The Regular Missive

Ah, my favourite subject. The Daily Mail.

I read in a headline yesterday:

"£100 000 - that's the taxpayer's cost of Tony Blair taking the Royal Jet on Holiday."

Now, much as I loathee Tony Blair with every inch of my being, I object to this transparent attempt by the Daily Mail to drum up support for a bunch of immature children who couldn't organise a bursting session in a lagoon of balloons.

It's quite frankly bollocks.

No, really. The thing is, it's that apostrophe in the headline. It implies that £100 000 is the cost to each individual taxpayer. Now, I've been doing a little bit of research, so let Professor U-B take you onto a journey into the exciting world of mathematics...

"Hello children,

It's a simple process, this. First, let's look at the numbers of people at taxpaying age in the UK. Now, www.statistics.gov.uk lists the people of taxable age (which I'm taking to be 16 or over) in the United Kingdom as 46 930 337 - that's nearly 47 million people on a couple of Islands! Aren't we lucky?

Next, let's take the cost the Mail gave of hiring this jet - £100 000.

Now, finally, we'll take that £100 000 and divide it fairly across the 46 930 337 people. What does that give us?

0.00213082. So, as we're dealing with money, and to prevent a short fall, let's call that 0.003p.

You see, Maths is fun!"

Thank you Professor.

So. 0.003p.

That's three thousandths of a penny.

Now, I don't know about you, but I really don't begrudge Mr Blair that. Well, that's not true, I begrudge him everything, but it's hardly very much really is it? I mean when you consider that my average tax bill per month is about £150, a thousandth of a penny really doesn't matter to me.

But the Mail is trying to convince me that, no, all my £150 is going to fund Mr Blair's little jolly, and then some. This is total crap. If they want to be accurate, they should write:

"that's the taxpayers' cost"

You see what I did there? The little apostrophe? Implying that, as is the case, the cost is shared? You'd have thought the sub-editors, or indeed the journalist in question, on the Mail would have picked up on this. But then again, I suspect it was a "deliberate" mistake, which is typical of them. I could defecate on a piece of paper, and the words formed at random by my fecal matter would constitute a more reliable and interesting article than anything that appears in the Mail, which is, generally speaking, a load of unmitigated arse.

I mean, let's look at the title of the paper itself: "The Daily Mail".

It implies a regular missive, possibly sent by an acquaintance, updating you on interesting happenings.

Now, I'm not being awful, but if I had a friend who sent me regular lines along the lines of what appears in the Mail, I'd have them sectioned. No, actually, I'd beat them to a bloody and swift death with their collected writings to put them out of the perpetual misery that clearly exists in place of a meaningful existence.

Someone once said they hated the Mail more than any other paper, even The Sun, because whereas other papers make you hate other people, the Mail manages to make you hate yourself too. This is very true. It's a loathsome publication that carries delusions of grandeur and tries to convince people it's something it isn't. And until they change, they can go and choke on my tumescent (and quite frankly magnificent) member.

(PLEASE NOTE: Personal details in this article may have been altered to make them more impressive than they actually are...)

It's a Jerry Springer moment...

Now. Those of you who know me could probably predict this would be coming at some point.

I watched the Jerry Springer the Opera on BBC2 the other night.

For those of you who don't know, it's rude, childish in places, impossibly outrageous and bloody good fun.

To give a taster, one of the choruses features the lyrics:

"What the fuck?
What the fuck?
What the fucking fucking fuck?
Three-nippled cousin-fucker!"

Needless to say, it featured quite a lot of complaints. The majority of these came from the Christian community. Now they were outraged by the fact that at one point in the opera, a direct parallel is drawn between Jesus and a nappy-wearing child-man desperate to soil said nappy. Furthermore, Jesus admits at one point that he "is a bit gay".

I can see why this could be taken as offensive. Not the gayness - after all, he never said he was a "practising homosexual" which would be sinful, and henceforth blasphemous. But the comparison with the child-man is a touch vicious.

Bizarrely I'm not complaining about the people who complained before the opera was actually shown. Apparently 50 000 people did this, of which, if I was feeling PARTICULARLY generous, I'd say 800 or 900 had actually seen the opera before. Actually, no, fuck it, I am going to complain about this - WAIT UNTIL YOU'VE SEEN THE FUCKING THING BEFORE COMPLAINING!!!!! You can't live your entire life by what the Daily Mail says!

But that aside, these people had a right to protest, as I dare say some of their leaders HAD seen the opera. It's interesting though that they condemned the BBC for showing this as being an abuse of their license fees. Apparently 1.8 million people watched this. Taking into account the 50 000 "prior-protesters" and the subsequent 50 000 who complained, that still leaves 1.7 million people who watched and enjoyed it. Do the people objecting to the screening think that the 1.7 million people who did this have no say over where their license fee goes?

