Give me a break!

There are some truly evil people in this world that must must be hunted down and stopped. Robert Mugabe. Osama Bin Laden. Radovan Karadzic. Nick Griffin. Noel Edmonds.

Above all of these demonspawn, however, is the most evil man ever to draw breath upon this planet:

I've been poorly a lot lately (hence the lack of updates) and I've been stuck at home in front of the telly. And every time I put the bloody thing on, this fat pillock turns up and ruins my day. He doesn't exactly make me feel better. And there's not just one advert now. There are many. Do advertising agencies really think that an annoying advert sells the product? Well, it doesn't sell it to me. In fact, I now steadfastly refuse to use the poxy website. If you 've not seen it, this is how it goes. Two blokes are in a coffee shop, each drinking those big mugs of coffee that cost three quid. These blokes are talking about car insurance. As you do. The one topic the whole nation is talking about is car insurance. At this juncture, the wanker in the picture above leaps up and sings a mock-operatic song about the virtues of a certain price comparison website. He's then accompanied by everyone else in the coffee shop, because they've either a) been convinced by him that his price-comparison website is indeed the best way to save money on your car insurance, or b) they're all suffering from Stockholm Syndrome because Gio Compario (apparently, that's his name. No, it's not Damien. I agree, it's a terrible name. I reckon they should have called him Juan Kerr.) has kept them all hostage in a dungeon underneath the coffee shop and has told them all that it'll be their children next if they don't follow him blindly. After the song and dance, it's all topped off with a god-awful, Bruce Forsyth-quality joke. If these blokes are really that skint that they have to save forty-seven pounds fifty on insurance, why don't they stay out of them bloody rip-off coffee shops and make it at home with a jar of Gold Blend?
It's not just Go Compare either. Every other advert seems to be about insurance or price comparison websites. There's Confused.com, Churchills, Compare The Market, Direct Line, Swiftcover and so on. Where are the adverts actually advertising tangible stuff I might actually want or need?
Actually, I'm probably being unfair to the comparison websites. There are lots of adverts advertising 'tangible stuff' that are just as annoying. There's that McDonald's one with a poetry voiceover about how everyone's 'just passing by', when really it should be saying 'just passing over from coronary disease'. There's that really badly dubbed one (another bugbear of mine; dubbed adverts. Just make your advert in English! If you can't be bothered to spend the extra money on an english version, then I can't be bothered to spend my hard-earned on your poxy bathroom wipes.) about that kid who 'wants to do a poo at Paul's'. Now, if that was me, I'd happily send him off to defecate at Paul's house if his arse stinks that badly. I certainly wouldn't pander to him by buying an air-freshener that disguises the smell of the little shit's shit, just because he told me to. Like my mother used to say (when she was sober, anyway) 'I want doesn't get.' What's also odd about that advert is that the young kid is chinese, and his mother is caucasian. I understand that he might be adopted, but we're not told. And if that is the case, surely it's going to put some people off adopting. They'll watch that and think, 'I was seriously considering giving a home to a poor unfortunate orphan asian baby, but I'm not going to now, because they stink out the house every time they poo. Actually, sod it! I will adopt, but they'll have to go round to Paul's every time they need to park their breakfast.'
A more recent addition to the annoying adverts canon are those new ones for Nintendo starring Ant and Dec. The Wii adverts were crap before when they had the Redknapp family or that bloke from 'My Beautiful Launderette' who isn't Daniel Day-Lewis flogging them to us. As I said, they were crap before, but they've taken on a whole new aura of shiteness. There's a family (all card-carrying members of Equity) playing Nintendo Wii. When I say family, I mean family. There's Nan and Granddad, Mom and Dad, sisters, brothers, sons, daughters, nieces, nephews and cousins, even the fucking milkman and all, probably, all sitting on the sofa playing Mario Kart. This is unrealistic for a start. That scene might happen for twenty minutes on Christmas Day, and that's only because dad wants to see if it actually works seeing he's spent so much money on the bloody thing, and they'll have fun playing on it until Nan demands they watch the Christmas edition of EastEnders (thus killing off any fun, or indeed, Christmas Spirit.)and she has to watch it on the big telly because she's 'only bought her readers'. Like I said, unrealistic. Then, they act all surprised when Ant and Dec walk in, despite the fact that they've just walked in without knocking the door or anything, and also the fact that there's a camera crew filming them playing Mario Kart. Then it ends on a cliffhanger. Ant (or is it Dec?) challenge one of the family to a race on Mario Kart, and then it stops! Who wins?! Go to the nintendo website to find out! Like I give a fuck whether or not one of the fabulous forehead twins wins his go on a video game. It's not even a good cliffhanger, they should've put an anvil on a fraying rope above Ant's (or is it Dec's) head and he has to finish his go before the anvil plummets down and smashes his giant bonce into porridge, like they did with the old Batman TV show. As cliffhangers go, it's probably up there with the following clip:

Makes you wonder how Doctor Who ever got cancelled in the first place, doesn't it?
Anyway, all this ranting has made me ill again. Poxy commercial television. I'm off for a Lemsip. Ta-ra a bit.

Brits.

I like to think I'm a cool dad. I like to think, because I'm younger than most of my daughters' friends' parents, that I'm more with it than them. But I'm not. I'm turning into my dad, and that's a scary thought.
I have my children staying with me at the moment, because it's half-term, and after the Villa match finished last night, my kids nagged me into watching the Brit awards. I've never really liked the Brit awards, they never have any of the bands I like on, or are they likely to, but there's usually something on there that might be fun or interesting. Not last night. What a load of old shite. Watching that, I realised that I've reached the point in my life when I hate everything about modern popular music. I'll soon be shouting at my kids 'Turn that shit down' like my dad did. I'll soon be telling them about how music in my day was proper music and this stuff today is just noise and that in my day at least you could hear the words, even though none of the statement is in fact true.
Admittedly, I didn't see all of the awards, as I was watching the Villa outplay CSKA Moscow but still only getting a draw. Maybe the first hour of the Brits was amazing. I doubt it.
I turned over to see Take That fly in on a UFO. Robbie Williams has spent most of last year looking for UFOs fruitlessly and all he had to do was swallow some pride and get on the phone to Barlow, who had one in his back garden. And they were miming. Nominated for best live act and they turn up to lip-synch to their god awful song. No wonder they didn't win. (Weirdly enough, Iron Maiden did! )
I hate Take That. I hated them in their heyday and I hate them now.I know they write their own songs and they've come back from the wilderness and all that shite, but because they came back successfully we had to put up with all the other disbanded once-popular manufactured boy/girl 'bands' coming out of retirement too. I could cope if it was just Take That, but it's Boyzone reunions and Spice Girls tours and all the other wankers releasing crap records.
Duffy won three awards. Don't know why, as she seems to be a watered down version of Amy Winehouse. A lot nicer to look at, though. Tom Jones give her her last award, banged on as usual about how great being from Wales is (even though he lives in Las Vegas and L.A. most of the time) but now he's chucked the Grecian 2000 away he looks like Count Dooku.
Coldplay were nominated for four awards but won nothing. Good. It's a crime they were even nominated in the first place. An ex-colleague once summed up Coldplay when he said 'Coldplay are trying to be U2, but U2 turned into wankers, Coldplay are wankers already'. Still, lots of people inexplicably like them, and I bet any hurt they felt at being snubbed is balanced by the joy of looking at their bank statements. Lucky bastards.
Girls Aloud won Best Single for 'The Promise'. They moaned that thay haven't won one before, but that's because they're awful. I wish they'd promise to piss off. I don't get Katy Perry either. She won Best International female for singing about kissing a girl. Big deal.
The show itself played safe and was fairly dull, no controversy, and the acts they had on weren't interesting. They teamed up the Ting Tings with Estelle and they did a medley of their own hits. I heard they only got Estelle because they couldn't get Rihanna, who couldn't come because she got beaten up by her fella, ella, ella.
The 'celebrities' they got to dish out the awards were awful. David fucking Hasselhoff. Gok fucking Wan. Alan pissing Carr. For Christ's sake. And as much as I like Gavin and Stacey, I thought the hosts were shit, and they're getting everywhere those two, like dogshit.
By the time that wanker Brandon Flowers turned up (wearing a dead pigeon on his back) to sing with the Pet Shop Boys (who were this year's Outstanding Contribution winners) I'd completely lost all interest in music. At least I've still got football.

