Double Your Money!

I went to sign on again on Wednesday. The Job Centre hasn't changed much since before Christ's Mess it's still full of the stinking scum of human effluence. This time, however, like me, they were all demanding to know where 'their fucking giro was'. I haven't been paid since before Christ's Mess, despite them having had three weeks to sort it out. I was told that the computer system they were using was from the old Civil Service and therefore had the computing capacity of a village idiot drunk on lumpy cider, moonshine and pond water. It had the digital equivalent of a straw hanging out of its mouth, hence the delay in sorting out my claim. I was told I would be paid on Monday, so I'm expecting a lump sum of the money I'm owed, plus the money I just signed for. Yes, come Monday, I'll be richer by £12.68p!! As I was signing I was also informed that I will have to attend a 'back to work session' in a week or so. I was informed it would affect my claim if I decided not to attend, I was informed of this just as I was about to open my mouth and say something like 'But I know how to get back to work, I have a degree after all, I'm not a fucking thick Rotherham Orc, who wouldn't be able to find his arse with both hands. I also keep my CV updated and I am in touch with potential employers, there is nothing they can possibly teach me, in fact I should be teaching them. So take your fucking course and shove it so far up your arse that it touches the back of your teeth.' Or words to that effect.

"Can I put 'eating man flesh' as a hobby on my CV?"

I've just returned from Sheffield where I had a lovely lunch with Lauren and in turn saw Angela, Linzi and Colin. Much archaeology gossip ensued. Which brings me to something completely unconnected. The British Archaeological Jobs Resource website sent me a message through Facefuck the other day, it read: Subject: BBC Radio want to know top 5 archaeologists songs: 'Just got onto Radio Scotland... they now want top 5 archaeologists songs for next weeks radio show.. go here to add your fave!' I looked at the lame ass list that the other archaeologists in the country were producing and it had the same old hackneyed shit that archaeologists always come out with, which they generally think are hil-fucking-arious: Christy Moore - 'Don't forget your shovel' being usually somewhere in the list as is the Mock Turtles 'Can You Dig it?'. By far the best and criminally overlooked Archaeological song, which sums up everything about archaeology and the people that practise it is Anal Cunt's 'Van Full Of Retards':



Speaking of music... the accusation keeps getting levelled at me that I 'only like music that no one's ever heard of''. This is simply not true, I do like music that is obscure and difficult to obtain, that much is true. For the early part of the nineties I was heavily involved in the underground Black Metal scene. It is not like it is now, with Myspace and Blogs offering downloadable music at a click. I had to write to bands themselves to hear their music, there was a system of exchanging and recording tapes for each other. I would write out by hand long lists of the music I had available for recording and search similar lists from others to find gems that I'd not got copies of. CDs and Records were virtually unheard of, record labels operated like cottage industries pushing out 500 copies of a split EP. This has coloured my taste in music to an extent that I still get the buzz of excitement when I finally track down that hand numbered limited edition LP of that Scottish Black Metal band released through an Italian Label. Whilst this is still true of me, I do like popular music. Just not all of it. My critics complain that if few people have heard of a band then that band must by definition be shit. By the same definition U2 must be one of the best bands on the planet. As must Coldplay. And they simply are not. But here, to prove my detractors wrong, is a list of bands/artists that are very popular and known to the mainstream and I like them: Abba, AC/DC, The Bee Gees, Black Sabbath, Boney M, Johnny Cash, Nick Cave, Daft Punk, Deep Purple, Dr Dre, Elvis Presley, Ice Cube, Iron Maiden, Joy Division, Kraftwerk, Led Zeppelin, Manowar, Metallica, Misfits, Motorhead, Pink Floyd, Public Enemy, The Prodigy, Run DMC, DJ Shadow, Slayer, Snoop Doggy Dogg, The Stone Roses, Tom Waits... I could go on... But I won't. Instead I'll leave you with this little gem:

We. We. We. We. We. We Are Floating In Space

I was asked by Ninjasaurus Rex for dinner on Friday night and for a game of his Starship Combat game Captain Ferk III (it was under the guise of 'playtesting' but I know full well he's only doing it to make me play SciFi games...). As he knows a thing or two about cooking I politely accepted the offer. It was either that or CHIKEN TIKKA PIZZA from the Punjab (the takeaway, not the region. The delivery cost would be astronomical to have a pizza flown in from the sub-continent of India). Although I've always been suspicious of the Punjab takeaway (they do curry, Pizza and Kebabs all in the same place, make your minds up lads), Sarah recommended the CHICKEN TIKKA PIZZA and they have been commended by Whiston's local Snooker 'celebrity' Shaun Murphy. At least that's what the portrait shot of him on the wall says. In the event Ninjasaurus Rex made a lovely Rogan Josh curry and then I lasered his face off in deep space. It was just like the Return of the Jedi, but with less Ewoks.

