the new contestants is Timmy Mallett. Timmy Mallett is not a celebrity, he's a bad punchline. I thought they were scraping the barrell with Carol Thatcher, but at least most of Britain's been waiting nearly 30 years to see a Thatcher eat dirt.

Goodnight.

Government Research Proves Children are Evil Little Shits

I think I'm losing my ability to get into the real meat of stories. I've never been one for real, proper journalism but I think I realised the problem was increasing when I came across 'Asian Officer Faces Assault Claim' and all I really took note of was just how much I'd probably have sex with the officer in question. Though in my defence, Parm Sandhu is quite the filly, as far as 44-year-old Chief Inspectors go. If it's between her and the bloke who played Burnside, I'm not going to kick her out of bed.

To avoid getting into the debate about why the media sees fit to point out her Asian-ness in a story that is otherwise completely devoid of relevance, I'm going to chalk the story up as another example of my shameful letchery and move on and shout at the police for something else - this time, the fact that according to new figures, only 49% of violent crimes in England and Wales have been solved. The government says this is because new rules say that officers cannot close cases as 'solved' just because no further action was taken, but I really don't see how that's good enough - someone, somewhere has still gotten away with punching someone in the face. You don't deserve a pat on the back just because it's easier to take the split lip than deal with nagging the police for three whole months just to get them to come and take a statement.

The shocking part is that this is just 49% of reported crime, rather than all crime. I know that the police can hardly be expected to act on crimes they don't know have taken place, but it does go some way to illustrating the size of the problem. Where I live being where I live, pretty much everyone I know - none of whom are anything close to a be-tracksuited 'hoodie youth' - has been assaulted by someone who is at least once. I have been in the unpleasant situation of seeing a young man I didn't know knee'd in the face by a 'hoody' at a bus stop in broad daylight for not giving up his skateboard. I sincerely doubt that was reported to the police, because it just isn't worth it. I don't mean to commit the internet blasphemy of trying to be 'edgy' and fully understand that part of being an adult is making your peace with the establishment, but they really cannot be bothered. I hope that this new way of not being able to fudge statistics will go some way to getting them to get something done instead of sitting on their arses and going home at five while the rest of the country turns into Lord of the Flies in tracksuit bottoms.

In related news, children's charity Barnardo's are throwing some sort of shitfit because half the people interviewed on a survey think that UK children are evil. That's because they are. They go on to say that the survey also said that about 54% of the adults questioned thought that British children were 'beginning to behave like animals', and that I have to disagree with - most animals don't kill for pleasure, but any teenager who owns more than three items of sportswear without actually playing a sport seems to be suddenly enveloped by an unstoppable bloodlust sated only by kicking a pensioner's tits off. I'm sorry, Barnardo's. I know you do good work and there are some cases out there where your ilk are truly needed, but you make your own position look rediculous when you try to defend the sort of feral evil roaming the British countryside in tracksuits and blindingly white trainers. It's really hard to see someone as misguided and in need of help and guidance while they're stabbing you in the kidneys for breathing in a disrespectful manner.

Still, let's not get too caught up in such seriousness. Let's look forward to our new hopeful horizons in the field of sport. That's the ones just barely visible behind the hulking, planet-eating behemoth of Germany in midweek, obviously, because they're quite clearly going to smash us into tiny pieces on Wednesday night. It's not that I don't think that England's best eleven couldn't beat Germany's best on a level playing field, because I do. It's because thanks to 27% injuries and 73% dubious cry-offs, what we're going to be putting out in a day's time is, apart from the intolerable John 'Uncharacteristic Mistake' Terry, a rag-tag bunch of children, has-beens, never-weres. Let's look at the treatment list: Steven Gerrard's out with a tweaked bollock, Frank Lampard's rib has snapped under the weight of his ego, Wayne Rooney's hair has started growing into his brain and Wes Brown has been diagnosed as terminally orange. On top of that, Rio Ferdinand is out with ugly, Joe Cole with smug, Emile Heskey has to stay at home 'cos his mum's not well and someone's got to feed the cat, Joe Hart isn't allowed out after 7 on a school night and I don't know what's wrong with Cashley Cole but I really, really hope it's a broken sense of self-worth. All we need is now is for David James to cry off with a dislocated face and the humiliation will be complete.

In their place, we've got the most useless bunch of shitkickers a world has ever seen outside the Montserrat second XI, and we're expecting them to go out and come back with another 5 - 1. Michael Mancienne, who's not kicked a Premiership ball in his life, which shouldn't be held against him because he's twelve, is included in the squad for no good reason, along with Jimmy Bullard, who's a Championship lumper at best, Joleon Lescott who's job must be to intimidate Miroslav Klose with his terrible noggin, and Jermain Defoe and Darren Bent, who for all their club form have proven themselves about as useful for England as taping your center halves to the goalposts. Throw in the fact Capello truly believes that Glen Johnson is the best right back in the land and you have a recipe for disaster. I'm actually quite glad I've got to be in the studio on wednesday night and won't get to see it - I'd only watch the whole thing through my fingers anyway.

In any case, I'm off. I've said too much already. What must you think of me?

Goodnight.

One Black President Doesn't Change the World

I surely can't be the only one to notice that the last few weeks have been absolute heaven for the types who make up for their considerable guilt at daring to be born white by patronisingly, and in the sort of voice usually reserved for talking to stupid children, pointing it out every time a minority does something new and exciting, like it came as something of a shock to them that a black man from Stevenage can drive quite well, or that there were a gang of white supremacists waiting with baited breath to tell the world how McClaren had fitted jet boosters to his car to defeat the superior Aryan driving skills of Kimi Raikonnen.

As a man who never thought that any given race was worse than any other at, well, racing, I didn't find Lewis Hamilton's Formula One World Championship win particularly historic. It's not as if there was ever a ban on black people racing Formula One cars and for years the likes of Hamilton had been yearning to get in and were being banned by Bernie Ecclestone somewhat confusingly marching up and down waving the British Bulldog around. Drivers from 14 different countries have won the title over the years. The title has at one time or another resided in 5 different continents, and we even let a Frenchman win it, four times. It's too global and too spread-out to be a racist sport - despite a few Spaniards in gorilla outfits - and race was never going to be an issue the minute a black driver with the quality and inclination to claim a race seat came along. Congratulations to Lewis on winning his title and making us all proud to feel British again, but there really wasn't anything truly historic in his being black and winning a Formula One title. No-one gave a toss what colour Juan Manuel Fangio was when he became the first South American to win the title. He was just good at driving, as is Lewis.

The US election is another area where people have gone completely overboard. Barack Obama ran as a Democratic candidate and swept through states which are either traditionally non-racist and Democrat-voting, or borderline states with a large black population. The talk of making history is even more insidious in this case because anywhere where attitudes would truly have to drastically change, they haven't. All the southern states as usual all voted for a conservative white bloke, the same way they've presumably voted since they chucked our lot out.

I know I should be caught up in the whole furore of 'hope and change' and perhaps being British and having lived through New Labour's breathy promises of things only getting better has jaded me against such supposedly historic talk, but I am finding it difficult to see how things have changed as much as people are making out - even if the traditionally progressive party and traditionally progressive states have elected a charismatic young black man President, they are the states I would have always expected to do so if the right candidate came along, and the states with the deep-rooted racist ties, the deep south, all voted for a man who's entire campaign was based around calling Obama a Muslim terrorist, and his Satan's Barbie-doll running mate who's idea of wholesome family entertainment is mowing down Caribou in an Apache Longbow.

The proof that nothing has truly changed is Obama's security budget, which must surely be more than the GDP of most central American states because of the sheer amount of maniacs still hiding in deepest Missisippi who still see the President-elect as a house black with ideas above his station. That's not making history. Talk to me about making history when the Republicans nominate Senator Snoop Dogg in 2012, on a joint platform with Queen Latifah.

Actually, I hope that never happens. I absolutely cannot stand that woman.

Goodnight.

The Room is Gently Spinning, But I Can Still See You're an Idiot

The trouble with home cooking is you have no-one else to blame when you poison yourself, especially if there's a lot of blame to go around. It's one thing to be slightly upset with yourself because that new idea for a sauce didn't turn out quite as well as you hoped, but believe me it's quite another to wake up the next day to find you've given yourself dysentery. Last night I dared to challenge the natural order of things by cooking Lancashire hotpot while having the sheer classless gall to not be from Manchester. The hotpot deities therefore felt I, as a lower life form, should be punished for my misdeeds and that is how I come to spend my Friday morning shivering, sweating and with my evening's entertainment in tatters, unable to go out lest I pebble-dash myself after one too many strenuous dance moves.