But that's starting to piss me off as well.

Snow joke and other updates.

Most of the blogs I've looked at today tend to consist of photos of peoples' gardens or streets covered in snow. Yes, it looks pretty, but it's a right royal pain in the arse.

It never ceases to amaze me how unprepared this country is for snow. It happens EVERY FUCKING YEAR, you think we'd have the mechanisms in place to deal with it by now, but no, of course we haven't. We can find untold billions to pay for missiles to rain down on Iraq, or to pay for the Olympics, but when it comes to dealing with snow, we're fucking hopeless. I bet Canada are laughing their bollocks off at us right now. I mean, our capital ground to a complete standstill, no buses, trains or planes at all. The 7/7 bombings never managed that!

This recent snowfall apparently cost the economy an estimated 1.2 billion pounds, and there's more on the way and we might run out of road salt. I'm not an economist, but surely spending a few million quid making sure we can deal with snow and making sure people can get to work and supplies are delivered, etc. will save us billions in the long run.

Still, at least the kids had a nice day off from school.



>Update on the previous post, my recent appearance on local and national news has now only bleeding gone online. See my full bell-endedness in glorious full colour. I apologise in advance for making you listen to Ace Of Base's (note the apostrophe!) 'The Sign'.



> My shoulder's still not brilliant, but it's a lot better, thanks for asking.


>Since Johnny Dixon passed away last week, two more Villa alumni have gone on to play for God's XI. Vic Crowe, former player and later manager of Villa died last week, and Monday saw the passing, at the very young age of 46, of Paul Birch. Birchy's death is particularly sad for me, because he's a player I actually remember, he was part of Graham Taylor's fantastic team of the late Eighties. I remember him marking Inter's Lothar Matthaus out of the game in our 2-0 win over them in the UEFA cup (the less said about the 3-0 defeat at the San Siro in the second leg, the better). I had an old Panini sticker of Birchy on the inside cover of my school hymn book (along with Gordon 'Sid' Cowans and Derek Mountfield and a posh foil sticker of our old round crest) He was a player from the time I used to go down to Villa Park regularly (those days are long gone! Can't afford it these days.) and though it's often claimed falsely that a player always gave 110%, Birchy always did, and that is why the Holte End still sing his name in our version of 'My Old Man'.

Cracked Back.

Generally, I've had a shit January. I caught the worst cold I'd had for ages. Having a bright red nose and streaming eyes isn't really much fun, and the look doesn't really suit me, either. When I recovered from that, our boiler decides to commit suicide, and I spent most of last week shivering my nuts off. It's fixed now, and my house is now warm again.
But now, worst of all, I've managed to royally injure my back. It's my shoulder, mostly, but I've trappped a nerve and it's killing me. After spending possibly the most gruelling Monday at work I can remember for a long time (they're all pretty gruelling, actually, but this one had the element of serious physical pain thrown into the mix. Fun!), my lovely girlfriend booked me an appointment at a back clinic, which, luckily, is just around the corner from where we live.
This was the first time I've ever been to a chiropractor, and I was kinda nervous about what torture he was about to put me through, but as I was in so much pain I couldn't even sit down to have a poo (sorry to be brusque, but my bowels are a big deal to me!) I thought it can only help.
Also making me nervous was the fact that there was a running machine in the waiting room. I don't like running at the best of times, and the thought of doing it in the waiting room in my debilitated state didn't fill me with joy. I was imagining the receptionist laughing at this limping Quasimodo figure trying to jog along on this treadmill like a disabled gerbil. Then the lady who'd been in before me came out. She was walking very gingerly. My girlfriend, who had accompanied me, saw my worried mug and started laughing. This amused me too, but we had to keep straight faces in case the poor woman thought we were laughing at her. Trying not to laugh only makes me want to laugh even more, though, but I managed to keep it together, mostly because I knew that laughing would probably hurt. Everything else I did hurts, so it stands to reason that giggling would probably kill me, too.
So, it was my turn, finally. The chiropractor asked me a few questions, ascertained how much mobility I actually had and then he told me to take off my shirt and lie on the massage bed he had, on which you lie face down, and your face goes into a specially built-in hole. (I've seen a similar bed in the terrible Jackie Chan film The Protector, but Jackie's bed had a naked chinese girl lying under it for him to look at. No such luck in my case, I'm afraid. Just the floor. Luckily, though, unlike Jackie, no-one tried to stab me while I was lying there either, so it's swings and roundabouts.) The chiropractor pours some kind of lube on my back and gets to work. This hurts. I thought massages were supposed to be relaxing!
Then the really fun bit happened. He asks me to turn over and then he cracks my back. Ow. He does it again, higher up. Ow again. Then he puts his arm around my neck, grabs my head and twists it so my neck cracks. Fucking mega ow.

(Those James Bond movies lied to me! 007 always gets a blonde buxom masseuse to give him a rub down when he's injured, and he gets to shag them afterwards in the steam room. I get my neck cracked by a bloke called Steve. Not fair!)

Now, I'm a fairly big guy. I'm over six feet tall, and I weigh about sixteen stone (yeah, yeah, I know, I'm a fat bastard.) but he was throwing me around like I was nothing. He said I had a high pain tolerance. Nice chat-up line. Normally, if I was in a situation where I've got my shirt off, covered in lube and a man is wrestling me, him saying 'You've got a high pain tolerance' might've worried me, but it made me feel cool. Yeah, I have a high tolerance of pain! I'm a rough, tough real man! This all evaporated when I winced and gasped as I struggled to put my shirt back on.
It turns out I have no spinal damage, but the stresses I put my muscles under at work are affecting my joints. So I have to do exercises. The main one involves putting my left hand on my right shoulder, my right hand on my left shoulder, like I'm hugging myself (I was doing that all last week anyway when I was fucking freezing!) and then I have to move my upper body in a figure-of-eight motion. Now this exercise is the first one you learn in junior school when you pretend to be mentally handicapped. If I stick my tongue between my lower lip and my teeth when I'm doing this, I'd look exactly like I did when I was ten and one of my classmates had just done something stupid. So, anyway, I have to keep doing this before I go again, next week.
I'm still in pain, though. I haven't been back to work since Monday, but it is improving. The fact I'm sitting here typing this is a sign of how improved I am. And I've managed to have several poos since. Hurrah!
I'm so bored, though. As I haven't been able to move out of my seat, I've just been sitting there watching DVDs and daytime telly. It may sound fun but it does get tiresome, especially when I'm watching shite like Tarantino's Death Proof or Cash In The Attic. I don't know which is the most gruesome!
Also, because I know she reads this blog (someone has to, I suppose) I'd like to thank my wonderful other half for looking after me. She wasn't really expecting this level of care until we were both in our seventies, but she's doing a wonderful job, and it's good practice for when I'm a septuagenarian with dodgy joints.
Right, gotta go. It's Homes Under The Hammer in a minute, and I need to see how that guy who bought that town house in Weymouth is getting on.

