What a long, strange, trip it's been.

Well, actually, no, it hasn't - I mean it's only been three weeks (and a day, for those of a more hawk-eyed persuasion) but we've smashed through the 1,000 hits ceiling. That's like an average of about 45ish hits per day!

Wow...

Who'da thunk that an odd fat bloke, spouting rubbish, could make people waste their valuable time for no financial reward? Not me, certainly. I'm the Captain of the HMS Suprised, sailing out of The small South-Seas port of HaventYouLotGotAnythingBetterToDo.

-oOo-

Anywho, I suppose I'd better give you lot what you came for, rather than this self-congratulatory nonsence. If only I knew what it is you people actually wanted!

When I got home from work last night, there was a package waiting for me, it was some very good friends of mine who now reside in (or near at least) Boston MA. It was squidgy and soft, my first thought was that it was the possum gizzards that I'd asked them to look out for, but no.

It was a rather spiffing T-Shirt with the slogan Boba Fett for President

I was immensely pleased with this item as Mr Fett is my favourite:

• Mandalorian
• Sarlacc survivor
• Star Wars character

(Thinking about it, if I'd changed the order of that list a little I could have saved me some typing - Hey, I don't pay by the character, stuff it!)

The thing is, I have no idea why he's my favourite - I mean, he wears an outfit cobbled together from a boilersuit, BMX pads and shoes that look as if they're made by Converse, he doesn't say very much in the way of pithy one-liners, every time he uses his jet-pack it always ends up with him having some wacky flight control problems and he doesn't seem to be able to shoot straight to save his life.

If you just take your view of Bubba Boba from the films then he's a bit of a loser, But then you think - The poor kid's earliest defining moment was prising his Dad's still warm head out of his helmet with a fish-slice, so I guess we should maybe cut him some slack.

I think it might be the idea of Boba Fett that I like rather than the reality (reality of a fictional character? - wheels within wheels dude!) The merchandising, the mythosaur skull logo - He's like an Intergalactic James Bond flying an orbital sander, the 'Bad' version of Han Solo.

I don't know, and it doesn't really matter. He's totally Badass

What I do know is that I'm wearing the shirt to work on Friday, before my daughter steals it and I never see it again

If I should die, think only this...

　
If anyone ever asks you, it's big and black, it looks like it's been burned, put out with dragon urine, burned again, lovingly sanded and repainted a rather fetching Baby Blue, then burned, with burning dragon urine and put out with a meat tenderising mallet. it has skulls and spikes, batwings and buckles and other, assorted things that you might find in a particularly interesting Goth girl's 'special' underwear drawer.

What am I describing? my current location of course - Death's door... I have been laid low by that most virulent of mortal agues, Columbian non returnable suppurating man-flu. I am officially dead, I am dictating today's Blog from beyond what you mere readers, would describe as 'The Grave' to a small medium (can you have a Small medium? are all mediums by their very nature, medium? - That would explain why they all wear such similar clothes.) called Gracie who just happened to be wandering past Dandy Towers as I was in the final throes of putrefaction.

Every time I cough, my lungs actually swap places.

When'ere I sneeze, I have to reel my eyes back into my skull with a handle on the side of my head, mounted for just that purpose.

To describe the inside of my head as 'Wooly' would not do justice to the 1.8 million sheep, all called Francoise, who are currently in residence within my metacortex.

If I lie down, there is a very real chance that I will drown in my own filthy, undulating ichor.

If I stand up for more than a few seconds, I feel as if I am about to fall, poleaxed, like an AT-AT that has been tripped by a virus-laden tow cable.

My eyes relay the world to me as a series of disjointed, abstract flashes of colour and brightness that I can only make sense of by looking at them through closed eyelids.

