Seecuhritaaahy

Everyone is so paranoid about security these days. I have to admit I have become just as paranoid about it too. Having had my credit card details stolen twice, but fortunately the fraudulent transactions have been intercepted by the bank. It's no wonder I'm a little suspicious about the security of my personal details. So as a precaution I now use the same strong password for every account I have whether online or otherwise.

It's really simple to remember: ●●●●●●●●

It's just 8 black dots, easy.

Guns don't kill people, tourists do.

I watched the film Hostel 2 last night. In the same vein as the first, the film depicts people being lured into a foreign Hostel, where they are captured and taken to a mass torture facility, where rich people pay to torture and kill them, fulfilling their own psychotic and often sexual fantasies. A nice sunday afternoon family film for sure. In the second part the film not only follows the victims but also 2 men 'murder tourists' if you will, prepared to partake in the act of torture and murder in the hope of changing their own life for the better.

I was watching the film thinking, I bet this really happens somewhere. What are the great taboos of civilised society? Illegal sex is one of them, sex with children, but allegedly (I say allegedly, it's a well documented fact) 'sex tourists' can go to Thailand or Cambodia to indulge in such a truly evil and mentally retarded practice. Drugs are another taboo in civilised society, but there are plenty of places in the world where anyone can go to indulge in whatever they like.

So is it really so inconceivable that a place exists that people, with enough money and no morals, can go to torture and murder innocent people?

I believe this is not too far from the truth, it happens somewhere. There are enough impoverished people in the world that would be easy targets, living in slums, with no family, no one to care about or protect them. These people could be easy targets, viewed as sub-human by some Western cultures no doubt. Perhaps these poor people's lives would be thought of as having less value than someone from a rich society who has the means and will to sustain their own life and develop it. So I am under no doubt as to the fact that there would be rich pickings around the world for any organisation wanting to set up such an operation.

It is possible, but is it conceivable?

I think it is. Killing someone is the greatist taboo of the human race. No matter how much of it is around, in wars, in the national or local news. The fact remains that humans, in general, know that killing another human is a bad thing. It is held as the highest of all crimes in Law: Murder. So if there is a rule, a moral, a code or a law, we as flawed and perverted creatures will seek to ignore it and want to do it anyway. For these reasons I fully believe that the greed of our species will seek to exploit this taboo for it's own gratification and proliferation.

So what would it be like to kill someone?

I find it a matter of some intrigue. Now I must state here that I'm not going to rush out and slice some poor bastard up, just to indulge that. But what is it like? The moment when such a complex organism, capable of thought and reasoning and self awareness just dies. Imagine it, something that lived, that had thoughts and memories and opinions, just gone. The shell of the organism still present as a dead body, but the body isn't the person, the person is gone forever. What must it feel like to be directly responsible for extinguishing that life. It's curious, that's for sure. I don't think I ever want to see someone die and I realise that some people who read this will have had the experience of watching someone die and not have relished it, in fact, quite possibly be scarred by it.

The whole matter leaves me confused. With so many questions:

What is it like to kill?
If life isn't the body, or the brain, then what is it?
Could someone gain a greater understanding of life by extinguishing one?
How would it change my perception of my life seeing another life disappear?
What drives serial muderers to repeat the process most people find so abhorent?
Why has each of these questions got longer until now?

Maybe that's why people want to kill. To answer these questions. I know I couldn't do it. We all joke about it and make flippant comments "I could fucking kill that bastard" or "I wish he was dead". But when it really comes down to it most of us, thankfully, couldn't kill a fellow human.

Perhaps the reason we can't kill is that we spend so much of our lives actively trying to stay alive. Protecting ourselves from real and perceived threats. Insuring our lives and those of our loved ones. Is that what makes us cherish life and hold it sacred, that we realise the fragility of our own life?

Luckily I have never been in the position to suspect that my life is about to end iminently. Maybe if that ever happens, my views will change about life and death. For now I am not scared of death, although I will be doing my utmost to avoid it.

