England's England

The hounding of Chris Moyles

Chris Moyles is now the longest serving breakfast show presenter on BBC Radio 1, and with every additional month he sits in the morning hot seat the clucking neigh-sayers (or is that “nay-sayers”?) get louder.  Despite his huge audience figures, they say “it’s only a matter of time”, “his days are numbered”, “not long now” with obsessive compulsive repetitiveness.

Eventually when Chris is toppled from his throne, the clucking will of course turn to “told you so”, “I knew it was coming”, “just as I said it would” and multiple variations thereof.  Chris Moyles will never win against the cluckers.

Logically, the cluckers are going to eventually be right.  Yeah, but only in the same way that if they were pointing at a new born baby saying, “Oh they’re going to die you know,” and then when they eventually died aged 120, they smugly said, “Told you!”.

However, as Chris is unfortunately heading to his own breakfast radio demise (as is every breakfast radio presenter), it is hard to see from this angle what the BBC will do to replace him.  Indeed, what will they do with him?

Current policy is to pension daytime presenters off to token weekend shifts for a while before they silently exit stage left.  Will he enter the wilderness of obscurity and silence before eventually resurfacing on BBC Radio 2?  Does he have a future on TV?  Time will tell.  Time will tell.

Why can’t we wait for time to pass naturally and just enjoy his journey in the meantime?  The cluckers seem to want to get to the end of the story oblivious to the laugh out loud fun that Chris has to offer to entertain us well before he is pensioned off.

At times his radio show can be bad and boring.  At other times it is belly-laugh funny, highly entertaining and informative.  Like everything it has its swings and roundabouts.  Not every episode of Corrie is brilliant either.

For now his show fits the needs and requirements of a huge audience, so to get rid of him would be to get rid of him for getting rid of him’s sake.  Much as that would excite the cluckers, it would leave a void.

I’ve speculated that Vernon Kay might step up to take the baton, but in truth his style is not too dissimilar to Chris’s.  Is that the audience that the BBC’s yoof station should be chasing?

When Chris is on holiday, the breakfast show is covered by Scott Mills who normally presents the afternoon drivetime.  Despite being the same age as Chris, Scott sounds younger and more down with the kids.  His show is faster moving with quick fire humour and features with less long monologues and slow patter.  Maybe this is the future of a Radio 1 breakfast show.  But, this is the future we are talking about.  The future.

Back in the present there’s a perfectly fine Radio 1 breakfast show presented by a perfectly fine Chris Moyles.  Let’s stop hounding him and enjoy what he brings us for as long as it is right that he brings it to us.  I suspect we will really miss him when he’s eventually gone.

Marry the Ripper? WTF?

Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, brutally murdered 13 women over a four year period, horribly mutilating their bodies, and was later diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic. He’s serving life in prison. Well, in Broadmoor high security psychiatric hospital, actually. He’s been there for 30 years, with possible release on the cards in the next few years.

Now then. In that time he has had an average of 30 letters a week from women admirers. These nutters just started writing to him and became pen pals. One woman moved nearer to Broadmoor in order to be closer to him, and another used to regularly visit him. Now, it’s just got worse; there’s one who’s getting married to him.

What the fuck? These women are allowed to vote, to reproduce, to look after children, to walk the same streets as me or my children, and their big thing in life is to be infatuated with a mass murderer they’ve never met? What is wrong with these women?

Jeez, the man killed and mutilated women for fun. And that attracts them to become his penpals?

Yeah, writing to somebody who has done nothing wrong, or is a hero but stuck unable to live a normal life, befriending a scared serviceman overseas, or simply finding somebody to communicate with from a totally different culture, or even talking to somebody who is terminally ill, all makes sense. But, why would you want to write to a mass murderer? Yet, murderers attract women. The more horrific or notorious that murderer is, the more that women are attracted to him. Why?

This latest nutter, a 56 year old lady called Pam, after writing to him constantly for the last 15 years, has just taken to wearing and showing off an engagement ring and proudly talking about her “fiancee”, the mass murderer. But, this women has children and grandchildren! What is she doing outside of some mental institute? She’s dangerously insane! Don’t their families think they are nutters?

I’d be scared for the safety of my children were it my mother started ‘virtual dating’ a mass murderer.

You couldn’t make it up, could you? This is not normal behaviour. These mass murderer lovers should be locked up. They are a danger to themselves and to others, with a complete disregard for the 13 victims.

Ikea .... please, no!

Ikea is a ‘Scandinavian’ self-assembly furniture shop. Well, it’s lots of shops. Huge shops. They are making an absolute fortune for the owners, because somehow they discovered how to tap into the female shopping gene.

Females are able to ignore all logic and danger when their shopping gene (or maybe it’s a hormone, if there’s any difference between genes and hormones in women) has kicked in. Triggers appear to usually be shoes or handbags. In pursuit of these, and the undefined word ‘bargain’, women will fight each other to the death. They will also ignore the fact that they are likely to be crushed to pulp in crowds, or die from heat exhaustion, and instead focus on their one goal – the purchase of the ‘bargain’.