You may mock, especially if you are of the female persuasion. But it is a serious illness to which more NHS research budget should be diverted... Possibly away from things like 'Having a bit of a tummy ache' and 'Finding out why people sometimes cry uncontrollably when they're drunk'

I suggest that an entirely new branch of medicinal research should be instigated, purely to provide ways of dealing with the symptoms of this insidious virulence. There should be clinics full of nurses who would be trained to make sure that the infectee was never without those really soft tissues that men are too manly to buy, but are really nice on your nose. They should have something approaching a Utility Belt that contains various curatives, both medicinal and otherwise, such as medicated sweets and hand-held games consoles.

(Hang on, just need a second to work out the Nurse's Uniform / Batsuit combo)

...

(Nope)

...

(Gonna need another couple of minutes)

...

Anywho, enough of my problems, I'm trying to soldier on, stiff upper lip and all that, mustn't grumble. Although now that I come to mention it, I am a little short of breath... Beads of sweat forming the outline of a hang-gliding lion on my forehead... Vision... Fading... Ears... Ringing...

Nurse!

Something for the Weekend?

Hands up, all those people who thought it was funny when your Ever-Lovin' Chimpster got a job at a Hairdressers? One, two, some, many - is that two people at the back or one person with both hands up? What? Oh, that's not your hand... You're very kind sir, but I'm not that way inclined.

OK, keep your hands up if you thought was even funnier when I found out that I had to work one day a year in an actual salon, with real people, who have actual hair?

And keep them up if you thought this was even funnier when you remembered I am, for all intents and purposes, bald?

Now, take a look around at all the people who still have their hands up, don't forget the one guy standing behind the pot-plant in the corner, pretending to be a... a... What the hell are you doing to that Sturgeon? put it down! No, not there!, nobody's going to want that now are they, Where the hell did you get a wheelbarrow full of butterscotch Angel Delight? - Anyway, I digress, none of you are getting Christmas cards this year, you people who put your hands down at any point? Neither are you. It's nothing personal, I'm just not sending cards this year, I'm skint.

Back to the story - I called the Salon in Derby yesterday to announce that I would be arriving first thing in the morning to 'Do my thang!' You could hear the faint smell of panic and tightening of sphincters all the way in Coventry. I put the phone down and made inappropriate jokes about my minimal amount of power over people who didn't know who I was. Then I heard a funny noise.

'What was that?'

'What?'

'That noise - The Beeep-Beep noise?'

'You've had a text on your BlackBerry'

'Really? Weird'

'Never had a text before?'

'Not on my work phone, no.'

So feeling a little stupid, I read the text, it said: [Do you like Black or White coffee?] Now, you have to admit that this a strange first text for anyone to recieve. I assumed that it was from the salon, and made a mental note to pick up some milk on my way in, nothing like being prepared. Then, again, Beeep-Beep! Knowing now what this noise signified, I checked my phone, it said: [Do you like puppies?] - Never has my Flabber been more Ghasted! (c) Frankie Howerd 1973. At this point, my colleague over the other side of the office dissolved into fits of giggles, it turns out that he had remote controlled the salon's computer, and got it to send me the texts. Touche Monsieur, Touche!

So I arrived at the salon at the crack of 9:30(ish) to be told that the manager had rang in sick, and the poor stylist had no real idea what was going on.

'I'm here to help you guys out, I can do whatever you need me to'

'You're not here to spy on us and report back on all the things that we're doing wrong?'

Did I mention that I'm a terrible liar? 'No..?' I squealed, like a constipated gecko. I think there was a chance that she may have seen through my complex web of subterfuge and deceit.

'Would you like me to, erm, clean something?'

'OK, how about those shelves?'

