Unimaginative Pseudonym

At the time of writing, the joint winners of yesterday's poll are 'Necrotising Fascitis' and 'Giant Squid Attack'.

I think the latter looks a bit more likely (I have a feeling I'd look a tad more disgusting if I had necrotising fascitis), but - alas - neither result is correct.

The right answer, provided only by pickled_jo (who may have had an unfair advantage, being Mancunian) was of course 'Zombie Outbreak'.

As you are probably aware² (from the news and that), the dead walked through Manchester on Sunday and I ended up being part of the horde¹.

While we tried to pretend that zombie-aid was an 'Equal rights for Zombies' march, it was actually in aid of Cancer Research, the Christie, Children in Need and Cash for Kids. Oh, and as an attempt to break the World Record for number of zombies in one place at one time.



We didn't do it...



...but we only missed the record by 160, so we're trying again in October!



The walk was excellent fun, particularly the 'attacking pedestrians', 'attacking buses' and 'attacking restaurant windows' parts⁴. Greater Manchester Police were very cool on the day, although I perhaps feel that allowing zombies a right to (relatively) peaceful protest is only going to exacerbate the whole situation.

More zombie pictures here and some fucking awesome ones (including a great one of me, scarletdemon & our friends) here.

(Oh, ok then - my bruises were actually from paintballing the day before at Al's Stag do. They did enhance my zombie make-up, though...)
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¹I got better.
²And frankly, if you missed something like 'the dead walking through Britain's second city³' then you really need to up your news intake, because that's really the sort of thing you need to keep abreast of
³Yes we are, Birmingham. No - we are. Just face facts.
⁴Oh, and a couple of taxis.

I'd check to see if I used that the last time I updated after a long absence, but I have a worrying feeling that I may have and I really can't be arsed thinking of a different title.

Obviously I've been up to lots of things, and equally obviously loads of them are boring as shit so I won't bother to fill you in. Despite all the distractions, and all the shit I've had to deal with lately (and all the stuff that has been distracting without being shit, of course), I do miss updating my LJ regularly, and getting the feedback and input from you lot - and hopefully I'll be able to get back into the habit of updating at least semi-regularly.

I've got a .txt file full of post ideas that I need to use, for one thing. It'd be a shame to waste them.

But that's all beside the point of this entry; as the pictures scattered about the place show, I've recently received some rather impressive bruising. I'd like you lot to guess what caused it.

Answers in the form of a poll and/or a comment, as per usual, and I'll reveal the horrifying truth later on tonight, or tomorrow (thus splitting this post into two parts, but only because of audience participation and not just because I don't have any ideas for subsequent posts¹)

Poll #1429136
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Which freak occurence caused this hideous effect 'pon my once flawless physique?

¹I do really. Although some of it is that 'boring shit' I mentioned earlier. I'll jazz it up a bit. You won't notice.

A recent conversation with scarletdemon has revealed something terrifying about her. The sort of thing that makes me think that maybe I'll start issuing questionnaires and intelligence tests to prospective girlfriends in future¹. The sort of stupidity so astounding that at first I thought she really had to be joking.

The sort of thing that made me want to rip the piss out of her mercilessly and publically for the rest of her life once I realised she was in fact totally sincere.

Most of you have - I fucking hope - noticed the horrific spelling mistake in the title of this post. You'll have noticed that 'lengthly' isn't a real word, and is the sort of thing a tiny child, or perhaps a foreigner just coming to grips with the English language, would come up with as an attempt at communication.

(Although really it would have to be a very tiny child; like a premature baby, or a very foreign person; like someone raised in the depths of the Amazonian rainforest with no previous experience of Western culture or linguistics, who failed to notice the atrocious mess 'lengthly' would make of English grammar)

Or you'd have to be Scarlet. Now you might be forgiven for thinking that she simply made a typographical error in a recent post, and I am drawing undue attention to it. This, however, is not the case.

No - she not only typed out "[...] the lengthly explanation [...]", but then proceeded to insist that the abomination she'd created was in fact a real word, and that 'lengthy' "sounds like something a baby would say" - even when confronted with several dictionaries.

I think Scarlet is finally starting to come to terms with reality, at last (several days later) - although at the moment she's still hoping that she'll wake up to discover that the whole thing has been a dream (and that 'lengthly' is a real word). This separation from reality isn't helped by the sheer number of people who can't spell on the internet, so that Google returns far too many results for 'lengthly' than is entirely sensible for a non-word.