'Everyone to the life rafts! This has gone to rat shit!'

On Saturday I was graced with the presence of Justin and Lucy. They were on their way home to Brighton from Scotland. The pair of idiots had decided to go to Scotland for a two week holiday in the depth of the ICY WINTER OF DEATH. With just an ancient camper van to sleep in the foolhardy pair reached Oban only to break down on New Year's Eve in Tesco's carpark. The snow fell, there was nothing open and even the gas in their heater froze. Cutting their losses the pair retreated to Lucy's parents, with their heating and food, and called in on me on their way home.

'try it in third...'

I immediately dragged them out for a walk down Whiston meadows but not before Justin had become worryingly obsessed with the Cliff Richard Calendar and Card that Lauren and Herr Docktor Clay had respectively given me for Christ's Mess. Justin wanted to see Ulley Reservoir as it had featured quite heavily on the news a couple of years ago, when it threatened to breach and sweep all of Whiston away in a flood of Biblical proportions. Fortunately it never happened and my building of an Ark was all in vain. When I say Ark, I mean a massive cage which I was planning to herd all the Rotherham female population into.

'I promise you, it's for your own safety. I'll let you out when this is all over...'

So we walked over hill and dale, and over another hill and into another dale. Ulley was further than I remembered, so our plucky little band turned off up a snow covered road and back on ourselves before night fell and the wolves came out. Justin had not only become obsessed with Cliff Richard, he had become obsessed with having a curry as well. We took a taxi down into Rotherham town and after trying a few places (one was no longer a curry house and another was closed. At 7pm on a Saturday night? I ask you!) we plumped for Akbar's, yet another taxi ride away. We had to wait in an extremely loud bar area while the waiter's built our tables or something, but we finally got to eat. It was good, but the meal was crowned whilst waiting for our taxi home. A young lady came teetering on six inch heels onto the snow with two massive fireworks. Intending to set them off to celebrate her mate's birthday the expensive one failed to impress or even go off and the one that cost the least was akin to Akureryi last year... Finally back in Whiston I showed J&L the pubs of the village until getting drunk and collapsing in my bed. A great weekend.

And finally I'll just leave this here.

Into the Lungs of Hell

This is how the country would look if Nick Griffin's BNP gets in power:


What with the country still in the ICY GRIP OF WINTERY DEATH, I haven't been able to go very far from the house, the news has been telling people to make journeys only if they are essential. But having said that, I mentioned to Ninjasaurus Rex that I wanted to go to Meadowsmell at some point. Since Monday I've had this seed planted in my head about buying a Marks and Spencer pizza. I just fancied one and the desire has grown out of all proportion driven by the lack of ability to move far. I have woken up everyday with a feeling gnawing at my mind: Pizza, pizza, pizza. I have also been wanting to buy some parcels for the books I'm selling on EBay. Ninjasaurus told me his wife, Sarah, was wanting to get a new phone, so we reasoned that all these were legitimate reasons for essential travel in these harsh conditions. They both came to my house and I managed to get the car out of the garage with no problems, but two hundred yards up the road it came to a grinding halt on the small incline up to the main road.

'Try it in a lower gear.'

It took nearly an hour or slipping, sliding and clearing snow with a rake (standing in for a shovel) to get the car back into the garage. We decided that our journey was still essential enough to continue on the bus. It was an exciting adventure for me, journeying into the unknown on public transport. Since having a car I've been able to travel like a KING, whilst the great unwashed moved about crushed together in cattle cars.

'A Daysaver, please'

But Winter turned the tables on me and needs must as the Devil drives, whatever that means, and we took the bus into town. Sarah and Ninjasaurus were old hands at this game and helped me choose the ticket that was right for me.

'Where the fuck is this bus, these two are boring me now...'