'All those? But there must be all of about, oh, I don't know, eight of them or something'

If I'm honest, the next three hours, flew past pretty quicky, and by the time I'd finished the first shelf I had gained the trust, and if I'm honest, grudging admiration of the entire staff, of one person... With my lightning powers of calculation, I figured that the other seven shelves would take me twenty-one hours. I am not a born shelf cleanerer it seems. I decided that my further efforts should be concentrated in a purely managerial / audit capacity. I weighed up the options, balanced what I knew about the salon against what I needed to know, turned to the poor stylist that I had been torturing with my very presence and said'

'I'm going for lunch'

Lunch was a pretty grown up affair consisting of a litre of Chocolate milkshake and a slice of pizza, that took me exactly the one hour to consume *cough*

On my return to the salon, things were getting busy, real people were having real treatments done to them by qualified people who seemed to actually know what they were doing, I felt very much out of my depth.

'I'm going to pop down to the other salon, and see what I can do down there'

'Uh-huh,' said the stylist. In fairness, I could have said 'I'm going to take this tin of beans and see how long it takes me to make it boil by just staring dissapprovingly at it.' And she would have cared exactly as much.

Down I went, into a similar situation again, Different salon, different stylist, same air of 'I know you're trying to help, but will you just get out of my way and let me do what I'm good at.'

Luckily, we have three salons in Derby, so I went to the third. Here at least, I made an impact. Oh yes... Impact.

If you were to think of the four words guaranteed to chill the blood of the average person, what would they be?

You're going to die?

I'm afraid it's positive?

Yes it is loaded?

Why should I care?

I feel that I found four words that trumped all of these today... 'I'm from Head Office' - It struck fear into the very entrails of the assembled staff, brushes were dropped, jaws hit floors, customers chairs spun around uncontrollably making the Zoidberg 'Whoop-whoop-whoop' noise, all hell was, quite literally, let loose.

Do you remember the seagulls from Finding Nemo? - Instead of 'Mine!' the cry that went up from the assembled staff was 'You want the Manager!' So the manager was found, I explained who I was, we all had a great laugh as we hosed the urine out of the salon and I completed my audit, such as it was.

The rest of the afternoon was fairly uneventful, I did a bit of shopping and started my weekend an hour or so earlier than usual.

All in all, not a complete waste of a day.

(Please note, there is a significant amount of artistic license used in this dramatisation, everyone I met today was great and I would have no problem spending an entire day cleaning a shelf for them sometime in the future - Whether any of them feel the same way, well you'd have to ask them)

But, if'n I wasn't me

Even the most content of us must have sometimes thought 'I wish I had that' or 'I wish I could do that' mustn't we?

I know I have, jealousy is the engine of aspiration is it not? If we were completely happy with what we had, why would we ever try to better ourselves?

But have you ever thought 'I wish I was him (or Her - Delete as neccesary).'? Meaning that you could actually sit inside their head like a phantom marmoset and experience what they experienced, get the adulation that was meant for them but you so richly deserve. Go to the right parties, get invited to the grand openings, have intimate knowledge of the right, if slightly underweight, supermodels?

No?

Really? It can't be just me surely... Bugger!

OK, I guess it's declaration time, I'll do that thing that they make you do at your first AA meeting (or so I've heard)...

My name's The Chimping Dandy, and when I was ten years old, I wanted to be Martin Shaw! You know, out of The ProfessionalsWith Lewis Collins and the butler dude from Upstairs Downstairs. I swear, if you looked up the word 'Man' in a dictionary, in 1978 there would be a picture of Martin Shaw, naked to the waist, with an RPG in one hand, a half-eaten side of beef in the other and a simpering blonde curled around his feet looking up at him adoringly.
There was nothing Shaw couldn't do, he could kick his way through doors, slide over the bonnets (hoods) of 3.0s Ford Capris, kick, punch, spit and everything else that the modern (70's) man needed to be able to do.

He was a Gerd (as in ErmaGerd!) and I may have modelled my image on him for longer than was strictly neccesary. In fact, I remember a school art project where we were asked to draw a self-portrait over the holidays, and my art teacher said 'It's very good, but I didn't ask you to draw Martin Shaw' - I was also still wearing fake leather jackets and Loon Pants / Bell Bottoms well into the 80's - Which, with hindsight, could have been one of the things that crimped my chances with more fashion concious girls, or girls in general for that matter, Although...