You see, this entry doesn't (just) serve to further embarrass her by publically highlighting a mistake she's been making for fifty years - really I'm just trying to cure her here, in the interests of science. Any amusement I may derive from writing this is purely coincidental and not to be taken into consideration.

In order to help her retain her slender grip on reality, answer the following unbiased poll so I can wave the results in her stupid face properly explain the error she has been making.

Poll #1368936 A lengthly poll
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None

Is 'lengthly' a real word?

Thankyou.

(Oh, and if you're up for some public humiliation of your own, feel free to point out any longstanding spelling mistakes, pronunciation errors etc. that you've been making, so that we can all have a good laugh at your expense increase our understanding of this important issue, in the interests of science)

¹Let's hope she doesn't read too much into that bit.

What the fuck has been going on?

I turn my back for a few months and everyone on LJ starts talking shite¹. Let's look at some of the hot topics on LJ that are in fact probably no longer hot but still pissed me off when I noticed people talking about them.

Doctor Who
Or rather, the new one not being black, like this marks some sort of fucking watershed for the BBC or a dramatic setback for black people.

It doesn't. It wouldn't have marked anything new or spectacular for black people if they had cast a black actor as Doctor Who, any more than if they started calling it Doctoré Whú² and making him mexican would have meant a dramatic leap forward for hispanic folks.

Casting a not-white person in a minor sci-fi TV series isn't a fucking leap forward for anything - aside from the fact that it doesn't bastard well matter what colour an actor is, or that it's been done before (half of the cast of Red Dwarf weren't white - although even in the 80s it was frankly more shocking that one of them was a Scouser), because it means bugger all.

Britain's first black MP was a huge step towards equality. Our first Muslim Lord was another one. The fact that our national newsreaders are as varied in skintone as the general population is a bloody good indicator that we don't really care what colour people are on TV - the main character in a cult science fiction show, on the other hand?

That's a landmark achievement for no-one.

Seriously, Americans - get the fuck over yourselves. You might have a vast history of civil rights problems. You might have segregation in your recent history and slavery in your not too distant past. You might have TV series' that seem to think putting one member of every ethnicity on screen in a stereotyped role isn't racist.

But you know what? Our country doesn't have any of that shit. The whole nature of immigration in the UK is different (we fucking begged most of the West Indian immigrants to move here, at a time when you were still segregating black people in the US (and limiting immigration from the Caribbean, no less)) - it's an entirely different dynamic.

And we have this crazy idea over here that equal opportunities means what it actually says - not forcibly employing token races and genders so that we can create the appearance of equality³.

Twitter
No-one cares. No-one wants to read about the minutiae of your life (I appreciate the irony of pointing this out on LJ, but there's a difference between writing about your boring as shit life⁴ and announcing "I'm eating some cheese."). No-one should have to put up with a friends page utterly devoid of content.

Just fucking stop it. Writing down and broadcasting every tiny thought that crosses your mind is one step removed from shouting them out in the street.

Go and do that instead. Nowhere near me.

St. Patrick's Day

Americans (again) - you're not Irish. NO - you're not.

For one thing, a real Irishman wouldn't wash his cock in that weak piss you call beer, no matter what fucking colour you dyed it first⁵.

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¹'Starts' might be a bit generous, but fuck you. It's hyperbole.
²Doctoré Whú (along with his assistant Consuela, and his nemeses El Bastardos Dalekos) would be Charlie Brooker's idea, years ago, not mine.
³And if you read that and decide that I've just said "racism and bigotry don't exist in the UK" please just fuck off.
⁴You can stop doing that as well if you like, actually. I don't want to read that either.
⁵The beer, not his cock.

Tags: observations, sociopathy

For anyone who may have noticed, all of the pictures normally on display in my old entries and profile are currently missing - that's because I'm moving my website between hosts (if this cat doesn't FUCK OFF trying to walk on the keyboard while I'm trying to type I'm going to nail its bastard feet to the floor¹), and I'm taking the opportunity to sort out the mess that was my old set of directories.

I've already sorted my e-mails out, so I'm still nice and contactable even if the site looks down.

