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.

There's Nothing More Glamorous than Being Shot in the Face with a Diamond-Tipped Diamond

I hate Watchdogs. Not the vicious rottweilers that the local tracksuited nutcase keeps in his back garden in case of, well, the urge to brutally murder someone - though they're pretty hateful as well - I mean the goody-goody wanky crusaders against TV violence that turn up every now and then and try to take away a perfectly good tale about vicious and brutal murder because it might 'glamourise violence'. This time they're having a pop at the Angelina Jolie flick "Wanted", for having her posing about with a great big gun in her hand on the poster - not suitable for children, they say. Might glamourise violence, they say.

Piss off, I say.

Violence is glamorous. It just is. There is simply no way you can portray a gun-toting sportscar-crashing society of secret agents taking on international terrorism (or whatever it was) as the least bit mundane. Not even if you cast Dawn French as the lead. Sure, you could go so far as to replace all the assault rifles with child-friendly paintball guns and make the entire thing about as interesting as a 5-miles-an-hour loop of the M25 in a car full of screaming children, but then that would simply prove my point about proper guns being exciting. The thing is, I fully admit that there is no logical reason for why we think like that, which is why these terrible 'watchdogs' can usually leap all over us. When they ask us why we like films with guns and death and killing, we sort of just stare at them, wide-eyed and confused that there could be someone out there that doesn't fall off their chair at the idea of shooting someone's eyeglasses off with an UZI submachinegun all while firing off acerbic quips like a gatling gun filled with little reformed pieces of Jimmy Carr. They walk all over us by calling us neanderthal, primal, primitive, and we have no responses because, well, that's precisely what it is.

There is something deep in the psyches of all of us that derives a massive amount of pleasure from seeing violence in which the guys on 'our side' win. It's a simple chemical release, our psychotropic replacement for getting up and going to war every day with the next tribe over. The sort of thing where if we didn't have it to stimulate that sort of release, we'd have strung the neighbours up to a tree and be whipping their testicles with a length of flex within about three weeks. In fact, the reality of the situation is exactly the opposite to what these groups claim; TV violence doesn't provoke real violence, TV violence prevents it, and most people - i.e. those not confined to padded cells in padded hospitals - are more than capable of distinguishing between TV violence and real violence. I love violent movies, and love violent video games more, but hate real violence. I will spend my free time running around digital starbases blowing the green alien shit out of Invaders from Zarg or the beaches of Normandy flamethrowering computer-generated Nazis, but refuse to even look at 'gore sites' where real people have been killed. To suggest that I or anyone else with a full set of mental capabilities cannot distinguish between the two is comically disingenuous.

Parents, you shouldn't care if 'Wanted' or it's ilk glamourise firearms - firearms do a fantastic job of glamorising themselves. The news glamourises firearms. War glamourises firearms, even if the war itself isn't glamorous. It's the tribal instinct in us all that makes us love guns, and would make us love something else even more if it came along and was better than guns. How many of you ran around in school playgrounds playing 'Army', waving machine-gun sticks about above your head, before the PlayStation 3 or the DVD player was but a twinkle in a Japanese businessman's eye? If any of you didn't, then you're probably some sort of lizard.

Don't shield your children away from these things, and especially don't get the government to do it for you - it won't work, and your kids will resent you for it. There will always be that one parent, the parent that doesn't mind when their kid smokes marijuana because they want them to 'find out for themselves' and explained 'the birds and the bees' with the aid of Google and the words 'fuck' and 'video', who will let their child have the latest, greatest, murderously deviant game or film, and if you go so far as to stop your children seeing them, they will not only resent you, but lie to you as well, and if your child is going to be away from you, it's better that you know where they are and precisely what they're doing than risk them being somewhere completely different because they felt the need to lie to you about going over to Timmy's to play Death Crash Cancer Rifles XIV.

Be sensible, and shut up.

Goodnight.