Commercial Breakdown.

In a newspaper I was flicking through earlier this week there was a feature on how to lose weight. I must've been bored to read through this shit, but anyway, one of the tips was to run on the spot during the ad breaks when you're watching telly. This might sound like a good idea, but this isn't going to work for me because I very rarely watch commercial TV. This is mainly because ITV and Channel 4 these days broadcast nothing but utter bilge. (There are exceptions; I love TV Burp on ITV, and I've been enjoying what I've watched of Dead Set on Channel 4. What is there not to love about a zombie Davina McCall eating one of her colleagues' entrails?)
And when I do watch something from commercial TV, it's usually been recorded so I fast forward through the adverts, so I'd be running on the spot for about twenty seconds, and the tremors from me jogging my lardy arse up and down would be enough to shake my can of lager of the coffee table. And spilling beer is a crime in my house.
However, I do see the odd advert, usually during half time when I'm watching a football match in the pub. (Actually, there's a cool ad doing the rounds at the moment, I think it's for VW, where a guy has a series of kung-fu fights against versions of himself. I like that one.) During the Villa match last Sunday, I saw an advert which upset me. Iggy Pop is selling insurance. What the fuck is Iggy Pop doing trying to sell me insurance? When he sang 'I Wanna Be Your Dog' with the Stooges, I didn't think he meant Churchill. Actually, I'm surprised he has a policy, this is a guy who regularly cuts himself open on stage, and has a history of heroin abuse. I bet his premiums are astronomical.
It's not really punk, though, is it? Speaking of which, there are apparently a series of ads which have John Lydon selling butter. I only know about this because my brother almost had a fight with him when he got shoved out of the way by one of his minders when they were filming a commercial in Trafalgar Square.( Apparently, when my brother Marc squared up to one of the minders; "Brick Shithouse, he had muscles in his piss" according to our Marc, Johnny Rotten said something like "That's it mate, show no fear" to which my brother replied something which involved ripping Lydon a new orifice. Miraculously, my brother walked away unscathed. He's good at that. But I digress.)
Who'd have thought, even five years ago, that we would be seeing adverts in which Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop are selling insurance, Johnny Rotten flogging butter, or Birmingham's very own Ozzy Osbourne promoting World Of Warcraft? You may disagree, but online RPGs are NOT Rock n'Roll!
I know selling out is part and parcel of success these days, but Bill Hicks, who said any artist is off the artistic roll-call as soon as they do a commercial as it's akin to sucking the Devil's cock, was absolutely right.

Always Has Been, Always Will Be.

I read in the Birmingham Mail yesterday that some arsehole local councillor wants the mighty Aston Villa Football Club to change their name to 'Aston Villa Birmingham' and we should also replace the motto 'Prepared' on our badge with 'Birmingham'. He reckons that a lot of people don't actually know that Villa are from Brum and the name change will help raise the city's profile if the Villains win the UEFA cup.
Firstly, let's try and win the cup first. Secondly, we've been Aston Villa since 1874. It's been good enough for the last 134 years, why change it now? I mean, back in 1874 , Birmingham wasn't even a city yet, and Aston wasn't part of it.
Lots of football teams don't have the city they're from in their name, I mean, just off the top of my head, there's all of the London clubs, Everton, Port Vale, Lazio, Ajax, FC Twente, Espanyol, Benfica, Celtic, Rangers, Hibernian, Queen Of The South and Juventus. There's probably loads more. Any proper football fan knows Villa are from Brum. Anyone who doesn't know probably isn't that interested in football, so how does Villa winning a trophy raise Birmingham's profile in their eyes anyway? The main reason this is a bad idea, however, is the fact that our local rivals and worst enemies are called Birmingham City. How is Villa incorporating the scum's name into our own going to be a popular idea? It's not our fault if the team actually bearing the name of the city aren't raising it's profile because they're a pile of wank is it?
If the council want to increase this city's reputation, how about they spend their time coming up with better ideas, such as cleaning up the shit bits, for example? (I reckon one of the main reasons Birmingham has a reputation for being a shithole is, ironically, because of football, as both Villa Park and St. Andrews are situated in dogholes, so visiting supporters go home with a bad impression) . I know this idea isn't going to come to anything, and it will all blow over, but it has bugged me no end. Football is all about history, and our name is part of our heritage, so leave it the fuck alone.

If you want to read about how we got our name, and also, if it wasn't for Aston Villa there wouldn't be a football league to start with, read this fantastic article from the Times Online.

Ahh, There You All Are!

In the words of trailer-trash headcase Britney Spears; "Oops, I did it again!"

I've been such a busy boy lately that I've not had the time to update my blog. (I've also found out that this blog has 'followers', now. Some of them are blogs I wasn't aware of until recently. I've got readers I didn't know about!The number keeps going up and down, though. That's what happens when you very rarely update, I suppose.) I've got an art project on at the moment which is taking up an inordinate amount of my time, and that's on top of all the stuff that moving to a new house entails, and that's on top of me being very ill this week with a virus that made my joints swell up and stop my bowels from moving. Still, not going to work for three days is almost compensation for not being able to bend or poo. Or bend and poo; after all, I don't do it standing up. Not every time, anyway.

More news on my art project if and when it gets finished. If you're reading this on the other side of the pond, firstly, happy Thanksgiving, and secondly, Septic Isle is now on sale in the US., so go out and get yourself a copy. As soon as the stores re-open after the holidays, obviously.

I promised to tell you what I've been up to since I've moved, but that would take ages, so here are the highlights:

We had a mini-housewarming with a lot of my glamorous other half's friends from down south. I made a twat of myself by slipping on the wet uPVC ledge on my patio door and crashing in a heap onto the very hard kitchen floor in front of everyone. My brother Marc thought this was the funniest thing he'd ever seen. I wasn't even drunk by then, either. My shin is still bruised. We'll probably have a housewarming with some of my friends from here in Brum at some point in the future, if I can find any.

The day after we moved in properly, Heather and I decided to go for a drive to get a feel for the area and find out if there's anything cool or useful nearby. We ended up in nearby Earlswood, which is near Bromsgrove and about ten minutes' drive away. We saw a garden centre and decided to have a look around. We looked at the cacky statues and gnomes and windchimes and the usual shite you get at these places, then we saw that this place also had an aquarium, so we had a look around there, too. Not because we want any pet fish, you understand. As we were walking around, I noticed that in one tank, the tiny fish inside were reacting to my movement. I waved my hand to the left, the fish all quickly swarmed to the left. I moved my hand to the right, they all swam to follow suit. Heather had moved along so I called her back to show her. She stood by me as I waved my hands all around the place quickly. The fish all went mental! The water acted as if it had suddenly boiled and the fish started leaping out of the top of the tank like some aquatic mass suicide attempt. My hands were moving rapidly again, trying to pick up all these dying little fishies and chuck them back into their tank quickly before the shop assistant saw me. I think I saved most of them. Heather had a look that said 'I can't take you anywhere, can I?' as we swiftly left the garden centre.

Heather's Mom and Dad came to stay with us, and we went to a posh restaurant as it was her mother's birthday. I even put a suit on. And a tie. It was a lovely meal,her folks enjoyed their time with us, I think. Which was good, as it was only the second time they'd met me. I had an interesting chat with a guy outside whilst having a fag, apparently he was taking photos for British Sausage Week, he was travelling around the country with famous cricket umpire Dickie Bird sampling and judging local bangers. I tried to see if Dickie Bird was in the restaurant with us, but I couldn't see anyone sitting at a table with five jumpers and three hats on. Pity.