On the plus side, when my stomach isn't rolling over on itself like a manic butter-churn, the weakness and what can only be described as minor hallucinations beat most recreational drugs into a cocked hat. Honestly, I'm seeing so many movement trails and distorted words that if you, the casual drug user, happen to run out of your chemical of choice, you can eat some bad hotpot and trip the night away in between bouts of running back and forth from the toilet desperately hoping you won't shit yourself and have a thoroughly good evening for the price of some fancy beef stew a cheap pair of trousers.

But that's quite enough about my bowels, what about the news? Well, the British Association of Muslim Police has called for 'more Muslims in anti-terror units'. I don't see why. I thought that in this age of equality, it didn't matter which book the bloke snapping the cuffs on your wrists happens to follow, or whether or not he has a natty beard, and the only thing that really mattered was that he'd found your bomb and now you were going to prison. I always believed that it really shouldn't matter much to anyone whether your arresting officer is Saudi Arabian, your judge is Cantonese or your jury consists of eleven Cypriot transsexuals and a Bolivian goatherd, but apparently the BAMP (which is a phenomenally silly acronym, but I'm ill and I'm not typing out 'the British Association of Muslim Police' every time) say that it would be an 'invaluable head start' to have officers who have a 'religious, cultural or linguistic understanding' with suspects.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but these offenders' particular bent on religion focusses largely on blowing up everyone else's. Do we really want police officers that understand and identify with that mindset? Do we really need them? Is Superindendent Dal Badu, spokesman for NAMP, really any better at kicking in doors and slapping on cuffs than any white, black, brown or otherwise shaded police officer? What sort of outcry would there be if an argument was made that only white police officers should handle white supremacist suspects, because of 'greater cultural understanding'? Half of London would be on fire within the hour.

The police should not recognise culture. They should not recognise religion. They should recognise the law. The law doesn't care what colour you are or what books you like to read, it's there and you follow it, or some large men in flak vests will come and knee you in the face. That's just the way things are. I, being a good Jewish boy, have never gotten myself arrested, but if my rebellious bowels progress somehow into outright psychosis, I wouldn't expect I'd have the right to swan around doing precisely as I like because PC Ben-Tofer hasn't arrived yet and PCs Smith and N'Sungu don't have the delicate cultural understanding to know where the cuffs go.

In any case, that's all you're getting today. I need to go and explode violently all over the bathroom.

Goodnight.

Hypocricy, Or Why Jeremy Clarkson is Better than Russell Fucking Brand

BBC viewers seem to have gone sack mental at the moment. Any time anyone says something they don't like, they're now straight on the blower to BBC headquarters shouting about sackings and firings and rolling heads, all because the furore over Russell Brand and Jonathan Woss's phone call led to one of them resigning. Now Barbera Jaques from Milton Keynes thinks she can have Nigella Lawson sacked for showing too much leg while her husband was in the room.

Alright, so that didn't happen - as far as I know - but things are getting almost that silly. Today the BBC has been reporting that complaints about Jeremy Clarkson's joke about truck drivers murdering prostitutes should lead to his immediate sacking, birching and hanging from a tree. All I can think is that whoever filed these complaints must have really overdone the Ovaltine that day and got a little bit overexcited when the large lumpy man started telling jokes they didn't really like. Bollocks to them, I say.

But here comes the difficult part. "How", you may ask, "can you defend Jeremy Clarkson while condemning the actions of Russell Brand?". Which is a fair question. The answer, of course, is simple; I'm a hypocrite. I like Jeremy Clarkson and would be deeply unhappy if he was removed from BBC2, while I detest Russell Brand so much that I'd be in half a mind to support the return of Stalinism if it promised to get that insufferable troll doll off my television for a whole five minutes.

There is also the small matter of humour. What Clarkson said wasn't a particularly fantastic piece of humour, I'll admit, but it was at least worthy of a giggle. More so than a man telephoning a septegenarian to inform him what a good lay his granddaughter was, anyway. If Clarkson had been phoning up the families of murder victims to crack his jokes, I would perhaps see the point in condemning him, the same as if Russell Brand had simply made the joke in the studio rather than ringing people up to laugh openly about having sex with their granddaughter, I'd have dismissed it without comment in the same way I do all tediously 'kooky' people who are easily starved without the oxygen of attention. Clarkson has more talent than that. He is educated and verbose, and his boorish personality is set off by the fact he means no harm by it. When he says what he says, he is saying it for no reason other than to get a laugh; the adult equivalent of the class clown. Russell Brand said what he said merely to boast about his own supposed achievements. If Jeremy Clarkson did nothing but tell us about his best lap times, we'd all switch him off, but the whole point of Jeremy Clarkson is that he doesn't. He just acts like a boor on TV. It's not politically correct and it's likely not even his real opinion, but what it is is raucously funny. He pokes fun at nebulous groups of people with wildly over-the-top behaviour designed to make us smile, while Brand pokes fun at individuals purely to fuel his own enormous ego.

It's the difference between class clown and school bully. It's the difference between oafish buffoon and preening pretty-boy. Between jest and spite, joke and ego-stroke, stupid hair and... stupider hair. Anyone with half a modicum of intelligence knows that Jeremy Clarkson could not possibly be that profoundly oafish without actually turning into a Tory back-bencher, but spend five minutes watching Russell Brand insult people and you'll see that he means to be cruel with every jab. It's not being catty, it's not being an effeminate man-bitch for comic effect, it's just being a cunt to people.

BlandPoll: Election Coverage You Don't Care About

Republican 155 - 338 Democrat

04:54: So that's it, then. I can't say that Barack Obama is the best choice for my personal interests, but then again I can't say honestly that he isn't the best choice for America at this moment in time. I have a great distrust of his policies pertaining to Israel and the middle east, but have full faith in his ability to turn around the spiralling debts the US has dug itself into over the last 8 years of Republican rule. I'm not sure if it's the spectre of George W. Bush, the tiredness of McCain's 'straight shooter' schtick or the dead-eyed shark-grin of Sarah Palin, but the Republicans have lost a landslide here. People on every news report around the world are going crazy, and I'm going to bed. I hope anyone reading has enjoyed these updates, and enjoyed them more than the dry commentary supplied by everyone else.

Goodnight.

04:23: And so he does. McCain and Palin are now on stage, delivering their concession speech. I was going to be around until 6 this morning if things were going to be tight, but it looks like I'm going to get to bed earlier than expected tonight. Barack Obama is to be the next President of the United States of America.

04:22: McCain has at least taken his home state of Arizona. Now would be the time to graciously concede.

04:20: Obama also takes Florida, taking his total to 333. McCain must surely now come out and concede - there is absolutely no way he can win this thing, even if the projections for the powerful west coast states are all completely out of whack.

04:17: Obama takes Colorado, but it's not like any results matter from here on out - he already has double the electoral votes of John McCain with a now almost irrelevant number remaining. This has truly been a disaster for McCain, who must be looking back wondering exactly where it went wrong. Arguments will be made that Barack Obama has engineered a triumph of empty charisma over learned experience, but the fact is the Republicans should have learned from the mistakes of the Democrats in 2004, and realised that charisma wins votes.

04:06: What now for John McCain's campaign? It's not nailed on that he's lost - there could be a massive turnaround in uncompleted counts in many states that have been called for Obama - but any change in fortunes for him at this point seems unlikely. The man is 72, he would be 76 by the time 2012 rolls around and so he is unlikely to be the Republican to challenge the incumbent Barack Obama. Sarah Palin, too, is unlikely to be back because her value as a diverse candidate is vastly outweighed by her reputation as an insane beauty queen with a machine gun. The Republican party can now go one of two ways - return to it's recent core of conservative Christian values, which McCain played down in order to appeal to more centrist voters in a move which has clearly backfired spectacularly on the party, or press on with what McCain has tried to create, but be sure to remove the fundamentalist spectre of the Palin sort of Republican from public view come 2012.

04:00: I'm calling it, Barack Obama victory. He takes Virginia with around 98% of districts counted, and that means victory for the Democrats even if McCain does the impossible and overturns already-projected Obama victories in California, Washington, Hawaii and Oregon. McCain takes Idaho, but it's unlikely to be any sort of consolation prize. Democrats win, President Barack Obama is on the way. I expect McCain will be out within the half hour to concede the election.

03:57: The Virginia vote really must be going right to the wire given how long it's going on. McCain really needs to take the state, along with Florida, Indiana and North Carolina or he's dead in the water. I really expect him to concede if any of them fall to the Democrats, as it truly would doom his campaign.

