“Fuck with me, and I’ll fuck with you do do do do dooo
Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do do do do do dooo”
crooned the Mary Chain in a tune whose title, like so many other important things, escapes me.
Am currently engaged in a sweet duet of this with a Noo Yoyker by the name of Florette Fraser.
At first I wanted to call her Caulliflower (or Collie for short), but on reflection she sounds more like a brand of mint.
Right. It’s time someone dealt with this phenomenon in a considered way. It’s time somebody used measured analysis and dispassionate comment to open up an ongoing?debate.
| Blog title | User name | Comments | Sweeties |
| I am desperately unoriginal | monkey_noise | 68 | 18 |
| the Erudite Baboon | erudite_baboon | 530 | 76 |
| Sex, Lies and Monkeys | RAGMonkey | 370 | 28 |
| Swindon Monkey | mkeen61267 | 0 | 0 |
| monkeydoo | monkeydoo | 7 | 2 |
| Monkeyland | monkeyland | 26 | 3 |
| Sonic_Death_Monkey | Sonic_Death_Monkey | 3 | 0 |
| angry monkey blog | angrymonkey | 0 | 0 |
| Little Yellow Monkeys | Leigh | 8 | 4 |
| Tales from a Monkey | Scubamonkey | 45 | 6 |
| Travellingmonkeys | Travellingmonkeys | 0 | 0 |
| MarsMonkey | MarsMonkey | 1 | 0 |
| joblessmonkey | joblessmonkey | 0 | 0 |
| noisy_monkey | noisy_monkey | 0 | 0 |
| Average of the above | 14 users | 75.6 | 9.8? |
| Not updated in last month? | 19 users | 14 | 2 |
| Average of all | 33 users | 32.5 | 4.2 |
Note - one or two of the above steadfastly refuse to appear on 20six weblog name or username searches. Perhaps the search database is not live but updated at intervals. Curiously, not a single 20six blog which I can find includes apes in either title or username.
Within the Blogshares.com animals industry, there are no fewer than 140 blogs listed under the monkeys sub-industry1. The next largest sub-industry, frogs, incorporates a mere 42.
1neither are there any more. In fact, there are precisely 140.
“you look fine - for someone who’s been trapped in a mine for six days”
- new favourite putdown adapted from this BBC story.
K2’s recent post on “Gorgeous” George Galloway made me realise that this is not an ironic nickname. GG really is gorgeous, by the standards of British politicians. He could almost, in one of the more unsightly slums of Glasgow, pass by without normal folk recoiling in disgust, kids fleeing in terror, milk curdling, etc etc. Perhaps this explains, to some degree, his erratic behaviour and odd sense of principle - in order to win the perverse, if not acceptance, then tolerance, of the malformed political orthodoxy, he has had to make himself intellectually ugly. Because let’s (with shades on) face it - in politics, you have to be hideous of countenance to succeed. Go read the Dysfunctional Cafe for today, as well, in view of what I’m about to say.
I was inspired (in a revulsed sort of way) by the mugshots on page five of today’s Times; the five leading Tory contenders leering like constipated gargoyles as a million readers hurled and wretched their lunch hour away. Ancram, oblong-faced, resembles an Easter Island statue carved out of lard; Davis puts on a queer gurn to try and efface his inherently decent cheekbones; Yeo rolls his squidlike eyes within a squelching sack of jowl; Howard does his best Humbert Humbert impression. But the real man of the people, as we’re always told, as he himself is all too aware, is Ken Clarke. Wincing like a man with a watermelon pessary, he hauls his top lip like a jib-sail to reveal a row of pared-down, baby-small gnashers, a la Hannibal Lecter. The porcine eyes reflect balefully an obsidian evil from beneath asymmetrical brows; like scaffolding above the gates of Hell. The whole resembles a Lovecraft nightmare given flesh, and then given more flesh, and then smacked about with a JCB by the Chapman Brothers. He’d get my vote.