Some years ago the man behind Ikea managed to work out how to trigger the response normally reserved for shoes and handbags, but with self-assembly flat-pack furniture, soft furnishings, lighting and other ‘home’ based stuff. Clever bastard. How other men hate him.

Ikea has made such an impact in modern society that estimations are that through-out the EU, 10% of conceptions are achieved in an Ikea bed. I’m assuming this is NOT just one bed somewhere that everybody goes to, but … well, you know what I mean. I also assume that’s not on the first night of trying to assemble the bloody thing. Women (the bitches) normally leave this part of the process to the man, who ends up too knackered to help her conceive after hours of trying to ‘easy’ assemble the impossible.

Ikea’s magnet is so powerful that three people died in scuffles and crushes during a stampede of hundreds trying to get a bargain when the new store opened in Saudi.

A number of years back, a store just down the road from me opened (Well, it’s not exactly just down the road. It’s in Edmonton, but that’s dangerously closer than the other branches. I say dangerously because I’ve noticed a woman twitching as she sniffs the air and definitely has its scent to the point where she’s pacing with that glazed look in her eyes). It opened at Midnight and closed half an hour later after everything went wrong. Crowds surged forward and there was panic and people were hurt. That’s all sorted now and the store re-opened quietly. That didn’t stop the mad Sunday shoppers though, causing yet more scary crushing.

Now then, men have logic and method to their shopping abilities. They know it makes sense to take time off work and visit on a weekday. The place will be less hot, people won’t be pushing and shoving, and the queues for the checkouts won’t be so long that they have entertainers doing complete shows whilst you wait. However, women want to go shopping on Sundays. Or Bank Holidays.

It may well be that they deliberately pick this as a torture that women use against men, one of their anti-male sports (you know, they all nod and wink at each other at how funny their stressed males look as they are dragged around, but men don’t see this, being pre-occupied with whether or not their last will and testament is up to date). Women do this to get back at men following an argument from four or five years ago that the man just can’t remember.

The Ikea stores (all of them) are designed so badly (deliberately) that you have to march along with the 2,000 other visitors in quite a scary way through bottlenecks and areas where nobody is moving and there is no oxygen. Exit signs are not marked properly (well, yes the Emergency ones are), so there appears to be no short-cut to get away from being on the huge conga chain. Yes, you may want to make a bee-line to a particular thing, but you ain’t going to. You will have to slowly walk past everything else first. Those are the rules, and the ladies love them.

Anyway, it was some six months before I was eventually accidentally dragged to the new Edmonton store, despite it supposedly being the largest. My household female mentioned it quite a few times before I had to use the industrial strength gaffer tape over the mouth trick, and shorten the chain that keeps her in the kitchen. Since the riots I had been constantly subliminally moaning about what a terrible and DANGEROUS place Ikea is. I even brought up the story of the deaths in the Ikea in Saudi to try to emphasise the point. Eventually this stopped working. The need to go to Ikea is genetically imprinted into females.

In the end I had no option but to face this inevitable evil and I went. Recently talk of Ikea has returned. Now it’s only a matter of time. May god have mercy on my soul.

Motivate to Metric

Good to hear that Ireland has removed all the silly imperial road signs spouting stuff like ‘miles per hour’ speed limits and has properly replaced them with metric signs showing ‘kilometres per hour’.

What happened to our move in the UK to metric measurements? We were slowly phasing out that old fashioned confusing imperial rubbish, but it seems to have come to a screaming halt. For a while on TV, news reporters would carefully make sure they spoke in modern measurements “I’m standing just 50 metres from where…” and all was right with the world.

But, it’s slipping back in. Down me local market (you have to speak like that) things are sold in “payands” weight, and on TV there seems to be a conscious effort to go back to the old fashioned ways too. “I’m standing just 50 yards from where…” keeps happening.

We no longer have people talking about the price of a gallon of petrol, but correctly, people think in price per litre. This is because we swapped over to one system and stopped bothering with the old one. Equally, when I see something that costs 27p I don’t sit there with a calculator trying to find out that it’s the equivalent of 5 shillings and 8 old pennies and a farthing. Neither do I try to express it in Groats. I just think, feel and know what 27p is, buys, and looks like. No doubt if we were still running dual currency in the UK we’d all be constantly confused with the conversions back and forth and back again.

This is why things are so confused generally. We should get rid of all forms of old fashioned imperial measurement and then just think, breath and believe in metric. Ireland seems to be leading the way in so many things, where once we looked on them as some pathetic simple potato loving bums that envied the UK, it’s actually time for the rolls to reverse.

All the time people indulge the old system alongside the metric system, we will never teach people to think in kilometres per hour, or kilograms when they weigh themselves. It’s time to take action!

Please can I flash forward on FlashForward?

Oh man.  I’m bloody hooked aren’t I?  I can’t stop watching FlashForward (showing on Five in the UK, Mondays at 9pm).  Sigh.