03:53: There's now talk that McCain will soon emerge to speak to his supporters, and I'd be lying if I didn't say there's a chance he could concede. It might be less embarrassing to the party if he gives up now instead of seeing his credibility shattered in a landslide. On the other hand, the BBC is reporting that Republicans in Pennsylvania are keeping the faith until 100% of votes are counted.

03:49: I have to say I'm surprised. I thought like most people before the election that Obama would win, but I thought it would go to the wire. As it turns out, it looks like he's won the election almost without the help of California's massive 55 votes, and if he can win in Virginia and North Carolina, he could almost tie a bow around the Hollywood state and give it to McCain as a present and still comfortably take the Presidency. I hope all my doubts about Obama are misplaced and there is actually some depth to his promises of change, and I genuinely believe he wants to make things different, even if I don't agree with some of the things he likely wants to change. It looks like now we'll get to see what he was talking about.

03:46: Fox News of all places is now projecting an Obama win in Virginia, while other sources are also suggesting he's just barely ahead in extremely tight voting in North Carolina. If he takes both, McCain's campaign wouldn't just be over, it would be crushed. This could into an embarrassing landslide.

03:44: Somewhere in the mix I seem to have forgotten to mention that McCain is projected to take Nebraska. Oh well, he is. Sorry about that.

03:41: Some sources are now calling South Dakota for McCain. It's only 3 votes, just like it's northern brother, but as I've said before, McCain needs to win all of these low-scoring states to stand any chance of victory. He's now on 141.

03:38: There's now only 7 states that aren't at least counting - Alaska, Hawaii, California, Nevada, Idaho, Oregon and Washington. Get a move on, lads.

03:36: Should I consider Indiana a key state? It has 11 votes, and they have a result coming in soon, so I think I will, just so we have some excitement to keep me going. I also need to put the bins out, but I know as soon as I get up and do it all these remaining states are going to announce their results all at once.

03:33: Reuters is reporting that the Democrats in the Senate are going to fall short of their projected 60-seat super-majority, so not all is going entirely to plan. I'm sure they don't mind, however, as they head seemingly towards victory in all three major elections this evening.

03:31: There's a whole bunch of states with results expected in soon - North Carolina, Florida and Indiana must be gearing up to make their announcements. There's also Virginia, but I think we'll be waiting for their result until 2012.

03:28: McCain has taken North Dakota, upping the Republican total to 138. It's a small number of votes, but he's going to need to win every single state he has a chance in in order to win, so this is a little boost that keeps him in the race, for now.

03:24: The electoral college vs. popular vote debate is looking sure to rear it's head again, as McCain is less than 2% behind in the popular vote with 48.5% to Obama's 50.4%. With McCain likely to take more states than Obama from the remaining pool even if it doesn't secure him enough electoral college votes to win, it's an interesting situation - McCain could easily come out having won the popular vote but losing the election. American talk radio must already be sharpening it's tongues.

03:21: The Democrats are also holding strong leads in the Senate and House of Representatives races, at 52 - 36 and 143 - 87 respectively. Many Republicans are alledgedly already looking to these votes instead of the now-thought-lost Presidential race, but they seem unlikely to find any solace there, either.

03:14: If this is the way things are going to finish, I can't help but think that Sarah Palin may have torpedoed her own party's hopes. It may have been politically smart to go for a female Vice Presidential candidate to run against a black Presidential candidate, but Palin's ultra-right sensibilities have rubbed even her own party up the wrong way, and may have alienated voters in moderately Republican districts who identified with McCain's 'maverick', straight-shooting image, but were never going to back someone who's idea of entertainment is to fly over a forest in a helicopter firing a machine gun at game animals. Just like the Democrats and John Kerry four years ago, the losing party could well have hung themselves with bad candidate choices.

03:13: Where is that Virginia vote? We've been hanging on this for hours.

03:08: If any state, any state at all other than California and Hawaii sides with Obama, he wins. Unless it's Montana or South Dakota, in which case he'd need just one more. McCain really is hanging on by his fingertips now.

03:02: Obama has taken Iowa, who weren't even projecting partial results until they announced their result. Mopping up just one or two more other small states will likely push Obama past the post, regardless of the remaining key east coast states. Still no news from them, but McCain has taken Utah. It's unlikely to be a great comfort, as things are slipping away from him fast.

03:00: Virginia's 13 electoral college votes, plus Hawaii's 3, would push Obama past the winning post with California almost invariably voting Democrat. If Virginia goes to the Democrats, I'm calling it for Obama.

02:56: The Virginia result creeps ever closer, with approximately 75% of precincts now counted. With 13 electoral college votes, they can't quite decide everything on their own, but it's near as damnit. News coming in suggests McCain has taken Mississippi, taking him to 130, but he's going to need more.

02:54: The BBC have already subtlely called the election in favour of Obama by pointing out that Ohio has picked the winning candidate in every election since 1964. They've also announced that the Republicans have conceded the state.

02:50: Fun fact: Mathematically, if all results are correct, McCain now needs to win every remaining state except Democrat strongholds Hawaii and California to beat Obama to the winning post and take the election. On the other hand, Barack Obama need only garner 12 more electoral college votes from those same undecided states. That's either one battleground state or approximately two and a half smaller ones.

02:42: Something for McCain supporters to cling on to now as he finally breaks into three figures, with Republican stronghold Texas going as most predicted. That's 34 electoral college votes for McCain, but he really does need Florida, Virginia and North Carolina to stand any chance now. Also, even with those victories, any more losses in the central states could spell the end of his campaign.

02:41: The Virginia result can't be far away now. This one could decide it.

02:38: Barack Obama is now projected to win New Mexico. It's only 5 electoral votes, but it's taking away the vital points McCain needs to pick up from the low-vote-count, central states. I'd say he's now one big victory away from certain success.

02:33: Seven minutes later, I'm successfully drained, and McCain's won two states. Louisiana and West Virginia have sided with the Republican, but between them are only worth 14 votes - he needs Florida more than words could possibly express, and could need Virginia and North Carolina, too. If the Democrats take both, I'll be calling the 2008 US Presidential election for Obama.

02:26: Reports are coming in that Ohio has gone to the Democrats. That pretty much spells the end of John McCain's campaign, as it would now take a big switch in a major Democrat stronghold to earn him votes to beat Barack Obama to the winning post. Florida's still unannounced, but I'm going for a wee. I do hope there are no major historical events while I'm away.

02:14: To illustrate how important the remaining two east-coast swing states are, if Obama takes Florida he only needs to get Hawaii to vote Democrat - which they traditionally do - to pass the winning post barring a bizarre and unlikely swing by California. On the other hand, McCain needs to take Florida to stand any chance of matching Obama's total by the end of the election.It's a similar deal with Ohio, but Obama might need at least one other state as well as Hawaii to push him past the winning post if he takes Ohio but not Florida. It's more delicately poised than it looks, but not by much - this is make or break for McCain.

02:10: To go out on not too fragile a limb, we can assume at this point that Barack Obama has 230 guaranteed votes and John McCain has 110, factoring in California's likely vote for the Democrat and Texas' inevitable vote for the Republican. That and the winning post being 270 should give you some idea of the uphill battle being fought by the McCain/Palin campaign.

02:06: He's taken one of them, at least. Georgia has voted as predicted and given John McCain 15 more electoral college votes. It shows up the strangeness of this college system that a win in one state can be worth more than three others combined. The Republicans won't be complaining, though, as he's now less than 100 points behind for the first time in a while. He's now only 99 behind.

02:00: It's all off again, and now Barack Obama is within 100 votes of winning the 2008 US Presidential Election. He's taken New York and Rhode Island, as predicted, as well as Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Illinois. I expect he only really needs around 40 more votes from other states, given that I'd expect he's all but guaranteed to take California. McCain fights back by taking Kansas, Wyoming and North Dakota, but they're worth a measly 11 electoral college votes total. He needs to start winning big states, and maybe now needs to take all three big swing states to stay in the race.

01:54: Some news agencies are apparently calling Georgia for McCain. That would give the Republican 64 electoral college votes, and give him one of the key three I think he needs to win in order to give himself a decent run-in platform.

01:48: The last north-east stopout except Rhode Island. I really am sorry.

01:45: Partial results in for Ohio now, leaving New York as the only remaining north-east stop-out. If Ohio turns out to be as important as it has been in past elections, this could be key, but we still might not find out for a while which way it's gone - Florida's been on partial results for coming up to two hours.

01:43: They must have heard me. Partial results for Michigan now coming in, but nobody's yet sure which side it's gone to. At least they're trying.