So I believe that people would want to kill an innocent person for 'fun' or even just 'curiousity' but I don't think I'll ever understand why or how any sane person could justify it to themselves. Let alone, live with that knowledge afterwards.

This post typifies my life in some ways. I started off by watching a film, a piece of fiction (or 'kidology' a great word my dad uses). It ended with me tying myself in knots with unanswerable questions, unfathomable posturings and more confused than I started out.

If I ever think of a conclusion to all this I will be sure to add it, unless of course I am doing a 20 stretch for murdering Jade Goody (and everyone thought it was cancer, pah!)

Demented!

I have noticed there is currently a radio and television campaign about Dementia. I kind of know what Dementia is, having some personal experience of a family member who suffered from it. Nowadays it has a proper definition:

Dementia is a syndrome (a group of related symptoms) that is associated with an ongoing decline of the brain and its abilities

This encompasses all sorts of diseases and conditions such as Alzheimer's disease. Whereas in years gone by it just meant: being old and a bit mental.

One of my Grans had Dementia. She was as mad as a bag of snakes. But she was a lovely lady and even as a youngster of 5-10 I could see that there was a normal person with a normal perception trapped in a mind which obscured the outside world with 'smoke and mirrors'. Thinking back now I wonder what frustrated her more, was it the delusions which made her act in the way she did, or was it the moments of clarity in which she realised that her condition robbed her of the real world around her and the cognition to interact normally with it?

The aforementioned adverts use the slogan: I have dementia. I also have a life.

Two things popped into my head after listening to/watching these adverts. If the people in these adverts are real and not actors, they have real Dementia. So how fucked up will it be for them when they are sitting at home one night, minding their own business and suddenly, their own face pops up on the screen, telling themselves they have Dementia? Still, at least the next day they'll have forgotten all about it. A constant cycle of surprise! Also I thought with such a serious and debilitating disease, they could inject a little humour into the campaign by changing the slogan to:

I have Dementia. I also have a bag full of magic Marbles and did I ever tell you about the time that I paddled to the moon in a canoe made of Pedigree Chum?

The Mont Blanc challenge

When I go to the gym, I always try to take the time to read the hastily made and amatuerish notices posted up around the place. They are usually mundane, rich with trivial details which are soul-crushingly boring to me: A new class which the brain-dead mums can go to make their fanny's tighter again, why the air con has been moderatley too cold in the men's changing room, a reschedule of this week's 'Spin Class'. But last week one really caught my eye.

The notice proclaimed. COMPETITION:

Complete the Mont Blanc challenge, 120Km trek/climb on the cross trainer this month. The person with the quickest time will win 3 sessions of personal training.

If I could complete a 120Km trek/climb in a sweaty gym, choked by the stench of stale sweat and testosterone, I wouldn't need a fucking personal trainer, because, arguably I'd be the fittest (or at least the most competitive) person in the gym. I think that the person with the worst time should win the personal training, they obviously need it most!

This kind of incentive is self-defeating and nonsensical. It's like watching Michael Schumacher winning a Grand Prix and then walking on the podium to receive his prize of... 3 free driving lessons.

The Pizza constant

Every good mathematical or physics formula has a constant.

I discovered a new constant yesterday , quite by accident, whilst writing an email to my good friend Joni.

I was explaining to her about when my cooker suddenly broke down. Not in an emotional way, it just stopped working. I'm not sure cookers have emotions. I think some electrical appliances do have emotions, for example my fridge, which has been revelling in my torture for some time now.