We changed buses in Rotherham after a debate over taking the train or another bus. I don't think I would have been able to sustain the excitement had we gone on the train, so we took another bus. This involved standing in the ICY GRIP OF THE WINTER OF DEATH for a while until one arrived. God alone knows how we survived.

'I thought the X78 runs every 12 minutes?'

After battling the elements and scrubbers on the X78 (the route originates in Doncaster, the home of an altogether lower class of people than those from Rotherham...) we arrived at our destination, the Land of Shopportunity: Meadowhell. It was the quietest I'd seen it for a long time, although there were still great gangs of children roaming around. Every single school in Britain has been closed, due to lazy teachers seizing any excuse to not work (they get about 40 weeks off a year already, what more do they want? Blood?) and as a result the children have been running wild in the streets like animals. As it was so quiet I managed to get everything I needed within about ten minutes whilst Sarah signed her soul away on a new phone contract.

Just as Meadowhell should be, when I visit.

Sarah insisted on getting a cover for her new phone so we stepped into the future in the Apple Shop. It was so far into the future there were no tills and Sarah had to pay by telekinesis. With Sarah's mind probed, we needed nothing more and once more boarded a bus, homeward bound.

The future's shite, the future's Apple...

It's Snow Joke

A little bit of snow has fallen in the North of England and as usual when this kind of inclement weather patterning occurs chaos has broken out. There has been rioting on the streets with cars being over turned and set on fire. Anti-snow protests in Wetherby have resulted in the death of sixteen people, including three police. In Sheffield the Supertram was derailed and looted before being set alight. The BBC News sent their intrepid Foreign Correspondent to the North to cover the stories. They uncovered horror stories of children refusing to go to school and instead spending their days fighting with crudely crushed together balls of snow. The general public is afraid to step into the street lest they be attacked by gangs of youths armed with these rudimentary weapons. Half of the pensionable population have fallen victim to the unrelentless snowfall by either freezing to death after refusing to put their heaters on or have slipped on the ice and broken a hip. The cost over the past two days to the NHS is comparable to the GNP of a small African Nation. Something has to be done and done fast, I'm at my wit's end, I can't get to Meadowhall to buy parcels from Poundland.

Oh No! No to Snow!

as I've been pretty much confined to the house due to the snow, I've been doing what I normally don't do. That is, watch TV, not only have I become consumed by the Jeremy Kyle Show, but I've slipped into Come Dine With Me. I have to do something to break this downward spiral up so I have also been watching the entire output of the Flight of the Conchords. I've exhausted that avenue of entertainment and will now have to turn to the two Kurosawa films I was bought for Christ's Mess. I'd go out sledging, if I had a sledge and some friends to go with.

'Can I come and play on your sledge with you?'
'Fuck off!'

With not much else to tell you, I thought I tell you a couple of jokes. The first one I told to Jamey over Facebook and she said I had to put it in this blog. The second I found when searching for a translation of the Funniest Joke Every Told in the Monty Python sketch of the same name. This second one actually made me literally laugh out loud for about two minutes. Let me know which you prefer...

A woman is giving birth and the midwife takes the baby, looks at it and says to the woman 'There's some good news and some bad news'
The woman says 'OK, what's the bad news?'
'Well,' says the midwife 'Your baby is ginger.'
The woman says 'Well what's the good news then?'
'The good news' says the midwife 'is that it's dead.'

Two hunters are out in the woods when one of them collapses. He doesn't seem to be breathing and his eyes are glazed. The other guy whips out his phone and calls the emergency services. He gasps, "My friend is dead! What can I do?". The operator says "Calm down. I can help. First, let's make sure he's dead." There is a silence, then a shot is heard. Back on the phone, the guy says "OK, now what?"

Shit bag

Simon Jenkins is a SHIT BAG

It's Not All Walking

New Year's Day is now well and truly over, as is 2009, we'll never see it's like again. Thank fuck. I spent my New Year's Eve in the company of Dave, Linzi, Jon, Joolia, Richard and Wendy and we proceeded to get as drunk as ants, whilst shouting about various things like being raped by bottle nosed porpoises. Which is nowhere near as bad as getting raped by a shark, but there you go. There was a pitiful display of fireworks from the rest of the estate, but being in the poorer part of the village, what can one expect? As the evening got later and we got drunker the music got louder until Dave was blasting Metallica at a level that was enough to makes one's ears bleed. I'd hate to live next door to that stupid hippy.

