Bulbous Bill gets it 3 times a night!

Online friends

I have missed a trick. In London it seems that people do not meet in real life anymore. Now they make friends through the Internet.

I don't necessarily enjoy the old, tried-and-trust method of meeting people. You need to wash, brush your hair, lie, be polite, lie some more, not glare, resist the urge to punch the cretin in the face. It's a lot of work to put yourself across as a normal human. But you don't have to anymore.

I attended a party last night almost wholly created by meeting and inviting people through Gumtree, the well-known social website.

So all these people were strangers. With the stress on the STRANGE.

It was like having a few drinks in a really sad circus green room. Fat people, weird boogly-eyed people, people who couldn't really speak English, smelly people and people who took notes during party chit-chat.

But the best bit was a strange man that kept coming into the room with animals. First, a lazy chameleon that didn't change colour. I have never seen a real chameleon but when I did I hoped it would change colour instantly and be a hilarious situation for all. But it was sleepy, and stayed a vomit-orange. Boooring.

Then he bought in a little dog, who supposedly had beef with the chameleon. The dog ran round for a bit, made a few friends and weed on the floor a bit. Then Noah took him back to the ark to continue to stare out the sub-par lizard.

I think I might organise an online party, see if I can get a bloke with a camel in. Or at least a chameleon that lived up to the hype.

he's right

London tube etiquette is a refined art, like beating up old people for their change.

How about those people that are going to stand their ground regardless of the commuters around them? The ignorant arse-brained dick faces that think as long as they don't have to move it's OK. You know who you are Mr glasses or Ms big scarf. Oh and don't forget Lil' Miss sneak round the side while we are waiting for people to get off the train before getting on.

And those indecisive bastards who just stand there in the middle of the walkway. And don't get me started on the retards that continue to bring on those wheelie cases of death. What is in them? A t shirt that says 'I need to wheel my insignificant life about'?

Oh it makes me so mad.

But I am trying to make amends. I am trying to adopt a certain zen-like quality on the tube, to distance myself from the anger and the hate. To do that I remember true fear on the tube.

No, not 7/7. I was in bed that day.

It was the day the scariest human being I have ever been close to stepped on my carriage.

He was about 6'5", weighed in excess of 16 stone. Cap depicting some sort of wolf creature, shorts (it was January) and a waistcoat that only fat guys know where to get. He stomped on and was breathing heavily. He glared round with his beady eyes of perturbed hatred and then focussed on the advert in front of him with the pretty girl. She was advertising some English language college and she wasn't bothering anyone with her pearly whites.

He reached into his pocket with his massive hand and pulled out a pound coin. He then went about frantically scrapping off her face while shouting obscenities. He looked round, probably praying for disapproval, and then stomped off. He could have eaten my head.

So when lefty middle class won't move because he has his little space and that's that, I think of the big man and his pound and am just thankful he isn't near me.

Also, what the flip is going on with Never Mind the Buzzcocks? This new series has been dire so far. Not that the jokes have been atrocious but something isn't quite right. I have some ideas.

Bill Bailey wasn't the crux of the show, he wasn't the funniest thing on it and it did feel a bit like he was in the wrong medium there. However, as my friend pointed out, he had an element of realness about him. Something has gone awry. Phil Jupitus looks a bit sad, I've noticed that at the minute he seems to be resorting to doing comedy shouting at people. It's easy & it seems like there isn't much of anything else going on.

Also, Amstell seems to have been neutered slightly. An element must be the whole Andrew Sachs thing, as a comedian he's excellent but he's at his best when he's excruciatingly preying on his guests. The best episodes of the last series was the Donny Tourette episode when he was merciless and really stuck into him. This series it's still a factor but it seems to have been reigned in a bit.