My fridge is just a youngster of about 2 years old. It was manufactured by Beko, a company I always presumed was Japanese, but it turns out they are Turkish in origin. Already, you can see the problem, letting Turkish people make electrical goods. A nation famous for kebabs and other fatty delicacies. However Turkish labourers re-built Berlin after WW2 and made a bloody good job of it, so why not have a manufacturing industry? Unfortunately for the Turkish kebab swilling labourers, fridges and other electrical equipment aren't usually constructed from bricks and mortar, under the direct supervision of a squad of Nazi commanders who've just lost a war and have been 're-skilled'. I am sure the Turkish took a few short cuts with fridge building, using materials like egg-plant and yoghurt, where clearly alloyed metals should have been employed. I guess that's why, just after the 1st anniversary of it's purchase, it failed horribly, defrosting everything inside. It's only got worse from there. I paid £300 for one year of reliable refrigeration. This is very un-Turkish indeed. I have been eating kebabs for years and by the look of my bloated frame, they are ALL still with me. I digress (which is the point of blogging).

So back to the story of my cooker. Ironically due to the nature of this post, which will become clear no doubt, I discovered that my cooker was knackered when I found a stone cold pizza in there after 20 mins of cooking, with cold air. So I rushed out to buy another one. I got a second hand one though because we want to move this year and I didn't want to shell out for a new one that we may end up leaving behind. The new one is very nice, nice and gassy, which the other one wasn't.

Electric cookers are shit to cook on but the nature of the fan assistance in the oven makes for perfect pizzas. They are crispy and cooked all the way through. Gas however is a different story. The hob cooking experience is a sheer delight, instantaneous temperature control, a luxury. The oven however is total toilet. Put it on, wait for a fortnight, then it's just about ready to cook, badly.

So here comes the real science behind this blog. Whilst writing the email to Joni, I realised that I use the hob more than I use the oven for the specific task of cooking pizza. So although I am happy about the thrill of instantaneous temperature control, I am disappointed about having burnt round the edge-soft in the middle pizza.

Let's put that into a formula where:

H= Happiness (measured in Jollynesses)
nP= Number of pizzas cooked for any given time period (expressed in pizzas per unit time) The SI (Scottish Idiot) unit for this is Pizza/week.
F= Fuel type where Electric ovens have a higher 'oven quotient' than Gas.

The formula is therefore:

H=F/nP

Elementary you may say, but my discovery is the 'oven quotient' for Gas. It's -5, whereas an electric oven is 7.5. So with 1 pizza per week cooked on Gas Jollyness is -5. Conversely, for every 1 pizza per week cooked in an electric fan based oven the Jollyness is 7.5.

So as we can clearly see, whilst cooking with a Gas oven, Happiness is inversely proportional to number of pizzas cooked. Whereas with an Electric oven, the opposite is true.


I am hoping to get this ground breaking and philosophical epiphany published in New Scientist magazine. This could revolutionise the world, by promoting happiness and unhealthiness across the globe.

Stephen Hawking popularised 'String theory', the understanding that a body with a gravitational pull acts like a ball in a blanket, please, spare me, was that one of the blankets he was dribbling on? What the fuck has he ever done for science except disprove one of Newton's fundamental laws. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction according to Newton's third law. So what happened when his wife knocked fuck out of him in 2004? He fell out of his wheelchair and she escaped without sanction. Well done Stephen, you've just blown away one of the foundations of Physics.

And Einstein, what the fuck did that forgetful fluffy haired weirdo ever add to society. I'll tell you, 2 flattened Japanese cities and 40 years of cold-war terror. Well done old man. Pretty clever eh, but never remembered to wash.

So in short, I hope to be held up there amongst the greats with this discovery. It has also led me to the conclusion that to attain true happiness I must eat less pizzas from now on, unless I change my cooker of course.

Extending the smelly hand of friendship

There's this man, who drives a bus. Let's call him the bus driver. Anyway it's a bus that I have to use to get around work and he's one of the regular drivers. He's a nice man, very friendly and polite, a gentleman. He's one of the people in the world that can put a smile on your face because you know that when he greets you that he's doing it sincerely and genuinely.

But there's a problem. He loves to shake hands with people. A warm handshake, not only with one hand, but with the other clasped around the back of your hand in a very welcoming way onto his little bus. That's not the problem though. The problem is his hands smell. They smell like they've been doused in aftershave overnight and then sprayed with some more just to make sure they still have that eye-wateringly strong aroma.