It wore off of course, as these things so often do... I mean it's not completely gone, I don't think you can ever truly forget the first person who you wanted to go all 'Single White Female' on. Occasionally, I catch an episode of Judge John Deed, look longingly at his full head of hair and a tear comes to my eye.

I've grown out of all that now of course, one puts away Childlike things doesn't one?

Although, thinking about it, I reckon wi' a bit o' practice, ah could get clurse t' Guy Martin's accent... Aye, grew aht me sidebons, put on t' boil'rsuit - Aye, that's reet nice, When's next bert f' th' Isle o' Mann? - Smart as Y' lake.

Pandas, the Eastern Scourge

Pandas, by which I specifically mean the Giant Panda or Ailuropoda melanoleuca for the taxonomically inclined amongst us. What are they all about?

I mean, seriously - What the flip is going on with them? - A decent sized Panda weighs about the same as a small Grizzly Bear (about 25st) they've got huge teeth and claws, big enough to tear you limb from limb in a heartbeat, Yet they seem to be the sweetest natured animals on the face of the Earth - I tried (for research purposes - Try typing Angry Panda into Google, it just feels weird) to find instances of angry pandas - And could pretty much only find evidence of one pretty grumpy one called Gu-Gu who bit three people who got into his enclosure, one of whom bit him back! - I'm guessing he was only upset because he was named after the first words the zookeeper's baby said.

There's a video on YouTube that comes up when you search, I wouldn't bother watching it, it's pretty much a Panda barking and waving his paws at a couple of other Pandas who got too close to his pile of bamboo. If that's what goes for an 'Angry Panda' nowadays, I think they need to change the title to 'Somewhat miffed Panda coughs politley and points out what is obviously his lunch'.

Then you've got the whole bamboo thing! Pandas have huge carnivore teeth, rippey, bitey, tearey teeth for eating goats and yetis and other things you'd find in the mountains... But no, they eat bamboo which has less nutrient qualities than celery and you need a completely different set of teeth to eat it successfully. They have to eat about a tenth of their bodyweight a day, in bamboo, to get anything out of it - Where's the sense in that?

Luckily they're not completely stupid they do supplement their diet in the wild with the occasional bit of carrion and.. erm... grass and bees and stuff probably, but still, they should ideally be hiding in trees, pretending to be.. erm.. [Insert name of huge black and white thing you'd expect to find in a tree and wouldn't seem strange at all] by the side of secluded trails, dropping down on unsuspecting sherpas and eating their brains with a spoon. (Oh... Zombie Panda.. File that under 'Next Flash Fiction story ideas')

You know, in captivity, they feed them cupcakes? - Not all the time I grant you, but all the same, feeding the cutest animal in the world with the cutest food item in the world - It's amazing that anyone accidentally seeing this spectacle doesn't just explode by achieving critical cuteness. You can picture the scene -

[Chinese] 'And here ladies and gentlemen, you will see Mung Mung being fed blueberry muffins by my lovely assistant Doof Lee Chung' (Noises off: series of small, wet explosions from the direction of the crowd) 'No! it's happening again! put down the cupcakes Lee Chung... Put down the Aaarggghh!' [/Chinese] Fade to black

Oh yes, another thing that I didn't know before today... They've got thumbs (kinda) and if evolution goes their way, then it won't be long, in a geological sense, before they start to use them... I don't mean hitch-hiking their way out of the bamboo line and going for a trot down Peking High Street, I mean fashioning bamboo into swords and shields and inventing coconut powered lasers and suchlike.

And Kung-Fu Panda is a very real concern, you know how they let gorillas watch TV in the zoos to keep them entertained? What if they do the same with Pandas - They maybe already do... One day, Ping Chin Min the Panda wrangler decides that it's Bloop Bloop's birthday and he could do with a bit of cheering up, sticks on Disney's finest and before you know it, you've got 350lbs of black and white fury spinning around it's enclosure flinging cupcakes at people and playing Tenacious D guitar solos! Don't laugh guys, it's stuff like this that keeps me awake at night.