Am also contemplating dusting off the site and doing something with it again - particularly as my LJ has (when I update it, that is) turned into a proper journally type journal - which turns out to be handy to have, but it's also nice to have somewhere to write with a narrower focus (i.e. what my LJ used to have), which is what I can use bastardised for (especially as I was playing around wordpress a while back (a long while back, now that I think of it) and it is suitably impressive).

It's all liable to take a while, because I'm not exactly dynamic at the moment - I'm fairly sure I've just started to recover from the 'flu - which started out as man-flu but nefariously turned into a still-admittedly-mildish version of the real thing. Today I've been able to do things like 'walk unaided' and 'sometimes breathe in entirely', which is a massive improvement on yesterday when I was getting increasingly certain I had TB or the black death or something much more impressive like that (still possible...). In any case, I'm not about to assume that I'm actually getting better until I can breathe in without rattling or wheezing, and walk upstairs without collapsing.

This may take several more days.

¹Problem eventually solved by teaching cat to fly across room, those of you who like to keep updated him.

Hi.

Yeah, not really been online much in the past few months (even including the sporadic updates you were getting); there's not any particular reason, aside from not being arsed and not wanting to say much.

I can't really say I'm feeling much different, so don't expect this to herald a new wave of posting. Don't expect it not to, mind - I might get myself back into the habit now that I've started. I do think that people are overdue an update, especially as a fair old amount of stuff has happened (although to be fair, most of you who care will have been getting your updates from scarletdemon anyway, which means I need to apologise for making you put up with her inferior prose)

Anyway, this is what I've been doing over the past few months, rather than being online and/or updating my journal :

Executing my mum's estate. This didn't take as long as you might think, probably because my mum didn't exactly have much of an estate in the first place. Cancelling benefits etc. was a piece of piss, and transferring utilities over was - by and large - pretty straightforward (and rarely involved more than a phonecall).

It was a bit difficult at times for reasons other than administration, but then again doing anything relating to mum was (and is) pretty difficult, so it didn't exactly leap out as torturous.

I suppose organising the funeral comes under this one as well - I'm going to say something everyone who has arrange one says : the undertakers were brilliant, and took most of the weight for me. They also managed to keep the costs down (which was especially helpful, given how shit some of my family were at the time, as you well know), while maintaining the dignity of the event. I won't say it was good, but it certainly wasn't any harder than it needed to be.

(obviously dealing with the familial aftermath was, but fuck them)

Fighting with my landlord about my succession of the tenancy. This took far too long - it took them 6 weeks to respond to my initial attempts to notify them, and they broke several laws (including the Housing Act 1985). It's all been dealt with now (although I had to get Shelter on their case, and even then the landlord only came around after I wrote a very strongly worded complaint - listing all the laws they'd already broken...).

Bearing in mind my mum died on the 12th September, I was properly confirmed as a permanent tenant - free of hassle and threats from my landlord - on the 2nd of January. They did send me two written apologies, made one apology in person and gave me £30, though.

Helping Scarlet (and LGB) move house. This wasn't as big a job as, say, moving them from Brighton; but it was still the usual stressful endeavour. And painting rooms in a house you're someone else is leaving is FUN. Oh yes.

Adopting a cat. Who, despite being rescued from certain death by Scarlet, shows excellent judgement in preferring me. Clearly he senses my superior character. Or possibly just that I'm allergic to cats.

Sorting out my house. My mum, love her as I did (do? I don't know which fucking tense to use any more), seemed to think that this house needed about 40% more furnishings that you can reasonably fit inside it. She also liked keeping things - items with some memories attached, like my medical chart from when I was born, or my baby teeth(?). And also piles and piles of tat, like some kind of demented magpie.

I've chucked out¹ a metric fuckton of stuff already, and there's still some stuff left that I need to sort through. There is, at least, room to swing a cat in every room now². Or there was, until someone had the cheek to expect her stuff to fit in here as well...

Sorted out some photos. Actually, first I got all my digital ones of mum printed out (I recommend Boots.com, because I used them), even though I already had the world's supply of photos to sort through from my mum's tardis-esque drawers, and then I started sorting through them. I made quite a nice album of my immediate family (primarily focusing on mum, for obvious reasons), and then I sorted out another one of just me and her.

Oh, and some of the best³ ones went on the wall. The ones that look like her.

It was incredibly difficult, and deeply upsetting, looking at all these pictures of mum. Seeing her so full of life when I'd fairly recently seen her really quite empty of it (if you've ever wondered whether you can tell the difference between a corpse and a sleeping person, you've never seen a dead body) - also quite distressing seeing photos of myself as a child, and looking at how happy he (er, I) was. And how much he loved his mum.