Finally, drop the novelty bullshit, scripted things. The 198th Episode, the Bunny Suit, reading facts off the autocue, it's all shit. Pretty soon it'll be Mock the Week,

The peak of rudeness

Also,

On London things. I've been down here for pretty much 2 years now. They've been a good two years, I stay up late on weekends, eat kebabs, stuff like that. One thing that winds me up at the minute is public transport etiquette. Working in Camden means I can catch the bus to work each morning which suits me fine. However, at the minute I'm currently getting myself wound up over a rise in a rather odd type of behavior.

If you're sat on the aisle seat and the window seat is free, you move up if someone wants to sit down. You do not scoot to one side and have them struggle over you. I honestly don't know how this has become acceptable, but it has.

Also, if you are one of the "can you please move down" people, everyone hates you. Everyone thinks you're a cunt and we all imagine what possible inadequacies your private life holds. I reckon most of them are into the old belt wanking.

Black men and ham

A lot of our blogs will involve London. It’s where we live and ultimately we want to be at the hub of some sort of London blogging mecca. The Morecombe and Wise of blogging.

But alas we are a long, long way from those echelons. Instead we must scrabble in the mire of mediocrity in the City. And here is something from London, which I have yet to work out is racist or not. It’s funny, though.

From a random email from some friend of a friend of a friend:

“Two days ago I was on the bus and smelt this bacon sandwich type smell. I looked around but couldn't see anything. The smell persisted so I looked directly behind me.

“And there he was - this little black bloke with a scrawny afro sitting there. He had on those stupidly big sunglasses all the women have been wearing the last two summers (it was night), and he was eating the biggest leg of ham I've seen in ages. Christ knows where he managed to buy about two kilo of hot ham, on the bone mind you, in Clapham Junction.

“Anyway it even had that big old white bone sticking out the end, just like in the comics when there was an african feast - the old comics from years ago, when racism wasn't a bad thing. It was like sitting in front of a bloody cannibal. Seemed to be enjoying it though, so fair enough, the nutter.”

London. So progressive yet so much like a Beano cartoon from the forties.

RELAX

Picture!

East London Haiku

Hey,

Here is the first collaboration between Mr Lee Jones & myself. Lee is an old friend of mine and currently works as a journalist. He is a man of many talents and his face tells many stories, one of them involves saying "well, as long as it's just this once" to a Spanish man, but that was a long time ago, he's married now.

C

Live Blogging

we have been debating over the merits of live blogging (yes, we. this blog has two bloggers now, deal with it) and it seems to be a point of contention.

On one side blogging is a new art - it's a bit edgy, a bit rough and is certainly raw. But on the other hand we all have PDA 3G ITV 64MB ADSL interweb 5 megapixel Nav4 in-yo-muthafuckin-face phones that have WAP coming out of their arses (well, we don't all have these devices. Only us mugs who were outsmarted by Waz in the o2 shop do), so we should live blog with them, use their technology. Blog there and then, right in the thick of it, as it happens, live web streaming mp4. Click on the web link and hook up to the main frame. BAM.

It hasn't happened yet. One of us thinks it's dumb and unnecessary, the other can't get it working on his phone. I can get BBC football live scores, got that down, but I can't get blogging. I can take photos and I can text. And I know how to set the alarm.

It's because I am not 18 and called Waz and work in an o2 shop, wearing an iPhone as part of my uniform. I was conned into this device. I know it can do a lot of things, James Bond has it, and I know for sure they put a man on the moon with a lot less technology than I have in my pocket. But I can't get it to blog.

Anyway I wanted to live blog tonight as I was in a bar and they served hotdog with mash. It needed spreading. People needed to know there and then that hotdog and mash was out there. But I couldn't tell the world as I can't live blog. I can only blog from my mac at home. Like a fucking cave man.

Yes. Hotdog and mash. Think of that. But of course, it's old hat now. We have all heard of hotdog and mash. Because it's already out there, with a JPEG and a RSS feed. Twittering away or something like that. I was just too late.