01:39: No partial results, either, for the deciding state for the last two elections, the fine state of Ohio. Of the two big states left in the north-east, New York is almost certainly going for Obama, leaving Ohio the only key battleground in the north-east quarter, and they don't even have the decency to count faster. Also no partial results for Michigan, another big state close by.

01:32: The sweep begins. McCain has made ground up by taking Republican strongholds Arkansas and Alabama, a total of 15 votes, but we're still waiting on Florida, Georgia and Texas. If McCain can take two of those - and he probably will - he'll be doing OK. If he can take all three, he's right back in it. New York are still holding out on even partial results, so it seems Obama is staying on 103 for a while yet. I'd also completely forgotten Rhode Island. Sorry. They're holding out too.

01:26: Seems like things are calming down a bit over there. Now I can eat. Even so, with a number of traditionally Republican and big-scoring states declaring partial results, this could be McCain's chance to get back into it and set himself up with a decent total for the inevitable red sweep across the cheap middle states.

01:23: Another interesting fact to note - despite the huge gulf of electoral college votes, McCain is only 4% behind in the popular vote, with 47.5% to Obama's 51.7%. If the percentages for both measures stay roughly the same, we're going to hear the same awkward questions about the representative value of the electoral college as we heard last time out, only this time from the other side.

01:18: Partial results for the state of Texas are coming in. If the Lone Star State does as predicted and sides with McCain, the Republican will double his stake - the largest state by geographical area is also a huge state in the Electoral College, with 34 votes to cast. 34 votes that at this point would certainly make Mr. McCain's campaign look a great deal healthier.

01:15: BlandPoll, the only election coverage to include the words 'fuck', 'piss' and 'tits'. Intellectual election coverage from the internet.

01:12: It's all going tits-up for the Republicans so far in this election, they're losing everywhere: 103 - 34 in the Presidential election, 43 - 29 in the Senate vote, and 21 - 13 in the House of Representatives. If they've in any way managed to piss off their core voters in the central states, this could be something of a whitewash. Oh dear.

01:09: Full or partial results are in for everywhere along the east coast, all except New York. If Obama takes every state he's expected to down the eastern seaboard, he'll be more than halfway there, and will only need to pick up a smattering of central states to win, given that California, wielder of 55 precious electoral college votes, hasn't voted Republican since the age of the dinosaurs.

01:06: Everyone's favourite state you've never really heard of, New Jersey, goes to Obama, taking him past the treble-figures post and over a third of the way to winning the election. McCain's 'Straight Talk Air' plane has apparently landed and he's off to a party, but at the moment he might be more drinking to forget.

01:04: I can't even keep up with eating my sandwiches. Illinois has gone to Obama, and it looks like even though McCain took the small-potatoes prize of first into double figures, Obama might be the first into double.

01:02: Fucking hell, it's all kicking off now. Obama's torn into a huge eastern-seaboard fuelled lead, taking Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maryland, Delware and Washington D.C., while McCain has struck back with victories in the Republican heartlands of Tennessee and Oklahoma. Told you it would pick up.

00:59: An interesting fact to note is that 90% of the Twitter updates the BBC are mentioning are in support of Obama. This is probably a reflection of Obama's greater influence amongst young voters, but there's also a chance it's more reflective of his supposedly more intellectual, tech-savvy audience.

00:54: South Carolina goes to the Republicans, taking McCain into double figures and leaving Obama on 3. The early Democrat surge I was certain was going to appear is yet to take flight, but it's early days. They need to start picking up states, however, as the central states, while individually worth little, will likely become a valuable swathe of red as the night continues.

00:48: An important issue is resolved as I help myself to a cup of tea and a cheese sandwich. In other news, American news agencies are calling West Virginia for McCain. That wouldn't exactly go against predictions, but no confirmation has come through as yet. It's another small state, with 5 electoral college votes, though it would take McCain into double figures first. Not that that means anything.

00:37: Anybody reading my updates instead of any of the far more professional ones from, frankly any other proper news source, you're in luck, as I've just had a shedload of work dropped on me by a colleague, so it looks like I'm here for the duration. With it being 8-3 for the last 40 minutes, you might be starting to think this could be a slow crawl towards the key total of 270, but with many states carrying far more electoral college votes - California with 55, Texas with 34, for example - several key states, counted early, could decide this election quicker than you might expect.

00:30: Plenty of results expected in soon, with announcements from most of the eastern seaboard expected imminently, while polls are currently closing in West Virginia, North Carolina and Ohio, two key battlegrounds and the one state that gave both sides nightmares the last two times around. Hopefully we'll start to see the true pattern of the election emerging some time in the next hour, because I think I might have bitten off more than I can chew in promising to keep you updated all night.

00:26: The BBC's coverage is suggesting that, if the Democrats get the percentage of the Senate that it looks like they're heading for, they could pass any bill they like. That is, presumably, any bill they like that wouldn't lead to Pat Robertson steering a hurricane at them or, as the BBC suggests, Rush Limbaugh bursting into flames.

00:23: And they're off. The first results in the US Presidential election have started to come in, and at the moment John McCain is in the lead, though only because the one state he's taken is slightly larger than the one state Barack Obama has. Kentucky, land of bourbon and horses, is currently keeping the Republican ahead of his rival, who has Vermont, land of... something that isn't bourbon or horses. More results expected soon.

Nerds, Your Time is Now

There comes a time in every man's life when technology advances beyond what he grew up with to such an extent that the only way he can envisage anything being able to function in the frightening age which is his children's future is to imagine it all being held together by an over-class of nerds; deathly-pale protectors of all we hold dear, locking themselves in deadly combat with machines that only they know how to defeat, like The Terminator with bad skin.

My dad experienced this Nerd Singularity when I was about eight years old, back at what was probably the dawn of the computer age. He had been a roofer, and saw no place in his son's future for anyone who's only skill was physical labour. By 2010, all construction and repair work would be undertaken by machines, programmed and controlled by the aforementioned and all-powerful nerds. Buttons pressed in a control room would send a swarm of Star Trek-esque nanobots to swarm around what was once a raw pile of materials, turning it into a house, or a shed, or a car. Those salt-of-the-earth builders that would have once sat around drinking you out of house and home while one or two of them occasionally move a hammer from one side of the room to the other would be obsolete, or worse, turned into some sort of Soylent Green-esque paste to feed these slightly ominous building machines of the future.

So I reached for computers with great gusto - I learned everything I could, and perfected more techniques for illicitly viewing pixellated tits than I could possibly count. I spent a good portion of my early adolesence fixing mice and setting up web browsers for people for whom the computer age began some time the previous week. I was a whizz, a technological ace. I knew everything, and I had more porn than any other fourteen-year-old boy could possibly imagine. I was going to be part of this wonderful digital over-class, I was going to be rich and powerful, and spend my days lying under satin sheets with an array of beautiful women, reaching out from under the cashmere blankets to tap out the odd command on a backlit green keyboard.

But then it never happened. And that's a good thing, because once my forays into technology took me away from anything I could use to make easy money off of gullible teenagers, I was completely and utterly stumped. Programming eluded me, hard as I tried, presumably because as horribly socially inept as I am, I can actually sustain a conversation with a woman. Counter-Strike was a phenomenal amount of fun until it got taken over by 15-year-old boys with £50 mice and phenomenally stunted social skills. That was years ago, and I was starting to lose my grip on things then. Now, there are things coming out that frighten me. Roombas, for example, those little robot hoovers that drive themselves around and tidy the place up while you're away. They're terrifying. Even people just a few years younger than me probably think they're fantastic, that they'll never have to know the slap-faced tedium of the housework of their ancestors. I find the things horrifying, and can't get past the fact that one day, the little bastard is going to go all Skynet on us and trip me down the stairs. I, too, am fast approaching the Nerd Singularity, though I expect when I do finally cross over it will be so I can get my children to work out how to stop the video of the future flashing zeros forevermore.

A word of warning, however, before I finally slip across the threshold and find myself enveloped by the bafflement with this generation's technology that always embraces us in the end; don't go into it as a career. If you or your children are currently at the age where education starts to become more about choice than assemblies and P.E, don't think about choosing the path to being the latest genius whizz with all the latest technology. The sort of people that fall into this sort of job will do it naturally, and nothing you could possibly learn at school will prepare you for the sort of massive advancements that seem to come along every ten years or so, and by the time you finish your schooling in becoming the tip-top tech wizard you dreamed about a decade ago, you and your knowledge will be entirely obsolete, replaced by a new generation of whirring, bleeping technological abominations which given half a chance will kill you off for bio-fuel.