Annoyingly, the episodes are only running a few days behind the showings in America so I’m as confused as all the forums and speculation fansites as to what’s going on.  At least with other shows that are usually running six months to a year behind, when I get the bug of wanting to know what happens, I can usually pick up a blow by blow fairly easily from when it was broadcast Stateside.  But, the Americans are as much in the dark as us lot over here.

If you’ve some how missed out on what this whole FlashForward thing is, here’s the idea in a few sentences.  Suddenly, one day everybody in the entire world collapses into a coma that lasts 2 minutes and 17 seconds.  During this coma they have a ‘flashforward’ (like a ‘flashback’ but going the other way) and vividly see what they will be doing for a period of 2 minutes and 17 seconds on April 29th 2010. Then they wake up (well, those that collapsed whilst flying planes or driving cars or having surgeons performing surgery on them didn’t - a lot of people died) and obviously the story is the investigation of what the heck caused this, plus people changing their lives or being confused by the events they saw. And scarily, a few who saw nothing realise they’re going to die some time before April 29th 2010.

So, was it man made?

Space aliens?

What exactly is going on?

The central characters we are following are a division of the FBI that has accidentally started investigating the whole phenomenon, mainly because one of the FBI guys saw in his flash forward that he was surrounded by evidence from the investigation.

And so it unfolds.  As people share their flash forwards, confirming that they saw each other in the future, it weaves a mysterious tale of trying to piece everything together with the puzzlement of an addictive Agatha Christie story, except this one is multi-layered and quasi-dimensional.

I mentioned addiction.  When Lost first started it was extremely addictive with no real rational explanations about what was going on.  However, when they extended the story arc over 7 seasons it jumped the shark for so many of us. “Another 6 years of not know? Feck this!” I recall saying after deciding to stop being tortured through watching it.

I remained pain free until Heroes came along.  The first series stood alone and was addictive and exciting.  Then it got so dazed and confused with impossible twists and turns that sadly it too jumped the shark.  Despite loving it, it was impossible to feel the emotions from the original hit (a bit like heroin).

So, although I’m still a Heroes fan, I suspect I shall watch the final series with a feeling of resignation and disappointment.

But then along came FlashForward.

Sigh.  I watched the first episode out of curiosity saying, “I can handle this” in my drug addict stylee.  Of course I couldn’t handle it, fool that I am. Yep, addicted from the off.

I can only hope that they don’t extend the story arc to 7 years.  I want this to be over.  I want to know what happened, happens and why, and I want to know now.  The quality of the concept plus the whole presentation is perfect.  This is uncut heroin for the sci-fi cum thriller cum mystery cum action addict, and I’m mainlining it.

But hey, anybody else got a clue what’s going on? Please? Pretty please?

Cunning Chinese make fat people explode

Whilst the world spends its time staring suspiciously at anybody of an Arabic(ish) origin or appearing to be dressed in an Islamic way (especially carrying a rucksack), something far more sinister, and until now unseen, has been going on.

The real enemy are the Chinese. (Ok, obviously, not really really, but go with the humour on this one!)

I mean, let’s face it, they don’t like our way of life, do they? They are communists and we aren’t. The divide is obvious.

So rather than strap explosives to their stomachs and detonate themselves in a way that can only cause maximum collateral damage, they’ve hatched a far more cunning plan.

Their weapon of choice is the “all-you-can-eat” Chinese food buffet.

Look in the window of your nearest. What do you see? Fat people. Loads of them. Huge, gigantic bottom wobbling constantly sweat-dripping porkers waddling and wheezing their way back and forth between the area where the food’s been left and the trough at the specially reinforced table and extra wide chairs the Chinese people have provided.

Up they stagger, onward they head looking like slow moving buffalo, just about able to carry the plate they’ve piled high with anything they could find, wearing track marks in the carpet from their 20 or 30 shuffling journeys to get their money’s worth of food.

Yes, you’re right. They get fatter and fatter. Week after week they return to this cheap obesity assisting swill pen to stock up with tonnes of edible matter until eventually their stomachs explode.

And there you have it. Nobody realises this is actually another success chalked up by the Chinese, who want to eliminate us from the inside. We just think it’s only another good for nothing scrounging Council Tenant splitting at their seams again as this country heads on into the obesity epidemic. But now, at last, we know better.

Damned cunning, those Chinese, eh?

Do you believe they put a man on the moon?

So, like, 40 years ago man walked on the moon, strolling around looking at things, driving buggies all over it, planting flags, playing golf and bringing parts of it back.

Then, 40 years later we start crashing unmanned rockets into the moon to see how soft the surface might be and to try to see if there’s any sign of water there.

We even miscalculate about how much debris will spray into the air because of the rocket crashing into the moon.

Hmmm.  We learned so little from the original moon landing that we didn’t know whether there was water on it or how likely it was that a rocket crashing into it would not cause much in the way of a dust cloud.

Hmmm. Now, I’m not normally one of the conspiracy theorists that this news is playing into the hands of, but what’s wrong with this picture, eh?

(Not the actual picture up there, silly, but the ‘scenario’ I’ve just pointed to)

I think we should be told!