We're more or less all moved in now. We still have a spare bedroom full of shite, though, and we don't have an aerial for our telly yet, either. We have to use a portable aerial, which isn't the best, and because it's plugged in to our freeview box, it means most of our programmes tend to be stop-start, i.e. the picture freezes for a bit or the sound comes and goes, which means the continuity announcer sounds like Norman Collier (but obviously not when he's doing his 'other joke' when he puts his jacket around his shoulders and pretends to be an unfunny chicken. By the way, is Norman Collier still alive?) but we get by. Most importantly, though, I now have a room where I can go and draw, it's got a desk, drawing board and everything. It's also got a 'gas lift' chair that doesn't stay lifted so when I'm drawing I start to sink every few minutes. Still, it's all good fun.

Also, it's very nearly Christmas! That's snuck up on us this year. I don't know where this year's gone. We finally get the house to look like a home and now we have to fuck about putting trees up. Bah Humbug! Nah, I'm looking forward to it really. I just have to act curmudgeonly to keep appearances up.To prove how much Christmas spirit I've actually got, check out the following clip:

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Right. There's probably loads I've forgotten to tell you about, but I can't be arsed to type anymore, but I promise to update a bit more regularly from now on.

A Right Royal Embarassment.

It's been a while since my last post, I've been busy with real life these last couple of weeks. I know it's hard to believe comic nerds have lives, but there you go. I'll probably blog about it in the near future, including my drunken hiking trip in the wilds of Worcestershire, but I'll wait until a bit more dust has settled on what my youngest brother now refers to as 'The Bewdley Incident' before I tell you all the gory details.
This post is about the Olympic Games that are happening at the moment. Whilst I'm pleased that Team GB has won so many medals this time, there's one thing that pisses me off about it all, and that's when our national anthem gets played when they're on the podium. What a horrible, dreary, out-of-date tune.
From a purely musical point of view, it's dull. In my opinion, a national anthem should be rousing. Not the same note over and over again. It's the lyrics and sentiment of it that bugs me. There are sixty million people living in Britain, why should we focus all our thanks on the one person, who, by accident of birth, happens to be our head of state? Especially at sporting events. I mean, for example, was it the Queen who got up at five every morning to go to the local swimming pool and train for years? Nope.
It's the same whenever the English football team play. I get embarrassed when the anthem is played. Only half of the team sing along. I've noticed that it tends to be the southern lads who sing along, and the northern lads who just stand there stony-faced (unless it's a northern lad that's the captain, he kind of has to or the newspapers will moan at him).
No other European monarchy's national anthem is so arse-kissy. You don't hear the Spanish football fans singing about their king (but that's probably because they're too busy making monkey noises at the opposing team's black players).
And what do the Scottish and Welsh athletes who win gold think when the national anthem is played? I can't see them giving much of a shit about our Queen. Since devolution, the Scots and Welsh have their own anthems now, so in that respect, God Save The Queen is outdated. It's a throwback to the days of the empire, and seeing as the empire no longer exists makes the song obsolete.

Maybe it's because I'm from an Irish family that I have a bit of disrespect for the royal family (my grandad used to spend his mornings writing funny comments all over the royals' pictures in the paper, and he never calls Prince Charles by his name, always referring to him as 'Lappy Lugs') but I do think of myself as English, and I'm proud of my Englishness. I just think that in the 21st Century, the thought of bowing and scraping to someone just because they happen to be from a cetain family is ridiculous. At the very least, we should change our bleeding horrible national anthem to something that's a bit more celebratory and inclusive.

And Finally....

Having lived in the People's Republic of the West Midlands for nearly as long as there's been a county called 'The West Midlands', I thought I'd be used to the stupidity and crassness of our local news bulletins by now.
It turns out I'm not. I'm still weirded out by what I witnessed on Central Tonight, tonight (funnily enough). This is the bulletin on ITV, and it's been presented by Bob Warman for what feels like forever. I think his first story for what was then ATV Today was something along the lines of 'Sabretooth tiger attacks Neanderthal in a cave near Bromsgrove', but I might be making that up. Because Bob's the elder statesman of news in the West Midlands, the news bulletin tends to be a bit more straitlaced when he's on it, because he doesn't understand the modern world or senses of humour. You can see he's uncomfortable with the friendly lightweight stories or the affable banter with the sports presenter covering the lack of transfer activity at Villa Park that day. And rightly so, in my opinion. News is for news, not for giving airtime for some local tit who's designed a new way of getting jam into doughnuts or something.
Anyway, Bob Warman was away today. It was instead presented by that woman with the Lego hair and that Scouse bloke whose face is far too small for his head. (I think it's wrong for a Scouser to read out Midlands news).This gave the editorial staff the chance to fanny about a bit. It went like this; the weather girl, Emma Jesson likes to do her daily reports from different locations, although it usually tends to be an ice rink or the Walsall arboretum. Today, however, it was neither of those exotic locales. She was, wait for it, in a living room in Sutton Coldfield! (I can sense you're all getting excited by that particular piece of prose!) She had a couple behind her who were both dancing, albeit slightly out of sync with each other and a bit rubbish. This carries on for a couple of minutes, the lovely Emma telling us it's going to piss down all week, with this man and woman acting like they're both dying for a wee in the background.
Then we found out why. They're practising for their elaborate first dance at their wedding, which they're going to film and put on YouTube. How original! To prove how original it was, Central Tonight then showed us a montage of all the other wankers who have done something similar and put it on YouTube. (Just put 'wedding dance' into YouTube, you'll see the kind of shit I mean.) Why do people do this? Why is it always to a shit song? Why don't they do something original? (I'd love to see a wedding dancefloor with a big circle pit and lots of moshing! That'd be cool! Maybe I'll have it at my own wedding, should any woman be daft enough to agree to become Mrs. Michael Trimble.) What happened to dignity? Why do they feel the need to show the fucking world how 'wacky' they are?
I know I sound like a miserable old fart, but for fuck's sake, the last thing I want to see at a wedding is a re-enactment of Dirty Dancing, which is probably the biggest crime-against-the-eyes shown in a cinema ever made. (This reminds me, actually, of a wedding my dad told me about. It was one of his mates from work, and it was about twenty years ago, when Dirty Dancing was first out, and they tried to recreate that scene where she jumps into his arms and he holds her aloft. Thing was, she wasn't the lightest bride, nor was he the soberest groom. She gets up on a chair when the song reaches its big chorus, there's no way she can actually jump from the floor without a block and tackle. He's ready with his arms out. All their nearest and dearest are all round them on the dancefloor in a big circle, to give them both room. She launches herself at him, and he catches her, but he's too weak and too pissed and after about eight seconds of sweating , straining and swaying they both crash to the floor in a heap of white lace and grey tails. Fantastic. Now that, I wouldn't mind seeing. Unfortunately this was before the internet, so it will just have to live on in oral tradition.)
Where will it all end? Divorcing couples having a West Side Story-type dance off at the custody hearing?
As you can see, I'm a hopeless romantic.

This bit of the news wasn't the weird bit, though. Afterwards, they cut back to the studio and Lego Hair and the Scouser With A Face Too Small For His Head both remarked to each other how nifty the Sutton Coldfield couple's moves were. Then, and I shit you not , they went into a crappy dance routine of their own, which culminated in Lego Hair jumping into Scouser With A Face Too Small For His Head's arms and he swung her around at waist level. Then the theme music and credits came on, and Lego Hair carried on shimmying around the set with all the grace of a three-legged tortoise, whilst Scouser With A Face Too Small For His Head had a suitably shameful look on his face that was too small for his head. This was on the same show that had a big story about a poor bloke getting stabbed to death, and they looked like they were celebrating the news!
Local news, eh?

