Occulomency

Happy Anti-Jesus Day

Repent! Repent! you pumpkin worshipping idiots!

The Week of the Amusing Videos - Part One

Don't bother bleating on about 'how much funnier it was when Mark Lamarr presented it'. Heard it all before.

Adam Buxton is funny.

 

or sutin.

The band was sha-wady-wady.....

In other news. Bruce Forsyth makes it through another night.

Well, it is possible that he's a sentient golem who was created in a Prague Synagogue, some time in the mid-17th century by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (also known as the Maharal), who reportedly created Forsyth to defend the BBC Light Entertainment schedules from the much prophesied coming of the evil Simon Cowell.

Forsyth was well controlled on media outlets until the unfortunate events of the 1973 Miss Anglia TV beauty pageant. When Forsyth saw comedian Lenny Bennett, the excited troubadour reached out to him, asking, "Friend?". Bennett started to scream, rejecting him.

Forsyth dejectedly cried "She hate me! Like others".

As Bennett raced to fellow comedian Mike Yarwood's side, Forsyth rampaged through Norwich and Diss.

Forsyth wrote in his autobiography ("I am a Dancing Twat"):

I told Bennett and Yarwood "Yes! Go! You live!" and turned to my agent, Douggie Brown and said "You stay. We belong dead."

Forsyth reportedly shed a tear as Bennett hissed at him. Forsyth then pulled a large lever to trigger the destruction of the TV Studio and much of Swaffham. All that was left of that dreadful night was a strange tin-foil effigy of Forsyth on a horse and Nicolas Parsons.

Forsyth's role within the BBC seems to be to:

Keep John Barrowman focused (eyes and teeth and JAZZ HANDS JOHN!)

Wave arms about when someone on Stricly Come Dancing either horribly fails, epicly wins, or is getting jiggy

Take the ring to Mordor

Run a shrimp boat with Bubba Blue, and

Untrap Chillien Miners.

 

Other news... I'm in a bit of a quandary. Many things happening simultaneously never make for a settled existence, so I guess I shall have to wait and see what seems to suit best.

tick tock, goes the clock.

I've got a lot of very cool things. Seriously, I regard myself as generally really quite lucky. So I should, I suppose.

Sometimes people do extraordinary things which make me insanely happy.

The Parsons organised this for me:

Thanks doesn't cover it.

I just needed chips.

This morning I decided I needed breakfast.

Lettie said she wanted a pony.

Now she wants to know when she can ride them.

There are six. Their names are:

• Top;
• Bottom;
• Up;
• Down;
• Strange; and,
• Charm.

I amuse even myself.

Careless Memories

Sometimes, you never know when, you open a drawer and you get reminded of Digger.

The Verve Experience.

So, the Stone Roses have reformed.

Ticketmaster has crashed, lots of folk despirately wanting tickets to see this seminal late 80's-early '90s rock combo.

But I was there when The Verve reformed. I was excited, I paid to see them at the Nottingham Arena.

There was the slight, niggly-naggly doubt that seeing a bunch of much loved musicians who helped define the soundtrack of my early twenties who had become middle-aged, survived various chemical addictions, still harboured grudges and were probably terminally short of cash might possibly be a little past their best.

No such luck. As I wrote in this blog at the time:

"It was bloody terrible. Seriously appalling. I have always said that you can go and see any band and have a good time, and with few exceptions (Badly Drawn Boy, David Bowie), that has usually been the case.

Not this time, the sound quality was awful (and you can't blame the venue 'cos the Kaiser Chiefs sounded fantastic), and there was just no passion in it. The audience response was lukewarm at best, and we joined the steady trickle of people walking out after Ashcroft had murdered 'the drugs don't work'."

My point?

I won't be going. Some memories are better left alone.

Political Ocrrectness

Ricky Gervais bothers me.

When we were living back in Australia, I attended a short course on bullying in the workplace (like I wasn't good enough at that already). As part of this course, they showed some clips from The Office.

I had seen this show already as some kind people had shipped it over from the UK for me to watch, as they correctly assumed I'd love it, but it had not yet made it to the hallowed ground that is the ABC.

The clips they chose were the stapler in jelly gag and the wall of files between the workmates routine. Funny stuff, but the point the course wanted to make was, from one point of view, it's all good fun, from the other side, it can deeply affect the person involved. So much so in Mckenzie Crooke's case, he went on to appear in Pirates of the Carribean II (Jack Sparrow and the Crimes Against Cinema or something).

Anyway, I digress. The course said that bullying is soley in the mind of the recipient, it does not matter if the intent was humour, if the person on the receiving end feels bullied, they are being bullied. End of chat.

So, this brings me to the present. There is a bit of a twitter storm going on between Richard Herring and Ricky Gervais and his followers. Mr Gervais has used the word 'Mong' rather a lot on his feed recently, and it's been pointed out that this may be a bit offensive to persons with or involved with Down's Syndrome.

Gervais says that the word has been reclaimed and doesn't mean what it used to in the school playground of our youths.

I don't agree. How can any offensive term be reclaimed by those people who used it in a pergorative sense in the first place?

This new sitcom of his, I'm not so sure. I'm really not.