The Kings Arms

Went out, saw some excellent graffiti in The Kings Arms in Soho. It turns out that gay pubs are a rich seam for some fairly unique wall art. Yeah, a few of them were just blokes names with a mobile number next to it. God knows why, it might be a hobby club or something.

First off there was this one (left), which took up like an entire wall. My favourite bit is the little 'sorry' shooting from the tip. God knows what that says but I'm guessing there's definitely a case of the childhood summer that you'd most like to forget attached to it. I've attached a couple more below. My friend wanted to do this actually in the pub, something to do with 'live-blogging' , which was a little bit much really. To be honest, I think he lives a little bit too much in 2009.

I took couple more which I've posted below. Naively, my friend didn't realise we were in a gay pub and was actually a little bit scared because of all the blokes with (exquisitely shaved) goatees & bald heads, thinking we were in some sort of football hooligan meeting spot.

Below are the other pics I took. The Swastika one is frankly curious but I really like the clearly masoginistic tone of the 'stinky vagina' pic. One funny thing we did hear was as follows:

"Yeah, you do know it's a lesbian bar?"

"Ooh, arguments"

Redundancy

(Below - Klan, categorically a set of twats)

That's right,

This week I came up for the chop, it was pretty tense. I felt like a miner in the 80's or something. When I relayed that to a friend she pointed out that eventually none of the miners were left, it was a matter of time. Apart from possibly those last dozen or so that operate the museums, a bit like an olden days Zoo.

But that's insulting to miners, push comes to shove, my transferable skills (A Marquis de Sade level of self loathing & a need to please authority figures) will take me into any call centre.

Unfortunately, it's one of the downsides of working in an industry based on frivolity & boom. One of the first things to get crunched is the eating out industry. That sort of shit gets replaced with buying wheat and stuff, possibly. The thinking was to trim the fat from a few areas in the head office, which is a horrible process really. Everyone is miserable, no works getting done, the girl who orders stationary is at a loss to envisage how department heads could possibly ever grasp the ordering process. There's one girl I work with who's absolutely stunning, working in our HR department. She's had a rough week sitting in on meetings of misery taking notes down. This is the girl who if she said all I had to do to see her topless would be to survive a two storey fall...I'd consider it. I just want to shake her and scream "you know you don't have to exist in this? Release yourself and go and play volleyball in the clouds with Aphrodite".

Luckily our process was dealt with relatively quickly, but its still rather grim. Initially you go through a full range of reasons it could be you. Yeah, gradually I've been interpreting the dress code in an increasingly liberal way. Like taking "Freedom of Speech" & shitting on the US flag. And yeah, sure, I've had a couple of run ins with customers (my bread & butter) that have become public knowledge, but I went on a course. For the rage.

Also, the big one is probably e-mail usage. Initially, I did think "Yes, I did send a picture of a Klan cross burning, but in context that was actually hilarious". There's a few pictures I've sent over e-mail that really need to be looked at in context. Recently that's included a picture of a beautiful male Geisha with an umbrella, a scene from Scanners where the man's head explodes and a picture of a tramp on a bench with two bottles of wine with the heading "Erena, this is you, you pissed tramp". To be sure, I was shitting it.

I also had a "Consultative Meeting" which they were deliriously keen to emphasis was not a job interview for my job. It was all going through the motions, this didn't come out of nowhere, they've been sitting on this for a while. Dotting all the I's & making sure none of the T's immediately preceded 'ribunal'. I was convinced that the names had already been ear marked anyway.

This is the first time anything like this has affected me & it feels starkly of the real world. As my boss said, "The definition of a recession is if you know someone who's been made redundant", I corrected her by saying that it's a period of 6 months where the company continues to shrinks. But still, the sentiment was valid. Ultimately I was up against my two girls, so while I may have avoided the chop right now, there's little to be happy about and I've lost a genuine friend.

In a bit, might be more frequent now my Internets back up (Sky = Liars/Date Rapists),

C X