So what's the problem with that you may ask yourself? Perhaps he gets up in the morning, has a shave, then pours some Brut into his hands and rubs liberally on his freshly scraped face, it's what lots of men do. (I don't know if his face smells, thankfully, so I can't confirm or deny that) The man has a sense of hygiene, he's always smartly turned out, surely I can't knock him for that? What's the big issue?

So I just wander into work, sit down and get going for the day. Then it happens. I put my hand near my face, perhaps resting my head in the palm and I can smell him. He's invaded my day! He's invaded my nose, he's with me at work, my hands even smell of him. This is not acceptable to me. I begin to think that everything I've touched previously will smell of him, my pen, the mouse (I keep a little mouse in my pocket and stroke him every now and then, it makes me feel big and powerful). It's not even nice aftershave, it smells like he concocted it from cheap household cleaning products from Lidl. Even Cillit Bang (Barry Scott's favourite aftershave) would be an improvement. So off I traipse to the toilet and scrub the bastards until there is no trace of the repugnant stench left.

Afterwards I start to resent the bus driver. I feel that he's upset my day by invading my personal space. It's not that I mind shaking his hand, that's just polite. It's the that he then proceeds to follow me around, on my hands no less, until I wash him off. Also he's got very rough skin on his hands, no wonder if the aftershave he uses can also be used to descale toilets! So now when I'm walking towards the bus and I see his face gurning out of the window like a fish in a tank full of turgid bleach I think 'ah fuck, it's old stinky hands'. I imagine sitting in the bus with my skin withering away slowly, unable to touch anything in case there's a sudden onset of leprosy and my epidermis departs my person in one large hand-shaped scab. I get phobic about walking to the bus in case he's there and starts beaming out of the window at me, ready to infect me with his aromatic AIDS.

Then I feel guilty. The bus driver is a nice man, he only wants to make friends and make people happy. Sometimes his kind words are the only kind words I hear all day and here's me hating him because of his rough skin and refusal to use a spray on aftershave or at least one that doesn't have the same effects as Sarin.

I'm trying to think of a logical ending to this little saga.
Maybe it's that no matter how nice you are, you'll never please everyone.
Maybe it's don't befriend bus drivers.
Or maybe it's subliminal advertising for a company which produces hand sanitising gels.

Swimming

Today I had a swim for the first time in ages. I really enjoyed it. I don't know why I don't do it more often (laziness may be the answer to that question). It's a very liberating form of exercise, although it does make my back ache a bit. I swam in the pool in the gym I go to.

There's a man who goes to that pool every day and he gets in and just walks up and down. I call him Luke Poolwalker. It's not that funny really cause he's disabled and looks like some sort of hunched hobbit from Lord of the Rings. He went over and spoke to the young lifeguard today at length. I watched the interaction and was imagining that he explained to the young man that he'd dropped his ring in the pool and he had to walk up and down everyday, feeling for it with his toes. Of course that wasn't case, by the look on the young man's face I imagine he said "Do you know how to make an old crippled man happy? No, then suck my cock and we'll see how it goes" Of course that's probably not what happened either because I imagine his cock is crippled too.

I am going to burn in hell one day for my thoughts. And If I don't, I'll burn in hell for posting them here.

Also I was reminded today how fucking disgusting my fellow men are. Men are desperate, desperate for sex or just even to look at women and imagine themselves sliming all over the women they covet. There were a couple of pretty women in the swimming pool. I think they were mother and daughter, but both well kept. There was also a couple of lecherous men in the jacuzzi (I was observing them from the sauna). The jacuzzi sits in front of the pool so in walking from either the changing rooms or the sauna to the pool, one must pass the bath of bubbles and piss. Anyway these 3 guys watched these 2 women as if they'd never seen a woman before. They craned their heads, leering and leching with their eyes almost on fucking stalks as if Beyonce and Alicia Keys had just started to lick custard off each others naked bodies (Beyonce and Alicia Keys aren't members of my gym, to my knowledge anyway, although maybe they slip in and out early in the morning).