But I'm pretty sure it was helpful too. I'm not sure how.
I definitely feel better for having done it all.
-

It really feels like I've barely stopped to catch my breath for the past 4 months (longer, really). Having all of these distractions has partly been a good thing, I suppose - but on the other hand it means I haven't really had time to properly grieve. Or at least, it doesn't feel like I have.

Not that I know how I'd do that. Properly, I mean. But it has been all go, and there's been this constant background pain (which frankly spends a lot of its time in the foreground, too) that I don't know if I'm dealing with, or avoiding or what - or if focusing on it too much would help anyway.

I'm still basically functioning as a human being, so I've decided that's pretty good. I'm up and down (I use that a lot, because it's a really good way to answer the 'how are you?' question without saying "I'm suffering from VIOLENT MOOD SWINGS. You cunt.", even though it clearly means exactly the same thing⁴

I think you're caught up now.

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¹Only about a quarter of it actually got thrown away, just in case anybody environmentally conscious was wondering.
²Fact.
³There are a few people who disagree with my definition of a 'nice' photo - thinking that things like hospital beds, implanted tubes and assorted medical apparatus detract somewhat from a good photograph of a person. But either I've become desensitised to all the equipment, or it really doesn't matter, because some of the best photos I have of mum were taken in hospital.
⁴Not everyone infers the 'cunt' part, perhaps. But apart from that.

Tags: mum, personal

It was was Remembrance Day yesterday. The 90th anniversary of the Armistice in fact.

I normally do a post about it, because I think remembering the mistakes and sacrifices of all the wars (especially, but not just, the two big ones) is pretty fucking important.

But the thing is, Armistice Day was on the 11th, and my mum died on the 12th. So it's rather selfishly been a bit swamped by some more personal remembering. I still did the two minute silence and that, but I honestly couldn't say how much of it I spent thinking about the dead of two world wars and how much of it I spent thinking about my mum (or me).

I suppose at some point I'll stop marking every single insignificant fucking date by moping. At some point.

Not yet though, eh?

I can't sleep.

I can't sleep, and this Obama soundbite I keep seeing (pictured) is really irritating me. I don't think the two things are related, but I'm going to exorcise it anyway.

Ah yes, the story of 'rich and educated man gets elected president after embarking on highly successful legal and political careers'.

Yeah, I can see how that could only happen in America...

... and also Portugal, Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Eiré, Iceland, Luxembourg(!), Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Switzerland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Poland, Austria, Italy, Hungary, Croatia, Slovenia, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Montenegro, Greece and Malta..

(breath)

Cape Verde, Senegal, Mali, Ghana, Benin, Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Mauritius, Israel, India, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Belau (and a few other Pacific Islands), Japan, South Korea, Taiwan and Mongolia...

(breath)

Canada, Greenland, Mexico, Belize, El Salvador, Costa Rica, Panama, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Guyana, Suriname, Cayenne, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic, Trinidad & Tobago and pretty much the rest of the Lesser Antilles.

BUT, apart from these seventy-one or so countries, plus those I either missed or discounted because I was being harsh¹, yeah - only in America could this happen.

Or perhaps only in America would otherwise intelligent people celebrate a soundbite obviously made of as much bullshit as this one...

Then again, only in America would a politican say something like this - I can't imagine David Blunkett saying "only in Britain can a blind man get appointed to a cabinet position" - or any British people getting excited about it if he did².

The really annoying thing is that I like Obama. He is really exciting - although that excitement has bugger all to do with his 'story' and everything to do with the fact that he's an American President (nearly) with some seriously socialist policy ideas. In America.

That is impressive. That is the sort of thing he should be doing soundbites about.

Besides, Nelson Mandela's story is about four squillion times more impressive anyway.

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¹These are the 'free electoral democracies'; places where a citizen can be freely be elected to head of state or legislature (as appropriate) by the people, there are another 30 or so that aren't quite as free with their elections or nominations (many of which could probably have been counted for these purposes, really), and there are further 50+ who execute their claims of democracy to a considerably lesser degree
²Although to be fair he was Home Secretary, so the whole 'Justice is Blind' thing was cool for a while there. I make my own fun.

Ok, so this whole Russell Brand/Jonathan Ross/ Andrew Sachs palaver has gotten way out of hand now.