It wouldn't take much for an evil genius to make an unstoppable army of Pandas would it?

I for one, welcome our monochrome overlords with open arms. Now... Where's that cupcake recipe?

Hwit, Hwisdom & Cool Hwip

OK, so I've been putting off the Nickleback post - but seeing as the amount of people visiting the blog has plummeted since we had the 'Supreme Being' talk. It's obviously time that I got a bit more mainstream and started laying into the easy targets.

Nickleback are a bunch of guys from Canada who are presumably following the Canadian teenage boys dream of finding a job that doesn't involve chopping down majestic Larch & Redwood trees, not having to work as a Paul Bunyan impersonator, staying warm and not becoming an alcoholic (or is that Finland? - I always get the two confused) - Formed by the Kroeger brothers in the '90s as a covers band and going on to meteoric success, for instance becoming the second most popular foreign band in the USA (Second only to the Beatles my friends - Let's just take a moment to digest that - Second only to the Beatles!)

They've had a couple of inoffensive hits, 'How you remind me' was one of those songs that had a chorus that crowds of drunk girls sang about their boyfriends when they got together - And eveyone thought that the video to 'Rockstar' was funny and gave the people with a small amount of RAWK! knowledge a chance to go, 'That's that bloke out of Zed-Zed Top that is!' and people with more TV knowledge to say 'That's that girl's Dad out of Bones'.

But one of their songs that I do take issue with (If we discount all the album tracks that are about strippers, oral sex and getting drunk) is the one I have detailed the lyrics of below:

It's called 'If today was your last day'

　
My best friend gave me the best advice

He said each day's a gift and not a given right

Leave no stone unturned, leave your fears behind

And try to take the path less traveled by

That first step you take is the longest stride


If today was your last day and tomorrow was too late

Could you say goodbye to yesterday?

Would you live each moment like your last

Leave old pictures in the past?

Donate every dime you had, if today was your last day?

What if, what if, if today was your last day?


Against the grain should be a way of life

What's worth the price is always worth the fight

Every second counts 'cause there's no second try

So live like you're never living twice

Don't take the free ride in your own life


And would you call those friends you never see?

Reminisce old memories?

Would you forgive your enemies?

And would you find that one you're dreaming of?

Swear up and down to God above

That you'd finally fall in love if today was your last day?


If today was your last day

Would you make your mark by mending a broken heart?

You know it's never too late to shoot for the stars

Regardless of who you are


So do whatever it takes

'Cause you can't rewind a moment in this life

Let nothing stand in your way'

Cause the hands of time are never on your side

And would you call those friends you never see?

Reminisce old memories?

Would you forgive your enemies?

And would you find that one you're dreaming of

Swear up and down to God above

That you'd finally fall in love if today was your last day?

　

(C) and all rights reserved Nickleback & Roadrunner Records blah-blah etc. etc.


Right - So far, so Meh! - But seriously, it's as if they just took a collection of fortune cookies, smashed them open with a hockey stick and wrote down the ensuing chaos in an exercise book - I'm reliably informed, though I haven't seen it myself that the video for the song details the journey of two young scamps with a bag full of 'Stuff' (Which I'm guessing we are supposed to think is contraband of some kind - So that we can have our misconceptions well and truly challenged at the end) that turns out to be small strips of paper with lines from the songs on them which they distribute to people and change the world for the better, the lion shall lie down with the lamb, black and white will sit side-by-side on piano keyboards etc - I wonder if these pieces of paper are the actual fortune cookie favours that helped them write the song in the first place? - In effect, the song is a Chinese meal with all the good bits taken out.

The worry is that people (mainly the hard of thinking) will take these as a deep, meaningful and genuine expressions of empowerment and not lazy, derivative claptrap.