Try writing for people instead. The million robot monkeys haven't arrived yet.

Goodnight

If You're a Man Who 'Online Dates', You're the Worst Person in The World

I like Facebook, I really do. Alright, so it lets people bombard me with persistent requests that I hug them, bite them or rate them on some sort of crush-o-meter (sorry Dan, you just don't do it for me), and of course I could pick up the phone and actually call whoever it is I want to go for a swift pint with, but for the psuedo-antisocial among us who's refusal to organize parties is due to laziness rather than any deep-rooted dislike for people, it's a wonderful discovery. The sort of invention that means I'm only ever three clicks and a 'Select All' from a pint of beer. I love it.

The problem was that it just didn't really know what it was. There is a pale, nerdy and slightly podgy school of thought out there that suggests Facebook went downhill around the time that it opened its doors to everyone instead of just college students, and you needed to know your own college email and the college emails of all your friends before you could get an account and add them, the creators obviously not realising that everyone that knew all their friends by email address probably never went outside in the first place, and if he did he could just email all his friends inviting them to the pub without having to go through a slightly awkward and badly-coded middle-man.

The concept of a social networking site that didn't allow any sort of social networking outside your own pre-existing peer groups didn't really take off, for obvious reasons i.e. not even college students are that stupid. MySpace ate the proverbial lunch of Facebook for three or four years, at least as far as anyone can tell, largely because it allowed fourteen year old girls to wear big girls clothes, upload forty-eight million poorly-lit strangely-angled boob shots per day, overload the internet and give Chris Hansen a heart attack, while Facebook was only just starting to let you pretend to be a badly-drawn werewolf and annoy your friends. The irony of there probably now being an application that allows you to play a 'Jerk' who goes around 'annoying' in the same way the 'Werewolves' went around 'biting' is almost too delicious to avoid searching for, were it not for the fact there would be forty-four thousand people that thought the whole idea was hilarious and in no way even more tedious than the zombie werewolves via the inclusion of the dreaded meta-joke would be far too soul destroying for me to bear.

Yes, the age of the Facebook applications was upon us, and as soon as they pulled their finger out and released an API, there were suddenly thousands of them, and everyone loved every single one. I know, because everyone I know seemingly added every Facebook application on the internet, and every single one took it upon itself to invite me. The whole business has come full circle in that now MySpace has added an applications section in order to compete with Facebook, and is fighting a losing battle now that it's the latecomer rather than the former grand champ that has the most available applications for speeding up the process of leering at nubile young girls on the internet. A cursory search for 'rate' or 'dating' on Facebook's application directory reveals far too many results for me to bother sifting through, and serves only to prove that Facebook has, at last, found an identity, and one that has all but crushed all other social networking websites on the web; it's a boob-viewing machine. At least, that's what the guys know it as. The girls are largely under the impression that these applications can be used to find A Nice Man, which is frankly impossible as I am the nicest man on the internet and I'm a complete bastard.

But even though I share a sex with the grunting masses that have probably passed through the profile of every woman on the internet, touching themselves through their work trousers and secretly hoping they're the pretty one on the left, and even if I am an absolutely awful person with no redeeming features whatsoever, I can't help but feel slightly sorry for the hordes of women that really do think that these applications can be used for anything close to real dating, and not for the sort of grubby comment about your tits you're likely to get in your inbox as your only form of communication from the male side of the internet. I know all sorts of accusations could be bandied about pertaining to womens' unrealistic aspirations of romance and the belief that their very own Prince Charming is just a click of a mouse away, but surely they deserve better than constant sexual harrassment on the part of the average male dating site member, ergo a self-employed gas fitter who's view of female sexual behaviour is the fevered product of internet pornography and an overactive imagination.

The problem is, the internet seems to make people drunk. It drains away the inhibitions that stop us from acting like a soft-headed toddler with a hard-on in public and replaces it with the sort of complete personality failure that you only see in shark feeding frenzies and nightclubs at chucking-out time; slurring, neanderthal beings crashing around, pointing at women's chests, shouting loudly about being 'bangable' and generally being about as enjoyable and complimentary for the women in question as setting their tits on fire. If alcohol is the excuse then they're doing a national service as the minute they stop their constant heroic consumption we're all going to drown in a terrible Stella Artois flood engulfing Britain from stem to stern, but I sincerely doubt that it is, and attribute the entire thing to the sort of sheer bloody-minded obnoxiousness that can only flourish in the toxic environment of the internet.

My favourite of all these applications is still 'Hot, Cute or Okay', which I covered in a previous post referring to the rediculousness of not being able to rate someone 'ugly', and perhaps that's the reason these sort of people continue to be encouraged; if the worst someone can possibly say about you is that you're OK, or skip you, you can continue to shout 'OY OY' at them until they rate you at least 'Okay' just so you shut up and fuck off. My new favourite thing about the whole place, however is the fact all comments - not private messages, but that takes an extra click and these people have hormone-laced declarations of lust to hammer out, perhaps by slapping their semi-flaccid member off the keyboard - are out in the open. You are only ever one flick of the mouse away from the adolescent gibberings of the sort of men that don't have the brain power to type with one hand and fruitlessly masturbate with the other - has any woman, unafflicted by WKD and crap dance music, ever fallen for 'dam u look hot bbz'?

In any case, I'm not going to link you to it, you can find it yourself, but it's definitely worth it. You might even find me on there, and get to call me a name. Just for the comedy, though. As for actual dating, try a pub or something. Never, ever the internet.

Goodnight.

I Hope You Catch Fire

Noel Gallagher should shut his whiny little trap.

Now, I know there are many, many different occasions when such a phrase would come in hugely useful - every time Oasis decide to release a 'new' album, for example - but this time it's being used to describe my feelings towards his frankly ridiculous defence of Troll-doll 'media personality' (Read: Professional Cunt) Russell Brand after his disgusting and now infamous answering-machine prank played on ex-Fawlty Towers advert Andrew Sachs. 

Don't get me wrong, I'm as immature as they come. It barely takes a couple of beers on a friday or saturday night before farts and wee become the height of comedy again, and if I was the only one in the whole of Christendom to blow a raspberry every time Arsenal defender Gael Clichy slipped and fell to allow Tottenham to set up their equalizer, then I'm afraid that it falls to me to crown myself a King amongst men. It's just I, despite having other things to do to support myself and not getting to spend all day being paid a ridiculous amount of money to think up ways to be funny, just don't make it my business to go around upsetting septuagenarians.

Gallagher, however, has shown just how great the divide has grown between the entertainment and the audience, and not for the better. The Oasis guitarist and backing singer has come out in saying "It's so typical of the English in general - 10,000 people get outraged, but only five days after it happened. You know what? There's now a massive divide. Them and us". Yes Noel, there is a divide. We pay you, you entertain us. You seem to have forgotten which way around this relationship works, as if you should be granted the freedom to attack photographers and defend Jack Sparrow knock-offs with obnoxious haircuts without mockery or recourse, just because you and your equally gargoyle-faced brother have managed to fool everyone into buying your adolescent and barely-disguised attempts at remaking every Beatles song ever written. 

Still, given the presence alongside this one of a story about The Beatles having their work featured on an upcoming Guitar Hero game, perhaps Noel has finally gotten what he wants - he's been mentioned on the same page as McCartney and Ringo. Now maybe he can go back to touching himself over that instead of touching the rest of us with his pompous idea of celebrity.

Oh, and I do hope Russell Brand catches fire. Not because of any particular incident, although this was particularly heinous. I just don't like the odious little scrote.

Goodnight.

Bad Good Movies and Good Bad Movies

As we all know, there are bad movies and then there are BAD movies. There are bad movies that are bad in the sense Snoop Dogg would describe them, meaning - confusingly - good, and then there are films that are bad in the sense used by men who can't get away with wearing their hair in pigtails, in that they're not very good at all.

The truth is, all of us realise that, sometimes, films can be so bad, so atrociously and joyfully hopeless, that you can't help but be endeared. The sort of film we all think died a death in the late 80s but all secretly hope is still living on like one of it's own badly made-up creations. Shambling zombies with cornflakes stuck to their faces with PVA glue, still tormenting bad actresses in too much make-up and not many clothes. The sort of film we love precisely because, well, it's a little bit shit. Like The Wrestlemaniac, which I sat down and watched last night with the sort of childish, hand-clapping glee usually reserved for teenage girls watching High School Musical.