But anyway. Enough of my petty ranting. The BBC didn't exactly help themselves. I believe Mark Thompson came out and said something along the lines of "I'm a Catholic and I don't find any of the contents of the opera offensive." Not helping the cause there, Mark. You'd have thought that even the most blinkered pro-Springer could see that it was a tad offensive.

Now, on to the big rant. Apparently the Controller and Schedulers of BBC2 had to flee their houses with their families under armed guard because, after a Christian group posted their personal contact details on their website, they received credible death threats.

A touch of research has shown the following to be the Ten Commandments:

I. Thou shalt have no other gods before me.
II. Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.
III. Thou shalt not take the name of the LORD thy God in vain.
IV. Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
V. Honour thy father and thy mother.
VI. Thou shalt not kill.
VII. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
VIII. Thou shalt not steal.
IX. Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.
X. Thou shalt not covet any thing that is thy neighbour's.

So nowhere in there does it say "Thou shalt not say Jesus is a child-man or is a bit gay." In fact, it doesn't even say "Thou shalt not blaspheme," but we'll give them the benefit of the doubt on that.

What it does say, however, is "Thou shalt not kill."

Commandment VI - see it?

So what the Hell are these stupid, blinkered, pig ignorant horse fuckers doing sending Death threats! YOU HYPOCRITICAL ARSEHOLES!!! YOU'RE BREAKING YOUR OWN RULES!!!!

What I'd like to do is recover the lost Ark of the Covenant, and fashion replica stone tablets from the dust contained therein. Then I'd take them and BEAT THE HYPOCRITES TO DEATH WITH THEM!!!!!!!!!! I know I'm going to Hell, but God I'd like to take some of them with me!!!!!

In conclusion, however, I think Jerry Springer - the Opera put it best. In that they should be:

Fucked

Up the ass

With barbed wire.

Stupid People (pt. IV)

OK. So, I turned on the radio this morning in the middle of an interview with someone. Within the space of, ooh, about 5 seconds, I knew it was a Tory Minister being interviewed.

How did I know this?

Because all the person was doing was complaining about the Labour Government and what they're doing wrong. There wasn' t the slightest mention of their own policies or what they would do better, not the merest sniff of their own policies. No, it was just an endless stream of vitriol and invective against the Government.

Now I'm not a huge fan of our present administration. However, I prefer them infinitely to the nearest possible, alternative: a bunch of childish, pathetic muppets with no more substance to themselves or their stance than your average school playground bully.

It's embarrassing for them and irritating for us. They should stay quiet until they've got something worth saying. And preferably hold their collective breaths while doing so. That would get rid of a few of the toerags.

Then, as if that was not enough, "Doctor" Ian Paisley came on. What a pathetic excuse for a human being he is. A man who single-handedly derailed the Northern Ireland peace process by wanting to see a few pictures of what people were doing. All the warring political parties over there are total toerags who, because of an inability to get over their petty grudges have heaped death and misery on a host of people. (N.B. Appreciate I've simplified this a tad). The world will be a better place when Paisley and his ilk die and leave the way for people who aren't tired old men set in their ways.

In fact, for Paisley in particular, I know there's a special circle of Hell reserved for him. Being the "Right Reverend" won't cut any slack when he's being tormented with spikes for all eternity. In fact his special place will be underneath most other circles of Hell, where the effluent from the millions of inhabitants drips in a never-ending stream on his head, while his ranceid drool seeps ineffectively out of his mouth and drips with a seeming inevitability for all eternity on the head of a particular employee of South West Trains.

N.B. I appreciate that this rant means I have broken my main New Year's Resolution. Quite frankly I don't care. U-B is back to wreak vengeance on the mad and the stupid. They will all fall before the might of my words!! FEEL MY WRATH AND CHOKE ON THE DELUGE OF MY RAT-INFESTED IMAGINATION AND BRAIN DOINGS!!!!!!!!!!

I am U-B.

Hear me roar.

Genius

A few more blogs to add to the reference list:

"Call Centre Confidential" - been reading this for a while, since it was referenced by the paper. Good fun.

Zach Braff's blog - "Scrubs is a deeply deeply funny programme. Have since been desperately scrambling to find anywhere on this godforsaken little island that we live on that actually shows "Garden State". But no, nowhere has it on. Bastards.

"A Free Man In Preston" - He's from Preston so I'm contractually obliged to hate him. But no, he's funny. And hey, I always preferred Preston to anywhere else local when I was growing up. Go Tokyo Joe's!

Right, that's me done.

A Brief History of Chaulk: Part II

Things were going pretty well. We'd survived the Chundering Carrot Club, and not only that, had managed to avoid getting any of our kit dirty. We'd started to gel a bit as a unit too. I'd started talking to everyone a lot more. Rich A and I had started forming a pretty decent rhythm section. Dickie had keyed into the things I liked playing and started writing bass parts for me which took advantage of that.