Actually, it stepped considerably beyond 'out of hand' a few days ago, and has just been spiralling ever outwards into idiocy and twattery ever since.

Summary for any foreigners in the house : Russell Brand, comedian (and highly paid BBC Radio presenter) and Jonathan Ross (highest paid BBC presenter) fannied about on Brand's Radio 2 show and made some puerile prank phone calls to Andrew Sachs' (Manuel from Fawlty Towers, now quite elderly) mobile phone. It wasn't exactly the height of comedy. There are resignations and suspensions flying about willy-nilly.

The complaints of tens of thousands of pensioners (and David "I'm not a toff, honest" Cameron) are to be expected when this sort of things happens. The 'not giving a shit' of most of the population is also to be expected. Andrew Sachs being a bit miffed is probably a given.

What isn't expected is for the BBC to go completely mental and start talking about censoring programming.

This is fucking ridiculous. Ignoring the fact that this clearly isn't a very important incident (despite what the journalists and politicians are saying), the point of the BBC is that it can sometimes offend people in a way that other channels can't. The very fact it isn't advertiser-led means that close-to-the-bone comedy can happen without the producers worrying about pissing off the advertisers and losing revenue. This is a Good Thing™.

There's a lot of programming on the BBC that only exists because there aren't adverts, too - you wouldn't get many advertisers queueing up to book a slot in Gardener's World, for example. Not enough to justify it taking up the space of another reality TV show on the schedule, anyway. I wouldn't be particularly sad to see the back of Gardener's World (is it still on? Have I scuppered my own metaphor through lack of research? Fuck it, you get the point), but that's not what I'm getting at.

Comedy, on the other hand, is what I'm getting at. The atmosphere of the BBC (especially BBC radio) nurtures new and exciting comedy. It also nurtures old and trite comedy, because there are a lot of license payers who like Nicolas Lyndhurst, but we'll try to ignore him as an aberration and move on. While making a rubbish prank to an elderly ex-celebrity isn't exactly hilarious (nor is it new or exciting), it isn't the sort of thing that should shake British society to its foundations, either.

They shouldn't be talking about making sure 'this sort of thing never happens again'. They shouldn't be talking about 'taking a look at other programmes to see if they've crossed any lines'. I want my TV and radio programming to cross lines sometimes, thanks. And when it crosses lines I'm uncomfortable with, I'll change the channel. I've got a remote control and everything.

The complaints of thousands - or even tens of thousands - of elderly people do (spookily enough) not reflect the majority view of tens of millions of license payers. Especially given that most of those elderly people don't even fucking pay for their TV licenses in the first place. And since when did the Director General listen to the general public anyway? Isn't that what Points of View is for - to contain the opinions of morons and twats, to make them think they have some sort of impact on the world despite being sad, lonely little wankers who sit at home looking for nipples and continuity errors on daytime TV?

Why is the BBC making such a fuss? We're not American, for fuck's sake.

Are they just preparing for the increase in Tory government they think is inevitable, and getting in ahead of the legislation?

...ohh, fuck.

I'm still marking dates.

It's one month today since mum's funeral. I'm feeling a bit weird.

I'm not upset (like I was on the 12th), I'm not nostalgic (well, not any more than I have been), but I can't seem to settle, either. I've got half a dozen things on the go, and I don't seem to be able to finish or concentrate on any of them.

Although as one of them is 'cooking some food', I'm hoping that'll change shortly - at least long enough for me to eat it.

(considering that I just got up for an aimless wander around the house in-between sentences, it doesn't seem spectacularly likely though...)

As it's a month today, and because it's something I wanted to do at the time but never got around to doing (partly because I had a lot on, and partly because it was still a bit too upsetting), I'm going to put up the eulogy I wrote for my mum. It's nice to have a record of it, and I think it captures mum - and how I feel about her - pretty well (and quite a few other people said as much on the day, so I think I got it right).

Also, there are a lot of people who read my journal who I'm sure would have liked to attend the service, so at least you'll get to see this part of it.

As it was written to be spoken aloud, I've included an mp3 of it as well. I don't quite sound the same as I did at the service, as I only just managed to hold it together on the day (I actually couldn't read the words through the tears by the last couple of lines, so it's a good job I'd written it myself), but that just means you have the added advantage of being able to understand all of it.

( Eulogy )