The film's premise is based around a film crew - one of whom looks like a knock-off version of the fat curly one from Lost - and a trio of wannabe pornstars - one of whom looks like a knock-off verson of Jennifer Esposito, which was a much more enticing prospect - having their van break down in the middle of an old Mexican ghost town inhabited solely by an insane masked wrestler played by current WWE star Rey Mysterio's dad. The insane lucha libre'er (is that even a word? - Ed) was apparently dumped in the town when he started killing people, and now whenever someone happens upon his little corner of the desert, he rips their faces off - actually poorly-made papier mache masks with the actor's real faces underneath, smeared with what looked like blackberry jam - and leaves them to die.

Anyway, after about ninety minutes of wonderfully predictable murder and mayhem - in which the fat Lost-alike is bodyslammed to death by a middle-aged wrestler jumping off an oil drum - the bemasked lunatic has killed them all and stolen their van, riding off to what we assume is some sort of major population center, and the only one who hadn't had her face ripped off was the fake Esposito, who ended up with a spike through her instead. Which was a shame, as the idea of Jennifer Esposito smeared with blackcurrant jam had been moving steadily up my favourite mental image charts for the previous hour and a half.

None of it was very good, but the charm of the entire film was that it was completely and utterly aware that it wasn't very good. While not exactly played for laughs, the entire thing was so completely campy from beginning to end that you really couldn't help but cheer for the masked mentalist every time he hoved into frame, tossing pornographers and giggling starlets in all directions and smothering them all in breakfast condiment. The gore was there and pretty much everyone ended up completely soaked in either their own blood or someone else's, but there was no real sinisterness to any of it, and everyone involved clearly understood the rediculousness of Rey Mysterio's dad pulling people's faces off in the desert, and just ran with it.

The best part is, however, the film was released in 2006, so it's only 2 years old. The B-movie is alive and well.

Contrast this to another film that I've been getting bombarded with lately, Saw V. Their entire advertising campaign - on the sides of buses, at least - centers around the fact that their original poster submission was banned for being too graphic. I don't know how many of you have seen any of the preceeding forty-eight hundred Saw films, but they have been described elsewhere as 'torture porn' and it is completely correct. As someone who can sit down and watch a wrestler kill porn stars for an hour and a half and laugh myself stupid, I genuinely cannot see the appeal of watching 'Man walks into a room, gets eviscerated, repeat' for the best part of what feels like about nine days.

It's the unrelenting gloom that gets to me. There is simply no entertainment other than the violence and pain being portrayed, and if I was going to make a film solely based around those elements, I'd save an awful lot of money by just running around a slaughterhouse with a camera punching Fresians. Is there even a plot? I've been totally thrown. I thought the bloke controlling that odd little puppet had died of cancer, and his assistant who used to play the dumb one in Becker - clearly a talented actress, as it has to be difficult to play the dumbest person in the room when your co-star is Ted Danson - had gotten her head shot to bits. I'm told I won't believe how it ends, but the only interest I have at all is in seeing what sort of rediculous deus ex machina they pull out to lead on to the inevitable and in fact already green-lit Saw VI.

I know that it seems slightly hypocritical of me to complain about the lack of realism involved in Saw's seemingly indiscoverable warehouse full of atrocities that is both big enough to house all these traps and yet completely undiscoverable - someone has to have built those things, right? - while singing the praises of a film about a mad wrestler pulling people's faces off, but the difference is that The Wrestlemaniac was clearly meant to be rediculous, whereas Saw aims to be so serious it makes your head want to explode. It doesn't want to make you jump and giggle, it just wants to make you feel sick and I genuinely cannot see the appeal behind it, and it's all a little bit Year of the Sex Olympics to me, sitting around watching torture-porn.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, just be glad you've never seen Leonard Rossiter in a dress.

Goodnight.

One More Thing...

Before I go, I thought I'd just add this, simply because it's a story so rediculous it just has to be commented on: Sheikh Muhammad al-Habadan, a Muslim cleric from Saudi Arabia, has called for women to be restricted to wearing a one-eyed-veil, as veils with two eyes visible 'encourage them to wear seductive make-up'. Before we consider al-Habadan's offer, consider this: why stop there? Surely there's more sinful flesh left to cover. Why not have them restricted to covering both eyes, and forced to see out of little holes like Victorian pinhole cameras?

Why not force them all to live in tiny concrete cells where blind guards can feed them breadsticks through a little keyhole, you collosal tit?

You have to wonder what the sort of people that come up with this kind of thing have to do all day, other than sit around thinking of new ways to hate. I suppose if you've dedicated yourself to a life where touching yourself for too long in the bathroom damns you to hell for all eternity, your only remaining pleasure is to find ways to ruin everyone else's fun.

Doesn't mean I don't want you to die in a chemical fire, though, you frothy-mouthed fundamentalist cock.

Goodnight.

Passing Comment

Well, fuck it. In case you were wondering where I've been during my relatively long absence from all things bloggingly self-indulgent - and I'm the first to admit you probably weren't - I've been away, writing. I know it's nothing and any old bastard can sit down and bang out some guff about the government that might pass for satire at a playschool party, but I like to show off and flounce around my own private corner of the internet telling all and sundry that I'm a writer, and as such, I occasionally go out and write things, so that's where I've been.

I'm back, however, because, like clockwork, just a few months after the previous world-ending disaster, once again a subject I've covered frequently has been brought to it's knees by the sheer brain-swelling insensibility of everyone involved. It's not the marvellously-named Credit Crunch, though the Lehman brothers have done a fantastic job of fucking everybody in the entire world over quite nicely, because it's Newcastle United. Forgive me if it looks like I'm reacting with glee to the entire black and white debacle, and please don't think it's because I'm anything so lowly as a Sunderland fan, but I can't help but laugh raucously to myself - and anyone else who will listen - every time I see a Newcastle fan interviewed on the telly. It's not because I enjoy the demise of the biggest club in the north east since Nottingham Forest went to the dogs, or because I feel it gives my club a league advantage in any way - it's simply because you're all such unadulterated idiots.

Mike Ashley might be a businessman with nothing but profit in mind and Dennis Wise might be a hideous little troll and of absolutely no use to anyone, but that doesn't make Kevin Keegan any less of a rediculous bottler, or Alan Shearer any less right in saying that he wouldn't touch the manager's job at Newcastle - even with a new board in place - with a barge pole. Keegan completely failed in both spells as manager to bring any real success to the club and has left under a cloud every job that he has ever taken the minute any sort of pressure shows up, and the Newcastle job has to be the most pressured job in football. I'd rather be the bloke in charge of pushing the big red 'NUKE' button if Medvedev wakes up with a headache one day and decides to obliterate Surrey than be in charge of the shambles by the Tyne, where if you don't win each game eighteen nil and have both your wingers backflipping up and down the pitch with the ball between their knees, you're out inside a month.

No wonder Shearer likes it in his nice warm studio, because you're all bloody mental. I heard a caller on Sky Sports' phone-in show about new manager Joe Kinnear being "just another member of the cockney Mafia" - he's from Dublin. How big do you people think London is? I heard another say that Londoners are all out to ruin your club because you don't want it threatening the dominance of the London teams - you weren't anyway. Not only is there no dominance to threaten - only eight times in the last forty years has the English title made it further south than Birmingham - but if there was truly a conspiracy to ruin all non-London clubs with a chance of taking silverware away from the capital, there are far more pressing targets than Newcastle. Maybe Ashley just wants to make sure a club finishes below Spurs this year, but you'll be pleased to know that's not working out so well for him.

The problem with Newcastle United, or, rather, the problem with the Newcastle United fans, is that they are under the impression that finishing second ten and eleven years ago somehow gives them the right to be up with the 'big four' and challenging for the Champions League, but the year before Newcastle's first 2nd-place finish, Blackburn Rovers won the league, and they aren't under the same sort of delusion. They finished second the year before, and Norwich bloody City finished third the year before that, and none of their fans are screaming from the rooftops demanding a free passage into Europe every year just because they were quite a good team once upon a time.

I understand the frustrations of the Newcastle fans, and I get that they think that their club deserves better, but they are going about it all wrong. The constant diet of change and upheaval means that the squad is hugely disjointed and unsettled as each manager ships out half the previous managers' players and brings in his own, and soon the dressing room is a hodge-podge of styles and signings, and with each new manager more than aware that if his team doesn't manage to beat 6 - 0 Man United away while all standing on their heads two weeks after taking over the fans will be calling for his head, it means everyone is perpetually nervous, and nobody plays to their best when they're nervous - it's why Robert Green shits himself and concedes four goals every time Fabio Capello looks at him. You need to sit back and let whoever comes in when this Nigerian/South African/Martian consortium takes over and give them a couple of seasons - they won't get success right away, even if it is 'King Kev' - you simply can't refloat a boat that's floundering as badly as Newcastle is that quickly.