The material we were playing was a mix of leftfield covers and originals. Dickie used to compose all the music, which none of us objected to because it was excellent. He'd turn up with a bunch of sheet music for Rich A, Chris and me, and then rehearse Ben separately with the lyrics and vocal melody. It was a really good way of working, meaning that there wasn't too much sitting around. Ben and Dickie would get together outside of main band rehearsals, leaving those for us to practice the music.

Dickie was a prodigious talent. He wrote all the music down to the last bar, including melody lines, and wrote most of the lyrics, though Ben contributed a fair bit too. We lapped it up though, because we could see here was someone who was going to go far, and he was letting us accompany him.

After about three months of rehearsals, attention then turned towards gigging. We needed money, pure and simple, but we also needed an outlet for the originals we were playing. Before doing this, though, we determined to make a demo tape. This was a pretty good idea, allowing us to hawk the tape around as a form of rehearsal.

So, come Easter '98, we decamped to Chris' parents house, a veritable mansion on the outskirts of Nottingham. It was huge. I’m talking seriously massive. And the view from the conservatory was down from a hilltop looking over rolling countryside. Gorgeous.

We converted the garage into a makeshift studio, moving all the kit in there and setting it up in the best way possible. By now I'd well and truly bonded with Rich A, mainly through having to negotiate shifting my ridiculously large bass amp around the country. It was a big beast, and made a sound to match.

Once everything was fixed, the engineer came, with all his equipment. A friend of Chris' family, and being paid by them too, we had him for a grand total of five days. For those five days, we had finalised the stuff to go on the demo tape as six songs:

"Karma Police" by Radiohead
"Boy in the Bubble" by Paul Simon, reworked by Dickie.
"Cigarettes and Alcohol" by Oasis, reworked by Dickie.
"Forgotten Heroes" by Dickie.
"Love Machine" by Dickie
"Piece of Mind" by Dickie

The Dickie originals were by far the most challenging. My particular favourite was "Forgotten Heroes", because it had a soaring vocal line, but mainly because it had a storming bass part which I could mess about with to my heart's content without undermining the song. "Love Machine" was the hardest though. Conceived in four sections, all in different time signatures (including a "Paranoid Android"-style central bit in 7/8), it was a bugger to get right, particularly for Rich A and myself. However, we rose to the challenge, and laid down our parts within a day and a half. And then there was the sitting around and waiting...

The bulk of the rest of the time would be taken up with recording the piano and guitar, before the final day on vocals. So Rich A, Ben and I were at a loose end. Which was pretty good actually, because I started to bond with Ben. Before this, all I knew was that he liked monkeys and was virtually married off to a girl called Becky who Dickie thought was one of the sexiest people he'd met. But over several million games of Sensible Soccer and Jedi Knight, together with the fact that we were rooming together in Chris' dining room, a lasting bond was created.

In the evenings we decamped to the pub, where we all drank too much than was good for us every night. We also spent some of the days working on new songs, and here a problem arose. Chris had formed the band with Dickie, and thought himself to be equally musically talented. He'd begun to resent not being allowed to contribute his own material to the band, and ruptures started to appear between the two childhood friends. In the end a compromise was reached, where we worked on several songs of Chris'. It has to be said that, nice bloke though he was, his songs weren't up to the high standard we were used to. They seemed a little lounge, and in one case, overly clever (the song in question didn't repeat a single chord during it's entire duration). But we played them, and we enjoyed messing with them. Chris was more willing to accept a little outside input than Dickie was, so it felt more like jamming stuff together. Even Dickie enjoyed this, so things began to smooth over between him and Chris.

Overall, we had a riot. And by the end of the five days we had a demo tape. We eventually cut it down to three songs, as we thought that people we would be "auditioning" for wouldn’t need to listen to much more. We went for two covers – "Karma Police" and "Boy in the Bubble" displaying our Indie and Funk credentials – and one original, "Piece of Mind". This latter was a bone of some contention, as none of us, not even Dickie, liked it that much. But it showed a harder, punkier edge to us, so we went with it. "Forgotten Heroes" and "Love Machine" were deemed too "prog."

The remaining four songs were lost to the ether, but we didn't care. We were ready to gig.

How to construct a Narrative

Take a simple title.

Add most of your life.

Then Lie. Lie. Lie.

Greetings

And a Happy New Year to you all.

I've been a bit quiet haven't I?

There are quite a few reasons for this.

Lack of an Internet connection away from work, meaning Christmas and New Year was a no-blog zone.

Hi-jinks in foreign climes.

And above all, my New Year's Resolution. I'm aiming to be happier. To let things wash over me a bit more. To not let things annoy me.

The Fishermen will be a good chance to see how I succeed...the first rant means I fail!

In the meantime, you'll just have to make do with whatever mad shit my brain produces instead...