But what is it, I wonder, about the British Politician which com- (or im-) pells them to be so foul of face? It is to some degree psychosomatic. A career’s worth of being constantly caricatured, constantly portrayed unflatteringly, constantly jeered-at and sneered-at and bombardiered-at, will cause a person to become, to some extent, their caricature. Eventually a zenith is reached, where the most ridiculous thing the cartoonist can do is portray his subject in a handsome light. John Major is angular and dashing, Blair calm and soulful, ‘Fatty’ Soames, thin. But there’s more to it than this. Politics in Britain is controlled by the “ugly-school-tie” club. Geeks and bruisers are united under the banner of democracy. Letwin? Don’t make me laugh. He’s going to need all the backstreet plasto-quacks in LA to give him a real chance of power. Either that or a fling with an orally-fixated rhino. He may melt your granny’s jellyroll but the corridors of power won’t be so easily impressed. Besides, the last thing your average Brit wants is a PM for whom his daughter might break ranks. So Anne Widdecomb must be a shoo-in.
It’s been suggested that the LibDems buck this trend. And with lovelies like Lembit Opik*, Simon Hughes, and, err, well I can’t think of any more current LibDems but David Steele was a bit of OK and besides that’s 100% so it proves my point, in their ranks, it’s hard to argue. Just like it’s hard to argue that they’re a political party. I reckon they’re the party of last resort - the refuge for those too misshapen to make it in mainstream society but not pant-shittingly deformed enough to make it into Labour or the Tories. A protest vote by those who barely have faces at all, just blobs of putty stuck to the top of their necks to staunch the blood.
Foreigners don’t have quite the same situation (with the possible exception of the cabbage-faced Russians). Perhaps good-lookers aren’t so shunned by voters in other countries, or perhaps the populations in general produce fewer genetic freaks (see my entry earlier today - you’d be the first). A further thought would be that the less democratic a government, the better chance a prettyboy will get in. In a dictatorship, it’s those with the biggest guns, not the biggest gurns, who pull the Punch and Judy strings.
*does anyone else think that Lembit, as well as resembling an elf, has an elf-like name? He really should be ‘elf minister…
i’m going to leave it ’til later
like the blownout lightbulb
and the broken radiator
can i get back to you? we’ll see
and if i leave you ’til later
will you leave me?
Saw one new species today. Took the following entomological notes:
It was five or six inches long, the colour of snot, stiff and knobly. I sure as hell wasn’t going to fuck with it. It was inching v e r y s l o w l y across the concrete, like a glutinous spillage from a Gotham chemical plant. It glistened horrifically as a stray sunbeam struck it by mistake, this nightmare creature, this mutant fluke of evolution. Probably never-before seen by the human eye and probably never to be recoiled-at again. You should believe me, despite the lack of photo - new species, monsters, abominable and beautiful lifeforms are getting churned out of the evo-mincer all the time*. And they keep dying out just as quickly, because they have no feet, or no brain, or no genitals, or just aren’t cool enough, or whatever**. But one day, one will be born which has feet, hundreds of them, perhaps, and is snot-green and shit-brown, and is indestructible by all modern means, and it will proliferate, and eat people in their sleep, starting with the vagrants and disposessed, and the meek and curious, and it will have genitals, supsersized multi-active ones, continuously and obliviously replicating, and spawning more mutations, and more refined and more sickening fractals of evolution. But that’s in the future. Today I stepped gingerly over the stickysnotttysnottystick vulgaris, and left it to dissolve in some toxic biomelt, or be eaten by seagulls, or a toddler, or a mutt, and hurried because I was a little late for work.
*especially around here.
**sadly not so much around here.
I asked Martin from IT support why he had such long hair.
He said, “because it looks cool when I’m skydiving.”
Martin has a Prince Albert.
When Martin answers the phone, he says “G o o ooo ooooo oooooooo oooooooooooooood monin / aftnon Martinomes spkg.” It’s like he’s frantically trying to ascertain what time of day it is.
A singular fellow, Martin from IT support.
“cancer patients in the UK have been promised an end to the so-called ‘postcode lottery’ of treatment by government ministers”
- 5live news just now
Perturbed to notice, whilst scrutinising the smallprint on the can, that my increasingly-beloved Dr Pepper classes itself as having a “fruit flavour.”
What fruit?
Peppers??
The closest thing to a fruit listed under ingredients is phosphoric acid.
If I had to, I’d hazard a guess at aubergine. But maybe I’m influenced here by the rich, bongwatery hue.