Kids Today.

I know this post will make me sound like a moaning old fart, but what the hell is wrong with some young people today? (Please notice that I wrote 'some', not 'all', as I know that there are many great youngsters out there.)
Usually, I'm thinking these negative thoughts about teenagers after every bus journey I take around Birmingham. Usually, it's thoughts like 'Why haven't these wankers heard of headphones? Why do they think everyone wants to listen to their shitty, tinny music? It sounds like Pinky and Perky!'
Today, I'm also hating youngsters because of a bus journey, but it wasn't because of some selfish scrote playing his crappy MP3s out loud on his phone. It was because, today, whilst travelling back from Birmingham city centre on the 97 bus with my two daughters, some little shitbags lobbed a brick at the bus window. The bus window right next to where my youngest daughter was sitting. Luckily, it struck the bottom of the window and bounced off. Any higher, and the rock would've probably come straight through and who knows what would've happened? The window was a write-off, though, and the driver had to make the rest of the journey at a snail's pace so it wouldn't fall out.
What makes these little wastes of spunk tick? Why is this fun? If I ever grab hold of them, it'll stop being fun for them. I'd make them wish their fathers pulled out early, the little fuckers.
Right, rant over.

Auntie's Bloomer.

There's been a lot of moaning lately about the publicly-funded BBC and how much it is paying presenters like Jonathan Ross and Graham Norton. I can't say I'm that bothered, but what does strike me as a total insult is the fact that Auntie Beeb has seen fit to give Steve McClaren a job as a pundit on their coverage of Euro 2008.
This man is the main reason England aren't taking part in the finals, yet the Beeb in its infinite wisdom has decided to give him a fat cheque for giving his opinions to an audience that has no-one to support. A situation that is his fault! I see this as a waste of my licence payer's money, probably more so than giving Graham Norton money for hosting endless shite talent shows.
And while we're at it, the BBC's 'Who Will You Support' ad campaign for the event really annoys me. No Englishman I've ever met would say 'Come on Germany!' And that Scouse kid who is supporting Spain because Fernando Torres is 'elastic' really bugs me.
I'm just bitter, I suppose, because England aren't playing, and that's a shame. Saying that though, from what I've seen of the tournament so far, I reckon we'd have struggled anyway!

Horse-faced Lies.

I have to get something off my chest. It's been bugging me for a while now. The other day, whilst at the cinema, I was watching the trailers. As you do. One was for Hancock, a Will Smith movie. Now, Will might be a good actor, but I reckon he'll just look stupid in the black coat and homburg, and he'll have to go some to get the timing right of the classic line: 'A Pint? That's very nearly an armful!' Who have they got to play Sid James? Will Ferrell?
That wasn't what was bothering me, though. The next trailer was for the Sex And The City movie. Aaaaaarrrrggghhhh!!! I'm sick of seeing ads for this film. I'm sick of hearing about it, and I'm sick of flicking past articles about it in newspapers and magazines. They go on about this movie like it's the Second Coming. It's not. It's just a film about a horsey-faced skeleton and her four ropey mates sitting around a table and talking about men's cocks.
Now, I'm not claiming to have seen a lot of the original TV show. I did see a few episodes, though (the reasons why escape me, now) and they were all basically the same. Shergar or one of her mates gets a new boyfriend, or has problems with an old one. One of their boyfriends has a weird sexual kink, which they all have a good laugh about in a coffee shop.(They are all supposed to be successful career women, yet they all have employers that don't mind them fucking off for three-hour lunches every day.) They all buy shoes. Desert Orchid wears something that makes her look bleedin' ridiculous, the old one has a sex scene, and Red Rum sums it all up in a voiceover at the end.
This is not the great leap forward for feminism it thinks it is. I'm not claiming to be an expert on feminism either, but I have had my ear bent by a few of them in my time. SATC claims it shows modern women and relationships as they really are, but it basically tells us all women are interested in is shopping for shoes and big cocks. I suppose some are, but not the ones I know. (Just as well, really, considering my knowledge of shoes begins and ends with Doctor Marten. Can't really say I have a massive cock, either!) Also, in the episodes I saw, the men in it were either perverted or just useless. Or both. I find this offensive. Every bloke they met had something weird about them sexually, be it foul-tasting semen, or a prediliction for analingus or calling someone a bitch when they reached climax. And the four gorgons all found it a big laugh to share this intimate info about their boyfriends with their mates in a restaurant. I'd hate to be on the next table to them, about to tuck into a chocolate mousse when Trigger starts banging on about rimming. Lovely.
Can you imagine the furore if there was a TV show about four blokes sitting around a table in a cafe talking about how their girlfriend's fanny tasted disgusting? It would be criticised for being sexist. And so it should. Also, it should be noted that the SATC movie is written and directed by a man. Girl Power!
Maybe it's just me. Maybe I don't get it because I have a 'Y' chromosome. Maybe women like being stereotyped as cock-hungry fashion victims on telly and films. Or maybe it's because I've (hopefully) got a bit of intelligence and see this shit for what it is.

Radio Ga-Ga, Marley Ta-Ta!

Well, it's (more or less) finished. There's a couple of panels that need re-doing because I've drawn the wrong building (it was Google's fault! It's best to do it again, because some smartarse reader would've pulled me up on it!), and there's problems with the scans, (but that should be sorted shortly) but, mostly, Septic Isle is completed. Look left for a sample image!

I spent all of last week staying up until very late (at one point I had two cigarette lighters holding my eyelids up. I couldn't find the matches.) getting the last eight pages pencilled, then inking the last twelve or so pages. While I was doing this, I got very, very fed up with my CD collection. I have hundreds and I must've listened to each one at least twice in the last month or so. So for the final stint, I resorted to the radio.

Evening/late-night radio is a very different beast to its daytime equivalent. The playlists are different for a start, and the phone-in show is king. I'm allergic to Radio 4, I think. I can't be bothered with reviews of the latest pile of shite on at the Barbican, or interviews with the latest shyster to unveil another bigger pile of shite at the Tate Modern, and I've never found I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue that funny. I think Radio 4 is something you listen to when you grow up, and I'm yet to do so, and I'm too old for Radio 1, too young for Radio 2 and not enough of a classical music buff for Radio 3, and BBC WM is utter, utter bilge (unless there's a Villa match on, natch.) so I was stuck with the commercial stations. Now, you listen to enough of these for a while, you learn a few things.

The adverts, for a start, are mostly the government telling you to behave. Road tax evasion, benefit fraud, binge drinking, sharing needles and unprotected sex are all frowned upon. And so they should be, but it was like Chinese water torture listening to these ads again and again. There's one particular ad that warns against unprotected sex, which is a lad with a Liverpudlian accent telling me about his genital herpes that I must've heard about seven hundred and fifty-eight times in the last week. Talk about the City of Culture! I got so sick of hearing about this Scouser's scabby scrotal sac (alliteration!!) that I'm never going to wear a condom ever again just to spite him. (That may sound reckless, but it's okay, as Pope Benedict XVI probably gets more action than me lately!)