Alan Curbishley would be a good choice, if he's allowed to sign his own players, simply because there's no better consolidation manager in the game - he'll get you 10th place from here until doomsday. Martin Jol would be another good pick for what he did for a club of similar stature in Tottenham, but I can't see him surviving his Spurs connections after the Ashley saga. Keegan would be a bad choice, because all of a sudden his 'messiah' appointment leads people to believe they're going to win the league by 50 points, and when they don't they will turn on the new owners as well; any new board is going to realise that the 'no man is bigger than the club' rule doesn't apply to Kevin Keegan, and the majority of fans on Tyneside are bigger fans of him than they are Newcastle United, so they would do well to keep him well away and pack him off back to his Scottish soccer circuses.

Still, whatever happens, I wish Newcastle's players all the best. I don't have any time for Ashley or Wise, because they have both been immensely stupid time and time again, but then I don't have time for the fans either - you've all been far too fucking obnoxious. If there were a way to keep your long-suffering team in the Premiership - where their talent means they deserve to be - and relegate you lot, I would. But your team can stay, so long as you still beat Spurs twice.

With billy-clubs.

Goodnight.

343 People Have Voted You Hideous

Do try to forgive me, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that a goodly chunk of my audience - seeing as they are, if they are reading this, either reading the cacophanied wailings of a slightly misanthropic person from the internet, or the book of the compiled misanthropic wailings of that person - have heard of the likes of 'Hot or Not' and various other 'click the hottie' websites. You're probably also aware of the thing I've noticed after browsing through a few, and that's that none of them have an 'ugly' button. The internet needs an ugly button.

Before this starts to seem like an aimless rant against the sort of people who dare to be fat and unclothed, let me explain - the world needs an ugly button, including me, because we need to know when we look disgusting and when we don't. I've been exploring a Facebook application called 'Hot, Cute or OK?", and the three options you are presented with are included in the title; you can either rank someone 'Hot', 'Cute' or 'OK', which sounds perfectly reasonable until it comes to rating people who aren't 'OK', because the program gives you points - which you need to send messages to people, etc - for voting, so people are encouraged to simply lump everyone they don't really fancy into the 'OK' bracket, which sort of dilutes the meaning of 'OK'.

The other two are fairly self-explanitory; if someone's hot, then rate them accordingly, and if they're just a little step down to being someone you'd just describe as 'cute', you click that box. That leaves 'OK' as a catch-all for anything from not really being their type to being something that they'd sooner rub half a dead dog on their face than look at again. You don't know if your collar was just unfashionably uneven in that particular photograph or if it looks to those who haven't met your charming personality as if a truck has backed over your head. I know that their argument in response is that nobody is going to keep coming back to a site that calls them ugly, but I feel a touch less inclined myself to return to a site that, for the crime of being slightly out of fashion, relegates me to the same bin of outright rejection as the sort of people who have three chins, two teeth and one eyebrow, and if I really am that ugly, I'd like to know so I can seek medical intervention instead of sitting around assuming the website is merely misguided.

Even if you forsake everyone else, I, personally, need an ugly button. Admittedly it would always be getting hammered by everyone because I'm hideous, but it would be nice to know. I am lumpy in all the wrong places and gangly in all the others, and would quickly fall to the bottom of whatever measure it is they use to measure people against each other: the comedy section, the giggles section - the section of the website where testosterone-drunk teenage boys send their friends to laugh and say "that's you, that is", when they're not running around the site bashing out "CORRR!" and frothing gently onto their keyboards with everything with tits and a pulse.

Goodight.

The Concept of Role Models is Essentially Bullshit

Bastards. I can't sleep and I'm having 'A Horse With No Name' blasted into my skull by an overenthusiastic house-sharer with a subwoofer, so I've been forced to resort to posting on the internet again.

Apparently, Amy Winehouse is headlining something called the 'Bestival', which is allegedly held somewhere on the Isle of Wight. It's a small festival, not one of the 'big five' of Glastonbury, Reading, T in the Park and heavy metal gatherings of Download and Ozzfest, but the BBC decided to knock out an entire article based solely on the fact that Amy Winehouse turned up on time and didn't make a terrible mess of herself. Why this is considered news, I really don't know.

Well, I say that, but I have a sneaking suspicion that I do. It's because they want her to collapse into a heroin-addled heap so they can tut over her and tell everyone what a terrible role model she is, and how she should be ashamed of setting a bad example. Setting a bad example? She's not a nun, she's a singer. Her job is to sing, not to inspire your children to join the Priesthood. She can perform from a flaming armchair while doing knife tricks and injecting heroin into her eyeballs provided she keeps the wavering to a minimum and it really shouldn't be important. Not everyone in the media has been put there to set a good example.

Take, for example, the hilariously hypocritical stance taken by the Daily Mirror over the last - I presume - five years. Back when I used to read the terrible red-top pap regularly, when 'The Osbournes' was the show to watch, The Mirror's fashion section was devoted, every single day, with neither waver nor fail, to pointing out how fat and ugly they thought Kelly Osbourne was. Every day. For about a year. Then I stopped buying it for about three years and thought that perhaps they'd long since gotten bored, until I had a copy delivered last week by mistake. Sure enough, ten or so pages in, there's a half-page editorial and a two-page spread on how much of a 'slapper' Kelly Osbourne was for slapping one of their reporters in a nightclub. Good on you, girl. If someone spent five years spitefully and publically calling me fat over and over again, I'd probably give them a good slap as well.

That's a good example for you, standing up for yourself, regardless of how the papers try to spin it. Smack a few more while you're at it, girl. I'll give you a big wet sloppy kiss if you get your mum to smack Piers fucking Morgan in his smug mouth with a tyre iron. Actually I'd give you a big wet sloppy kiss anyway, but that's a story for another post. Or not.

The problem is that the media plays to a strange corner of the human psyche that really, truly, deep down, wants to see others fail. Wants to see the rich and famous knocked off their perches. People felt Kelly Osbourne was undeserving of the money and fame that comes from having a famous father, and were willing to fork out their 30p a day, at least partially, to see her insulted and rideculed because it soothed their jealous egos. Those same people now wait with baited breath, listening out for the thunking rustle of newsprint on doormat to see if today will be the day Amy Winehouse gives up and chokes to death on her own hair, just so they could say "I told you so". They hide it and dress it up in concern over 'good role models', but what they really want is to see that the rich and famous can fail too, because it makes them feel that little bit better about themselves.

Give it up.

'Horse With No Name' is still going. I think I'm going insane.

Goodnight.

What Britain Needs is a Heavily-Armed Battle Queen

You know those ideas that seem hugely bad at first glance, but after a little while with the alternative, you start to think that it might not have been such a bad option after all? I've come across one of those today, and, surprisingly enough, it's the monarchy.

Yes I know they're an undemocratic, overstayed, gold-plated bunch of powdered-haired plutocrats in the rose-tinted, green-spectacled eyes of spiky fist-pumping student protest types, but at least they wouldn't faff about wasting £1.5m on having a giant metal spider terrify some Scousers. Democracy is all well and good, but you really cannot run a country on it for more than a few decades without everyone descending into the sort of tyranny of the masses that leads to everything being measured in incubators. There's a mental hospital near me that's being closed down next year, and there are absolutely zero plans to replace it, which means that my county will be one of the few in Britain without a dedicated mental care facility, but there haven't been any protests, because the council have been making big noises about how they're going to use the extra money to pay for some incubators.

This is why the country needs to be run by someone who can point out how stupid you're all being, while safely locked behind some massive marble gates protecting them from the flaming torches of the Think of the Children, yummy-mummy mob who would rather let everyone over eight years old starve to death rather than let little Jocasta go without her designer toenails. The country needs a ruler that can tell you, without fear of reprisal, to piss off.

Now, I don't mean to sound callous, but I've not been seeing a glut of dead children who could have been saved with the careful application of more incubators. We have enough. There is clearly an adequate amount of incubators. An abundance, even. What there isn't, any more, is anything else. A good friend of mine has been sent from pillar to post over the last few months in pursuit of the machine which will electrocute his badly broken leg back to life, in order that he might be able to hobble more than four feet at a time for the rest of his life. He rolled up to the local hospital which was booked to give him the treatment, on the date he'd had from them for the past five months, and left in a waiting room for six hours only to eventually be told that they didn't have the machine, because they'd sold it. Sold it to who? Someone else with a broken leg who's slightly quicker on the uptake, presumably. And has a few thousand pounds for the hospital to buy more chicken nuggets for the children's menu.