But saying all that, They've sold 50,000,000 or so more examples of their work than I have - Maybe I should see if Simon Cowell wants to buy my completely original picture of some dogs playing poker?



* Yes, I realise that picking on Nickleback is lazy and derivative... You're stuck in a web of irony, didn't you know? - We'll get back to the funny stuff tomorrow when I've shifted this cold

A/S/L?

In the early 90's I had my heart torn out and handed to me on a plate - Luckily, I'm a big boy and I got over it fairly quickly, with the help of massive amounts of alcohol and free Compuserve CDs. Compuserve? What's Compuserve I hear you youngsters cry.

Well, remember before Hotmail? No?.. OK, do you remember AOL CDs on the front of Games magazines? Right, excellent, we finally have a frame of reference. AOL gave you an Email address and access to the Internet, before Sky & BT and everyone and his brother were including it in monthly packages - It was rubbish, and it used to frak your PC on a regular basis, but it was pretty much all there was.

Now, imagine that, but having to pay by the minute... using a dial-up connection at 56Kbps - There was also a monthly fee, but if you uninstalled the software and re-installed it from a different CD every month, you didn't have to pay (It just meant that you had a different email address every month).

Compuserve used to filter the Internet for you, not that there was a great deal of content back in the day, but it was mainly comprised of what they called 'Forums' - Which were just posh chatrooms really, divided into different subjects and interests. I say different, they were all pretty much full of teenagers (or people pretending to be teenagers) trying to get off with each other. and Usenet Newsgroups - Which were the forerunner, I guess, of places like Tumblr and Twitter.

It was through being a part of these forums that I was introduced to the mating call of the early 90's Internetter, "A/S/L?" which of course stood for Age / Sex / Location which in turn, was shorthand for Am I commiting a federal or statutory crime by talking to you about your underwear / are you the complimentary gender that I am looking for / are you local enough for us to meet up or far enough away for your parents to not be able to kill me when it all goes horribly wrong.

And while we're here, I'd just like to state on record that, despite evidence to the contrary, I never pretended to be a precocious 14 year old girl from California called Mindy to go trolling for paedophiles... *cough* not once.

If I were to use a fishing analogy, the A/S/L is the 'bite' and then you'd have to 'play' the 'fish' until 'it' was 'tired' and could be 'landed' - The most effective, and certainly most popular method of playing with your fish would be (and I kid you not) to quote popular songs of the day to your intended paramore - I didn't recognise a lot of the lines that were being used, as they were American songs that hadn't 'broken' in the UK - But towards the end of my Compuserve years, the chorus of the Savage Garden song Truly Madly Deeply became the go-to track for reeling love-sick teens in hand over fist - It went a little like:

I want to stand with you on a mountain.
I want to bathe with you in the sea.
I want to lay like this forever.
Until the sky falls down on me

Remember it now? I never saw this fail, not a single time, never used it myself of course... That would have been immoral, and not to say a little creepy, as I would have been fast approaching 30 at the time, and therefore, positively pre-historic in comparison to everyone else there.

No, I moved to the much more sanitary newsgroups. These were like a notice board where people could post images, of anything, although the subject matter did all tend to be much of a muchness (Certainly in the alt.binaries. groups) - With pictures of young, and not so young ladies, in various states of deshabille and / or contortion - that would load, onto your 640 x 480 256 colour screen, at the rate of approximately 1 line per second... Meaning that a full screen image could take up to ten minutes to load - Just enough time to make a nice cup of tea and get control of any unnatural urges that you might be having.

I think that this was a secret plan by Compuserve to try and get young boys out of their bedrooms and into the fresh air... What I think actually happened was that those young boys who were too shy to quote Savage Garden lyrics to cheerleaders halfway across the world spend all their time getting the grainy, false colo(u)red images of 'Debbie, 21, from South London' to download faster.

And thus was High-Speed Broadband created.