The people who get on these late-night phone-in discussion shows must be vetted to make the host sound clever. I've always wondered who can be bothered to phone up these shows anyway, and why are they still up? They can't have any work or anything meaningful to do, as they'd be doing it and wouldn't have the time. They obviously don't want to sleep, or they do sleep during the day and miss every news bulletin because most of them don't have a clue what's going on around them. So, generally, the host draws his conclusions on the topic of the night on the opinions of a bunch of lonely, ill-informed insomniacs with nothing better to do. For example, one show I listened to had Nick Pope on, he was the MOD's UFO investigator for a few years, and he was talking about all his reports which are soon to published under the Freedom of Information Act, and he said something along the lines of 'some information, such as addresses, and sensitive military and technical data will still be censored, this is for security reasons, but the conspiracy theorists will have a field day saying it's something else.' To which some bloke (from Sheldon, just up the road from me) phoned in and replied "Why does he use the words 'conspiracy theory'? It ain't a theory, it's real. Aliens have been coming down and mutilating our cats for years! That's a fact!" (Actually, later on in the same show, they had James Randi on, the famous sceptic, who has offered a million dollars of his own money to anyone who can conclusively prove to him that they have psychic powers. The money's stayed in his account so far. During his interview, they had a break which featured an advertisement for Derek Acorah's upcoming show at the Birmingham Alex. Well planned, that was. It's almost as if Derek knew...)

Anyway, I've survived listening to all this (I found it amusing, for the most part) to get this book finished, and it's going to leave a bit of a hole in my life for the immediate future (actually, some of the characters end up with a bit of a hole in them as well!) but there might be a sequel, so I don't think I've seen the last of Marley just yet. I was just thinking the other day that since i started working on this I've gone through a marriage break-up, a house move and four other break ups. Bloody hell. Let's hope the sequel is drawn during a less 'interesting' time!

Tinselitis: Slight Return

Christmas is coming, and the goose is getting morbidly obese, and all that shite. I've left the Christmas shopping extremely late this year, on account of being potless and always at work at either my dull day job, or my glamorous art career. (If you can call it 'glamorous', or a 'career', come to that!)

I made a good start this week, but man, do I hate Christmas shopping and all the annoying crap that surrounds it. Like standing in queues and being cold, and avoiding other shoppers who decide to suddenly change direction, or worse still,just stop dead in front of you, leaving you a braking distance of about four inches. Listening to the same bloody Christmas records over and over and over again, and getting annoyed at the records that aren't Yuletide songs, but end up on these bloody festive compilations just because they had a Christmassy video, and that bothers me, for some reason. Songs like Stay Now by East 17, The Power Of Love by Frankie Goes To Hollywood and Keeping The Dream Alive by Freiheit are lyrically nothing to do with the festive season!! Alright?!! Stop bloody playing them!!

I know a sound like a curmudgeonly Scrooge-type, but I hate the forced friendliness that retailers insist their staff use on us, the stressed out customers. I like the normal 'get what you want to buy, take it to the counter, pay for it, and fuck off' system thats employed the other ten months of the year. I don't want to have yuletide smalltalk with shop assistants. They don't really give a toss whether I've finished my Christmas shopping or not. I was in WH Smiths the other day, purchasing a video game for my youngest daughter. The game is based on a popular cartoon character, and the girl serving me was a big fan of this character and was filling me in on the history of him. All well and good, but by that point in my shopping hell, I really wasn't interested, I just wanted to go home. But, lo and behold, the game's barcode wouldn't scan, so she had to bugger off for ten minutes to find it, leaving me standing at the counter like a spare prick. It would've been unbearable but for the girl on the next till who was wearing a rather revealing blouse (apologies for the Sid James-type sexism that will follow) and kept bending down to get carrier bags and showing me her 'goods', so to speak. Smiths have a campaign at the moment in which they donate some money or something to help plant trees every time someone refuses a carrier bag, so I was getting annoyed at the do-gooders who wanted to save the environment, because it meant the girl wasn't bending down to get a bag. I was thinking 'bollocks to the environment!' (I know I'm sounding like an old lech, but you really can't argue with the truth.)
Anyway, the more sombrely dressed girl who was serving me came back with the appropriate barcode and proceeded to tell me all about an old college friend of hers who asked for her mobile number, but she wouldn't give it to him because he didn't phone her up the last time she gave him her number. I don't care, just take my money and let me go home!! For fuck's sake!!

Also, during a shopping expedition, I bumped into my eldest daughter, who was buying gifts for her schoolfriends, and she also happened to be with her boyfriend. Now, the other day, after finding out she had a boyfriend, I jokingly said to her (acting like all the fathers of girls I've been out with, and once, I even met the father of my girlfriend for the first time after I'd already impregnated her. That was fun!) that if I ever met him, I'd rip his balls off. I was only joking, really! Anyway, she told him what I'd said, the devious little cow, so when I bumped into them in the BullRing shopping Mall, he promptly turned about face and fled. Surely I'm not that scary! I feel bad now. I've still not finished my shopping, either.

Anyway, despite all this, I do like Christmas, and I hope all of you out there that actually take the time to read the cobblers I write, have a great Christmas and an even better New Year, and remember, enjoy alcohol responsibly!

Local rivalries.

The best header of that particular season!

There's a weird atmosphere at work this week. It's weird most of the time, but this week it's worse. Everyone's tense. The reason? Derby day. Birmingham City are playing the mighty Aston Villa at St. Andrew's on Sunday. (this is referred to in the media as 'The West Midlands derby', but it isn't. It's the Birmingham derby. If we were playing Coventry or Wolves-that's a West Midlands derby! Right-that's off my chest.)

You see, I am and always have been a Villain ( 'Villa', apparently, was the first word I could write. After that, I was taught to write 'Elvis', so I had V's and L's down pat pretty quickly. This was last year. (c) shit punchlines limited 2007 ) and so are a few of my colleagues. The majority support that other shower and are known locally as 'Bluenoses' (or 'wankers' by us Villa supporters), and most of the time, I get on okay with the noses. I might even call some of them 'friends', but all that goes out of the window for ninety minutes on Sunday.
I enjoy the banter, the piss-taking and the rivalry, most of the time. There are tossers from both Blue and Claret-and-Blue who can give it but can't take it shouting their mouths off. There's monetary wagers being set-up (a recipe for disaster). There are the rogue colleagues who support West Brom who watch from the sidelines with amusement, and there are the odd total fuck knuckles who support Man U or Liverpool who don't really give a toss about what's happening locally, as they're glory-hunting bastards.

Like I said, I enjoy the banter. But only when we've won! The stick I got when we got beat 3-0 a few seasons ago was unreal. My clock card and locker had '3-0' written on them in permanent marker. My coat was covered in royal blue plastic and I had to listen to 'Keep Right On' all fucking day because someone had brought it in on CD. This is on top of all the verbal abuse I had to suffer. But what can you do? You have to take it, knowing that one day you'll have your turn. And we did.
Anyway, it's tense this time round, as Villa are playing like shit lately. We've not won away from home all season. Even with a 4-1 lead at Spurs we managed to draw! Blues are losing a lot, but they played well against Liverpool and Man Utd, but they were absolute shit against Everton, so both sets of supporters don't really have a lot of confidence in their teams for the big match. But, that said, I'm looking forward to it, as it's the only proper local derby left in the Premier league these days (all the other ones are blighted by the prawn sandwich glory hunting bastard supporters who are from other parts of the country than the club they 'support', so all that 'local' rivalry isn't that important to them. Villa and Blues tend to have mostly local support-probably because neither of us have won fuck-all for ages-Blues never!).

Right, no more football talk now, I promise.

UP THE VILLA!

Egg-chucking.