These guys though, they looked like they'd never seen a woman in a swim suit before. I hate that desperate streak in men. Have some dignity, look, but don't make it so obvious. The two ladies were clearly uncomfortable by the unwanted attention of two men who looked like candidates for a UK Border Force eviction special and a fat beer bellied speccy twat who hasn't seen his own cock for 12 years. The kind of guy you see hanging around outside men's toilets in the hope he gets the 'come-on' for a bit of willy fun.

At the risk of repeating myself (and I can it's my Blog after all) I fucking hate men like that. There was another man in the pool when I was swimming doing the same thing. The younger lady was swimming in the lane next to me, about 10 meters in front. This horrible hairy greasy desperate fuck had positioned himself at the far end of the pool to letch at her when she turned and swam away. I watched him, he didn't care. I was watching him while I swam to the wall and she had swam away. H didn't even try to hide that he was transfixed by her body. He might as well have held up a sign saying "I AM MASTURBATING RIGHT NOW BECAUSE I HAVE NO SENSE OF SELF WORTH OR OTHER PEOPLES PERSONAL SPACE, I WATCH WOMEN IN SWIMMING POOLS THEN GET INTO MY CAR AND WANK INTO THE ASHTRAY".

I hate people like that. Men like that. They are sad and clinically unable to keep their testosterone in their pants, or a in handkerchief where it belongs.

The duality of man presents itself here. Lets put the boot on the other testicle. If a gay man were to openly ogle a straight man in the shower or changing area of the gym, he'd most probably end up as a mess on the floor, blood seeping from every conceivable orifice, staining the tiles. The same man who would give the gay man a kicking would most probably stare at a pretty woman in a swim suit and think nothing of it, even if it made her uncomfortable.

While I'm on the subject, another thing I hate about the typical man is their total lack of hygiene. You would be surprised how many men have a piss in a pub toilet and don't wash their hands. Maybe they think it's a bit gay, or they are too hard to wash their hands. Piss soaked idiots the lot of them.

Sometimes I hate being a man. Not that I want to be a woman, I would definitely hate myself more then. All women hate themselves for some reason or another. Maybe I should be a cat in my next life. The only down side to being a cat is the compulsion to lick your own anus twice a day, with an unfeasibly rough tongue. Actually, maybe licking your own arse is a small price to pay to live a life without the minutiae that I get myself so worked up about.

Conclusion of this rant: If I lick my own arse, maybe I'll be more content.

Crying

Today I cried for the first time in ages. Why?

My best friend left London today. Not just London, he left the UK. Now let's just get things in perspective, it's not the first time he's been out of the country for an extended period. But this time it's different cause this time I think it's forever.

He and his wife have gone on a once in a lifetime trip around the world which is due to last 6 months. 6 months is nothing really. There are people I don't see for 6 months and I couldn't care less. However this, is different. I think they'll find that they belong somewhere else, that they can have a better life somewhere else. I don't blame them if that is the case, but selfishly I'll be sad. It's not something that happens often, that 2 guys meet and become friends and 15 years later they are still in the same place, still knocking about together, talking shit and getting drunk. But there are the friendships that only happen once in a lifetime.

So, my best mate is gone for a while. I hope that whatever happens to him on his travels only enriches his life. But I'll miss him. We only met maybe every 2 or 3 weeks. In a pub in Wimbledon with a grumpy Scottish barmaid who sounded like she smoked 300 fags a day. But it was always good fun and we always put the world to rights. I hope we can again. Maybe, since he'll have seen more of the world, we'll be able to put more of it to rights!

So I wrote this after much cider and whiskey. That perhaps has amplified my normal emotional response. But so what? I don't care.

I don't mind admitting I had a good cry tonight (not very manly or macho I know).

Everyone cries. About different stuff. Life affects us in different ways, some cry at the birth of their first child, some because Celtic lost the old firm game at the weekend. Today, I don't mind admitting, I cried because my best friend, Colin, left.

Tommorrow I'll be back to my hard-hearted self no doubt.