A Marine Sexual Predator

Along with the New Year Decibel madness my parents have hosted two parties, the first for my mother's rambler's club. They all left at five o'clock ON THE DOT, lest they turn into pumpkins or something. The next evening was the lot from the local boozers, now this was a much more boisterous affair, being that they can take their booze due to having had good practise in the pub. Bob also came down from North Allerton, which is a lot further than Cow Rakes Lane, where Ninjasaurus Rex was hiding, although he had been repeatedly invited, least of all by my drunken mother on Christ's Mess Eve. Bob won my father's quiz, another shaming in the brainy stakes for me. She took home a picture of Whiston Manorial Barn, to be proudly displayed on her work desk at Archaeology South East, no doubt.

I coulda been a contender Charlie...

I have spent the rest of the holiday period quietly contemplating my navel and I have actually watched a massive amount of TV (for me) recently. The other night I settled down to watch 'The Turn of the Screw'. It was new BBC adaptation of the Henry James novella. The book is excellent, not much happens but the suspense it builds up is immense until the cataclysmic finale. This latest adaptation I could only watch for half an hour due to the cack-handed nature of the script. Coupled with bad acting, this was one of the worst things I've watched for a long time. It started off badly with one of the opening lines 'Tell me what terrible things happened in that beautiful house'. How clumsy are those lines? It's like holding up cue cards for the audience because the writers believe we are all so busy sucking on our own feet that we have no idea what is going on around us. It got worse, the governess was shown crossing a street in Victorian London with the voice over of the psychiatrist saying 'You were young, pretty and excited about you new job'. LET THE ACTOR SHOW IT TOO ME, I DON'T NEED TELLING! Those lines should be in the script but as a description of the character, not the voice over. The interview of the Governess was a wincingly awful scene with a really bad flirtation that would have never have happened in Victorian Britain. I turned off after twenty five minutes into an hour and a half program. It suffered as all dramas on TV, namely the people writing them are not good enough to write film scripts so they smash their way through classic writing like bulls in china shops. As usual TV treats us like idiots believing we are not up to the challenge of working things out for ourselves. I HATE IT, I HATE IT, I HATE IT!

Ext: Ghostly figure walks out of door

VO: This is a ghost. It is not a person, it is a Ghost.

Ante Christ

So, Christ's Mess 2009 is well and truly over for another year. Actually it's the last time Christ's Mess 2009 will ever happen so that statement is bullshit really. Anyhoo, it has been a pretty quiet one this year, I got me some good stuff, some books about some olden days wars and it was a Krautrock Christ's Mess this year with albums by Amon Dull II, Faust and Kraftwerk all being well received. . The rest of it has been lost in an alcoholic haze that began the day before Jesus' Birthday and pretty much ended yesterday.

It's my birthday, Motherfuckers!

Most of my time has been spent at relatives houses, I saw Neil and Lou's gaff for the first time on Christ's Mess day. It was surprisingly tasteful, I told them. It seems compliments are not always well received. Neil served me with a poor man's version of a Mojito all night, although I'm fairly sure there was no Bacardi in the last two, just lemonade and mint. Lou served the world's most miserable buffet; Party Eggs supplemented proper Scotch Eggs, cheese puffs in place of Hand Cooked Crisps. Having said that, her home made sausage rolls were fantastic. Ian had his (in)famous quiz, one that I have won for the past two years and I was back to defend my title. This time, however, the quiz was loaded against me, it was more like A Question of Sport than Mastermind and I was knocked from my position of number one. A History question, a History question, my Kingdom for a History question! I won't be going back next year.

Who took over as chairman of Arsenal in 1956?
How the fuck should I know?

On Christ's Mess Eve I'd put a bet on a Horse on the King George VI's Chace at Kempton. Ian had given me a hot tip on a nag called Racing Demon. I should have known, most horses that win are called Mustapha's Moustache or Pieface Thackery or some other ridiculous moniker. Calling a horse Racing Demon is just asking for trouble, it's too much pressure from the start. The race was run on Boxing Day and James and I called over to Ian and Chris' to watch the affair. If the gee gee romped home I was looking at a win of about £800, enough to ship me off to Japan and New Zealand in March. The moment arrived and they were off! At the first bend of the three mile course, the lame fucking donkey that I'd put my fortune on was pulled out of the race. The commentators never said but was probably shot and turned into glue afterwards.

and coming in last is Racing Demon...