I know this isn't exactly topical, with it all being finished last week (I've been a busy boy), but I'm glad the rugby world cup is over.
I know there's a lot of rugby fans out there. I can understand the appeal, it's a fast, violent sport, and I was pleased England got as far as they did (which pissed off my Scottish girlfriend. Sport's always good for rubbing the sweaty socks' noses in it) and was genuinely disappointed when they didn't win it.
What really pisses me off is the response to the tournament in the newspaper's letters pages that I've read in the last week. It's all been the same old "our football players could learn a lot from our rugby players" cobblers that was being spouted after the last rugby world cup. (These same letters pages were all saying the opposite at the beginning of the tournament, when England were playing shite.) Football , (or 'soccer' if you're from across the pond. I hate that term) is Britain's most popular sport. Always has been. Always will be. Rugby Union may be popular for the next fortnight or so, but it'll soon fade, just as it did four years ago, and that was when we actually won something!
I know a lot of Premier League players misbehave. I also know a lot more of them do loads of charity work and support a lot of schemes helping their clubs' local communities. I also know that, because of football's position as the number one sport, these players are under a lot more scrutiny than their egg-chucking counterparts, so any bad behaviour by a football player is going to turn up immediately in the papers. In fact, I seem to remember Lawrence Dallaglio making the papers for an alleged cocaine scandal, and Will Carling's various alleged trysts with women who weren't his wife, one of whom was the wife of the future king of England. (There goes the knighthood, eh, Will?) so, the paragons of virtues that are rugby union players aren't exactly that pearly white, are they?
And this is what pisses me off. All this moaning about our football players is just downright snobbery. Professional footballers are generally working class men who piss some people off because they make lots of money. (which is only right, in my opinion. I've never believed that footballers shouldn't make a lot of money. They are part of an entetainment industry, which in itself makes a lot of money. It's only right they should see some of the profits, as they're the ones punters are paying to see, and it is a very short career. I don't blame them for trying to make as much money as they can when they can. Hardly anyone moans about Tom Cruise making twenty million dollars a movie, which I think is more abhorrent. Have you seen Days Of Thunder?!)
Rugby players are, on the other hand, mostly middle-class. Until recently, they weren't even paid for playing rugger as they all had posh jobs like being accountants or quantity surveyors or company directors during the week. It seems to me that it's okay for rugby players to get pissed up (with members of the royal family, no less! I think I might join the army, if it's anything like Prince Harry's time in the forces, you get to get pissed as much as you like, go to swanky nightclubs and big sporting events all the time, and not actually do any fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan.), as it's just high spirits. If footballers do the same,(especially after losing an important match) it's another indictment of the sorry state of our national sport. It's just out-and-out snobbery and it shows that the class system is alive and well in our country, despite protestations to the contrary.
Right. I'm off to get pissed, now.

Clobberin' Time!

On Saturday night, I went to see the new Fantastic Four movie with my new lady friend. Wasn't that bothered about seeing it, because the first one was a pile of shit, but seeing as this was supposed to be a date, the other films on (Hostel 2, Captivity, Vacancy and some film about Edith Piaf) weren't exactly suitable, we plumped for the Silver Surfer. I have a very deep fondness for the 60s FF (It was Kirby at his zenith, even more amazing when you consider the amount of books he was churning out month after month at the time), and I wasn't keen on seeing it bollocksed up for the second time.

Now, my new lady friend knows I'm a comics geek, but I think she's unaware how deep my sickness is. When I watch films based on comics I love, I have to split my brain into two halves; the nerd half and the normal half. The normal half thought the film was 'alright', it passed an hour and half amiably enough. The nerd half of my brain was going 'Hate it! Hate it! Make it stop!'

Now if you've not seen it and want to, there will be spoilers so stop reading now. What is the point of adapting a popular comic into a film, then taking out most of what makes the comic popular in the first place? as I said before, I love the old Lee/Kirby Fantastic Four stuff. A highlight of their epic collaboration was 'The Coming Of Galactus!", which the new film is based on. Now, I'm not expecting a totally faithful adaptation, certain aspects of the story, like Uatu the watcher's intervention, (told you this nerdiness was a sickness!) just wouldn't work on screen. But to have a film which spends most of its time building up to a showdown with Galactus, who devours planets, only to have it not happen, is rubbish. And turning Galactus from a giant man with a tuning fork helmet into a big dust cloud with fingers is even more rubbish! The picture above shows you what Galactus looks like, in no way does he even remotely resemble a cloud. A cloud that sticks its fingers into the holes in the earth that the Silver Surfer has made like some giant cosmic bowling ball. After the film finished I was thinking, "who's going to fill them holes in? That's going to take some work." Not out loud, obviously. Like I said, she doesn't know how geeky I really am ! One of Jack Kirby's great talents was his character designs (Along with the FF, and myriad others, he's also responsible for Hulk, Captain America, Thor, X-Men, along with their most memorable villains) and his design for the Thing is great. I love Ben Grimm, he's not your usual tights and cape superhero, he's a big talking turd. The film takes this great design and makes it look rubbish. It's got to be one of the cheapest-looking make up jobs I've seen for ages. Also, when you have such a striking-looking character like Galactus, who was designed by a genius, it seems odd that Hollywood thinks it can do better, and that a big dust cloud is superior. Well it's not.

The film seems designed to do two things. One, it seems to be designed to launch the Silver Surfer into his own film franchise, which might be good. He's a great character and the films based on the comics could be interesting, but Hollywood will mess it up. They've taken liberties with him in this film already. He's gained the ability to phase through stuff, like Kitty Pryde (Nerdy comics reference again!), which, I don't remember him doing in the comics. Generally, though, I thought ol' Norrin Radd looked cool in this film, they obviously spent more money on him than they did on poor old Ben Grimm.

The second thing this film is designed to do is to advertise stuff. the product placement in this film is astonishing. Even the fucking Fantasticar has a Dodge logo on its bonnet!

Also, Jessica Alba is a rubbish actress. She looks nice enough, but she's the weakest link of the FF. They make her wear really unconvincing blue contact lenses and blonde wig, which makes me wonder why they didn't cast someone more talented who is actually blonde with blue eyes. Maybe they should've cast a real talking turd as Ben Grimm, as well. While we're on the subject of rubbish acting, Julian McMahon is terrible as Doctor Doom. Doom is the baddest bastard in the Marvel Universe, but in the movie he's some wooden girly bloke who spends his time smirking and trying to look evil and failing. Thank the Broccolis he didn't get the Bond gig. I did enjoy the bit when he pinched Norrin's surfboard, but it's still not as good as when it happened in the comic. And as for turning Johnny into a type of Super-Skrull at the end- meh!

At least the film only lasted an hour and half, a pleasant change from all the bum-numbing threequels I've been sitting through lately, and it's not all bad. Despite his shitty costume, Michael Chiklis' performance as the Thing is spot-on, and Chris Evans (not the ginger ex-Billie shagger) is great as Johnny, although him walking around with his shirt off makes me feel inadequate, especially when I'm with a lady. My physique is bound to look rubbish in comparison! Saying that though, my physique looks rubbish when compared to most people!

Also, this was the first time in years I've been to a cinema of an evening and without kids in tow. I nearly fainted when they charged eleven quid for two tickets! Bloody Hell! Considering the fact that a new DVD costs about £14 these days, cinemas better stop ripping people off or they will find themselves obsolete. It's got HD and Blu-Ray and surround sound 50" plasma screens to compete with these days, so it better buck its ideas up. Eleven quid!! It's not as if the film was worth it! Basically. If you're not a comics nerd, you might like it, if you are, just re-read the original comic strips. I think they're in the collection Essential Fantastic Four vol.3, which you can get for a tenner, a whole quid cheaper than the pictures, and about thirty times more rewarding!