It's a hospital, not a fucking playpark. The Queen needs to come and tell them this while waving a big sceptre about. It'd certainly have more gravitas than a grey suit with a grey man in it bowing down to armies of yummy mummies in 4x4s that they don't even take out in the rain, demanding their child's sniffles be attended to while the rest of us poor unfortunates nurse our own suppurating wounds and bemoan the fact we weren't lucky enough to be five years old with an overprotective mother with a badly-dyed beehive and a voice like a Welsh miner.

Admittedly I hold out little hope that my idea is even remotely workable. Very few of them are.

Also, as a final aside, is it wrong of me to be slightly amused by the fact that there are now so many stabbings, shootings and other violence on Britain's streets that the murder of a 17-year-old boy is no longer reported as a tragedy, a horrific event or even an incident? It's become nothing more than a 'disturbance', i.e. an ambulance crew were disturbed from their dinner to go and scrape another stabbed teenager off the floor. It's getting to the point where they'll have to start stepping over the dead teenagers to get to the dying ones.

I think we should send the Queen onto some council estates with an elephant gun that targets anyone with rediculously white trainers. You know the sort - the kind you only ever see when crossing the street to avoid them, or from three millimeters as the tread is repeatedly stamped into your face.

Goodnight.

Hindsight Being 20/20 Depends Mostly on the Size of the Hangover

Bloody hell, I shouldn't have done that. Possibly the most underused but most sincerely meant phrases in the English language, usually after you've just fallen down a lift shaft or eaten a whole large pizza after spending the night bouncing from pub to pub getting drunk out of your mind on cider. I could ask you to judge by my obviously-alive state which one I've been up to this evening, but then I would have to gloss over the anecdote whereby me and my drinking companions inadvertently kept an entire pub staff up and waiting before we left, them slamming the doors unceremoniously behind us, glad to be shot of our alcohol-riddled half-carcasses.

Never, ever, even under the influence of eight pints of cider and a not inconsiderable amount of fortified wine, assume you can stomach an entire 12" chicken and jalapeno pizza. At least not without losing half your innards and gaining four chins. Especially when you've been made sick to your stomach by the undignified failure of the England team to do anything they remotely should have done against some postmen and an accountant pretending to be a football team, i.e. score a decent amount of goals.

We also have to contend with the fact that our fastest rising boxing star, Amir Khan, was knocked out in under a minute by a giant-headed Colombian man named Prescott.

I'm going to ignore all that, however, and the fact that half of Britain is once again under water, and concentrate on the real nub of the issue plaguing this once-great nation: There is not a single nightclub within twenty miles of my house, that knows what a guitar is. Hundreds of R'n'B nightclubs litter the streets hither and thither, but not a single one wants to play 'Paradise City', even for all the money I spend on drink in the average evening, which, as I discovered earlier, is infinitely considerable.

Are there really that many people going to the 'R'n'B' clubs? There seem to be more than there are people in my local area, and I can't truly believe that none of them seem to have twigged onto the fact that there is no bigger-drinking societal subgroup than the one which drinks to forget the reasons they identify with far too many Pink Floyd songs for comfort. Surely one of the fifty-six seperate venues between here and the nearest rock club has realised that they have a captive audience, should they stop trying to ram DJ Bling Daddy Dogg down everyone's throat? Surely one of them must realise that while they would be giving up their share of the blinding-white-trainered mob, there really is only so much Stella Artois they can drink without punching each other in the face and rolling out onto the pavement, and it's considerably less than those afflicted by the torturous agonies that only a leather jacket and a scraggly beard can possibly hide?

One that hopefully doesn't play a great deal of Ozzy Osbourne, not because I dislike the man's music, but because I can't enjoy it as much as I used to, seeing as I couldn't look the man in the eye while wanting to do such terrible things to his daughter.

Anyway, I would give you a news update or at least some links in this now rather long-winded ranting, but I've been on the lash and have also spent six of my last twenty-four hours with my hand jammed down my toilet thrashing away at all manner of horrors just to avoid the cost of calling out Dyno-Rod, so I hope you'll excuse me if I choose a time to disappear and get my head down for a bit. Like now.

Hopefully Lewis Hamilton can win the Formula One tomorow, but if British sport keeps going the way it's going this weekend, he'll probably spontaneously combust before he even gets in the fucking car.

Yes, I know Andy Murray won, but it's not like tennis is a real sport. I also have considerable difficulty seeing past his adolescent, England-hating, petty little oik of a personality.

Goodnight.

Keegan Resigns, Newcastle Burns, Owen in the Pub

So, the big news today is that Kevin Keegan has resigned as manager of Newcastle United, which probably means that owner Mike Ashley is likely getting his Mercedes overturned by an angry Geordie toddler as we speak, and that's only if he hasn't already been lynched by the local arm of the militant WRVS. Actually, the big news for me today is I've got a new coat and couldn't genuinely give two poos about Kevin Keegan's plight, but I expect it's a much bigger story to most of you than my choice of evening wear.

To be honest, it was always an inevitability that King Kev would eventually leave. He's notorious for throwing his toys out of the pram the minute things start going against him, and things were always going to be against him from the very off back in the north east. See, the problem with being hailed as a messiah by so many people is that it's incredibly hard to live up to those expectations, and even though the fans were still massively behind him and expecting him to win back to back Champions Leagues while walking unaided across the Tyne, he was never, ever Ashley's man and, let's face it, completely failed to live up to the hype with which he was reinstated.

We were told when 'King Kev' returned that, armed with Ashley's millions, Newcastle would crack the Premiership's, nay Europe's, 'entrenched big clubs'. He would bring trophies, medals and, most importantly, flair-filled, exciting football to St. James's. Shame, then, that all he really brought was some shitkickers and Claudio Cacapa. Oh, and the return of Joey Barton, who's return against Arsenal culminated in him getting his ankles kicked from under him by a tiny slip of a Frenchman who showed him up for the spiteful little bully he is. His 15-game ban cannot come soon enough.

What ultimately drove Keegan out, however, was his refusal to work alongside Dennis Wise. as Director of Football and general transfer meddler. Now, I'm fairly sure you could write what Dennis Wise knows about tactics and transfers in microdot on the top left corner of a very small postage stamp, so I can fully see why Keegan refused to work with the atrocious little oik, but that's the way football is going these days - Wise is Ashley's man and Keegan would always have to work under him or incur the wrath of the Chairman, and when he handed in his alleged him-or-me ultimatum to the board, he obviously overestimated the influence his popularity with the fans would have - Ashley quite clearly sided with Wise, and so Keegan is gone.

So where now for Newcastle United? Where now for Mike Ashley? He surely could never sit amongst the fans in the way that so endeared him to some of the Geordie faithful - they'd have him crucified upside-down on broken bits of folding seat by half time - and no replacement he could bring in from the board room could possibly placate the fans short of luring Jose Mourinho away from Inter Milan with promises of all the fish pie he can eat. If he does what many are already suspecting he will and appoints Dennis Wise, the fans will raize the place to the ground, such would be the hatred and feelings of betrayal around Newcastle. Keegan might not have been doing particularly well and the rest of football might have laughed at the Geordies for their almost religion-like reverence of a man with a bubble perm who has built a career on building teams that flatter to deceive, but he wasn't doing badly enough for the fans to understand why Ashley was meddling. By interfering in transfer policy so badly, he has made his own position almost completely untenable and I doubt he will last a year, taking a massive loss and going from a nobody to one of the most hated people in football in just over a year.

How the Newcastle fans must be yearning for the stable if insignificant Freddy Shepherd years.

While all this was going on, however, an almost identical situation was playing out a few hundred miles south, as Alan Curbishley was forced out of West Ham in almost identical circumstances. The chairman, eager to cut back on expenses, was displeased with Curbishley's spending in the transfer market and had begun to sell players from under his nose - George McCartney and Anton Ferdinand in the last week of the transfer window, just late enough for Curbishley to be unable to replace half of his defence, being the final straw.

I'm not sure if the 'Director of Football' at West Ham is as intolerable an oik as Dennis Wise, but he'll invariably be some sort of shit, and when I read this morning that the board were being advised to sack Curbishley by that runt Kia Joorbachian, orchestrator of the Carlos Tevez debacle, I knew that the former Charlton man had done the right thing in quitting - what is a 'Director of Football' anyway? A few years ago that would have been a mockingly Americanised description of a manager used to poke fun at our American cousins - now they have David Beckham and we have an utter bloody shambles.

Goodnight.