Just not cricket.

I hate cricket. It's a stupid game. It's so bloody middle class. All that guff about cricket on the village green and stopping for tea harks back to an England that never existed. Not for me, anyway.
My local county cricket club, in Edgbaston (a resolutely middle-class suburb), is Warwickshire, a county Birmingham is no longer part of, and hasn't been part of for at least as long as I've been alive. If there was a West Midlands County cricket club, I still wouldn't support them. It might be different in other counties, but they're isn't really a West Midlands identity. Maybe it's because it's a relatively new county, but there isn't as much pride in being a West Midlander as, say, a Yorkshireman has in his county, nor do we have a county stereotype like Essex has.
Brummies couldn't give a fuck about Coventry, or Wolverhampton, or Walsall, and neither could they give a reciprocal fuck about Birmingham. That's why football is better. When you go to a footie match, there's a real sense of belonging to your community.(Unless you're a Man Utd. supporter, in which case you could be from anywhere! Glory hunting bastards.)
The game of cricket itself is stupid. They play in the summer but wear jumpers. They stop for tea. They can play a game for five days and still draw. Commentators say stuff like 'silly mid-off'
and 'gully' and expect you to know what they're on about, and they don't want to explain it to oiks like me in case I get interested and want to take my working-class arse into Edgbaston.It's such a snobby game! I mean, it's only been in the last few years that women could go into Lord's club.
The snobbery reared its head in the recent Andrew/Freddie Flintoff 'falling off a pedalo pissed' incident. There were a couple of people saying it was a disgrace, but generally the consensus was that "he's been a bit of a silly boy, but boys will be boys, let him get on with his cricket" (which I kind of agree with. The most exciting sportsmen, generally, are the pissheads- Alex Higgins, Maradona, Botham, Gazza, Paul Merson, George Best, Greavsie-the list goes on and on...) but if you imagine that if it was an English footballer at a World Cup that fell off a pedalo whilst pissed up the reaction would be 'SEND THIS DRUNKEN YOB HOME!!', because football is still seen as a game for oiks (although, lately, it's priced out of this particular oik's price range), and is played by mostly working class men, and if we do things like get drunk, it's an outrage, but if a cricketer does it, it's just horseplay.
The recent suspicious death of Pakistan coach Bob Woolmer ( whose name sounds a lot like a local Central TV newsreader; I initially thought Bob Warman had been killed suspiciously!) and the Cronje match-fixing scandal shows that cricket is totally corrupt and is probably as fixed as wrestling is. (Although, recent events in Italy show us that football isn't squeaky clean either.)

Cricket is a throwback to the empire, and we should leave it the past, and it's kind of ironic that the countries we once lorded over keep beating us at it. I can't wait for this cricket world cup to finish.

Mithering Sunday

I thought the humour on this year's Comic Relief was in very bad taste. Those sketches based in Africa just weren't funny. What we want is more Mr. Bean!
Not really. I avoided Comic Relief completely this year. I hate the whole notion of millionaires asking me for my money. Don't get me wrong, the causes are a good ones, and I do give to charity quite often, I just don't like being pressganged into giving money. Even if you go out drinking on the night, like I did, you still get arseholes dressed as the Pink Panther or something bothering you in the pub by waving buckets of change at you. I don't even know if these people are on the level or not. Those buckets of change could be paying for the Paddy's Day piss-up the night after. Still it makes a change from those people with buckets of roses (the flower, not the individually wrapped Cadbury's choccies) who try and lay a guilt trip on you if you don't buy the lady you're with one of their minging flowers.
Speaking of Paddy's Day, everyone celebrating it in town yesterday had the same hat on. It was a leprechaun-type titfer but with the top being a felt facsimile of a pint of Guinness. I'm from Irish stock (probably why I'm called Mick and not #shudder# Mike.) but I hate going out on St. Patrick's Day. The pubs are full of English people with Ireland rugby shirts on who think that having a long-lost decendent who was from Donegal somehow makes them more interesting. They'll still support England in the World Cup. I generally hate all displays of public patriotism. I really am a miserable killjoy bastard.
Today, as you all know, is Mothering Sunday, but I'm not really close to my Mom. I've not bought her anything as I think today is supposed to be an acknowledgement of all the hard work your mother does, and I don't think that I have a lot to acknowledge. I feel a little guilty about this, but I think she should feel more guilty.
In other news, the story Why Can't I be You? a strip I drew for writer Daniel Cox nearly two years ago, is finally going to see the light of day. I'm glad about his, as this strip has a lot of art in it that I consider among some of my best pieces. It should be on sale at the Bristol Comic Con. My character designs for Septic Isle are also being highly praised, and I'm nearing the point where I can actually do the pages. Also, I'm going to feature on an online gallery called Art Peeps which features a lot of local artists, as well as a Birmingham City Council online artists' database. Things are beginning to happen to me and my artwork now, after months of famine, it looks like there might be a feast soon.

Going back to the Mother's Day theme, here is a clip involving an awkward call to your parents:

Tramps-Elysées

About a year ago, the bus I used to catch home stopped virtually outside my place of employment. It doesn't anymore. It now stops about a ten-minute walk away, on the lovely road known as Digbeth High Street. Think of the Champs-Elysées, now imagine its polar opposite. You are now seeing how Digbeth is. The walk to the bus stop is, most of the time, dull, but every now and again, the traipse chucks up something shocking, like the time I saw a fight involving a broken bottle, and a man taking out his dentures in readiness for the punch-up. There's the woman who uses the same stop, but thankfully, catches a different bus, who carries around childish watercolours under her arm, and keeps asking other patrons of Travel West Midlands their opinions of her work. They're rubbish, but no-one wants to say so, as she is obviously mental.

I only bring all of this up (pardon the pun) because on Monday afternoon, I was trudging towards the bus-stop when I saw an elderly woman at another bus stop. Her head was down, and I thought she was inspecting her ankle, because it looked swollen and was covered in scabs and sores, and must've been giving her gyp. As I walked past her, though, she made a horrible wet retching noise and vomited onto the floor, narrowly missing my shoes. I could see now, that, she wasn't as old as I thought she was, and she was what's known locally as a 'pisshead'. Lovely. I'm sure they breed people who regularly drink in the afternoon in a tank somewhere. They seem to be a different species to everybody else.

When I finally got to my bus stop, I noticed that the phantom scribbler had struck again. Every now and then, the bus stop gets covered in racist graffiti by a kind of gonzo Jim Davidson. He sometimes lists all of the minorities he hates, with 'kill all' on top of the list. Nice. Well, on Monday, he put a speech bubble by one of the silhouettes on an EasyJet advert saying "I hate pakis". This was obvious, because they're included on the list on the reverse of this advertisement hoarding. I was standing by this when two Asian lads came past, read the graffiti, and shouted " You hate pakis? Well fuck your mother up the arse!"at me as they were walking past. This was probably because I was the only caucasian at the bus stop.

I shouted "I didn't fucking write it!!" back at them as they went, but they weren't interested in a debate.

Digbeth is a shithole, and if people come to Brum by National Express, it's the first thing they see of the city, as the bus station is there. (Like New St. Station, another shithole, is the first thing they see if they come by train) It's no wonder people think Birmingham is a dump. Thing is, Digbeth is the site of our annual St. Patrick's Day Parade, which is, apparently, the third biggest in the world, which brings in a lot of visitors, who would be far from impressed if they see the kind of shit I see every day. I believe there are plans to flatten it, and redevelop, and if that's true, the sooner the better. Let's hope they flatten the cunt who keeps writing on the bus stop as well.