RIPCORD MESSIAH
By Matthew Craig
My arm is doing the most delightful spasm as I sit here. I could marvel at these sorts of random nervous twitchings for hours.
The trip to Llangollen turned into a trip to bloody Sainsburys today.
Drug users and public school ponces who use the word "ganja" without sticking knives in their middle-class eyes should take note: Sainsburys are now supplying hemp products.
Today, I saw two different types of Hemp Pesto for sale. Naturally, being a sober fellow, I refused to partake. Instead, I amused myself (and nearly made the Sainted Mother jump out of her skin) with the bread slicer.
Hemp Pesto. As nasty-ass as it sounds. If you like dope that much, chop up some leaves and put it in a salad or something.  And only spoilt rich kids call it "ganja." The fucks.
Things have come full bloody circle. Now you can go into Sainsburys and slice your own fucking bread. How fucking overworked are they in sainsburys that they can't slice the fucking bread for you, eh? I mean, I made a right fuck of the machine today. The people behind me weren't impressed, especially when the Sainted Mother clapped sarcastically at their feeble attempts after they'd been waiting for us to finish with it for five minutes.
This is why the bastards should cut it for you: to save my embarrassment.
It seems we go shopping every day now. The Daddy certainly whinges about it often enough. I used to do it as a way of procrastinating from actually going home to my hovel and cooking for myself.
Plus, there was always the chance of meeting available women. Apparently, that's where they all hang out.
Bollocks.
Well, maybe not.
I used to see the same girl wherever I went in Cambridge. Just my type, too. Beverley Turner-lookalike. I figured she must be a nurse or a student or something. And I used to see her everywhere. She'd cycle past me on the way to town, or turn up standing next to me in Woolworths. She must have led about as empty a life as I did (do).
I spoke to her once. I asked her where the soup was in the Co-Op. And left it at that, like a twat.
I deserve to be single, doing stupid things like that.
I suppose I do meet women in supermarkets. But it never seems like the right place to bother people, to me. I mean, who wants to be chatted up while they're squeezing plums for ripeness?
Beverley Turner. Like I needed an excuse...
Ba-dum-bump.
Anyway.
I go to ASDA quite frequently. For the uninitiated, ASDA is a hypermarket chain owned by the American company that owns the WalMart chain of stores. I even overheard a conversation between British managers and American Imperialist Overlords the other day about how things were going to change under the new management.
Devil Cows.
That's what they must have agreed on.
I swear. Devil Cows.
To liven up the shops, Asda have installed Authentic Farmyard Sound Effects. You go to the milk, and there's a disembodied Cow Head with a button to press which makes a "MoOO" sound. At the egg counter, you find a chicken with a button who'll cluck at you.
Uder the Cow is a Devil Cow.
He jumps out from behind buishes,
and sticks cereal bars together with his gun.
Which is fueled by the substance from his" udders."
Now, Uder is a Boy Cow. He doesn't have udders.
Therefore, that white stuff...well, it isn't milk.
Enjoy your breakfast.
Of course, you don't find Lambs at the Chop counter, nor Pigs Arseholes at the Petfood counter. It's a Dairy thing, I think.
At the Asda I went to the other week, the cow button seemed possessed by Satan or one of his lower minions. For when I pressed it, a low and long and bowel-loosening sound came out. The small girl along the isle from me started crying.
(I probably shouldn't have turned to her and showed my Bloody Dracula Fangs during the hellish racket. Hee hee.)
This sound rolled out of the cowhead for fully two minutes. And it was one frigging moo. I've tried to capture it with the sound file here, but I can't quite seem to get the surreal horror of it all across.
Satanic Devil Cows conducting a Fimbulwinter Mass earlier this year. The photogrpaher was never seen again. So how the pictures got here is anyone's guess... Click on the picture to hear the Devil Cow Roar (ok, ok, fucking "Moo," then...)
Bottom line: I go shopping too often, for little return. I don't get dates, and my waistline is expanding.
Some time ago, I made a joke about the Tweenies, and how I was disappointed that they weren't pre-operative transsexuals. I saw two ladies last week that made me regret ever slighting them (that, and I had a hundred angry parents storming my house when I dared to air this view in public. Technicolour abominations they may be, but to fly in the face of the mob is to court disaster these days)..
Two men, living together as women, flying out to Thailand to have it all whipped off, and get married straight after.
Now there's two fellas with more balls than I'll ever have.
Just...not for long...
I don't take criticism well. This is not a secret. Even strangers or dickheads get under my skin when they attack or call things into question about me.
I like people to like me. It's not an uncommon thing to want. I'm not abnormal in the need to be loved. And, yes, I suppose people do...like me.
So I don't know where this need for approval comes from. All I know is, I don't like having my thin skin pierced. I tend to react negatively, even if I bottle it up for later.
Someone got through the other day.
The Sod.
I got upset over one lousy message. Unnecessary and childish.
It's a good thing it wasn't something important, like the PhD assessment where they kicked me out, eh? That I took in my stride. A bad review of this trifle of a site, and I explode like a cat in a microwave.
And, ultimately, what does it prove (apart from, perhaps, that my priorities are screwy)? How does it help?
It doesn't. So I won't let it bother me any more...
My prediction is coming true. The BBC have started a series called "I love 199-." By the end of October, they will have caught up to the year 2000. The producer of this series must be shitting himself. He'll have to come up with a new idea for the first time in over a year. The poor bastard.
On the upside: Maconie and Thornton are out, and there's more of the beautiful Katie Puckrick.
On the downside: the facts are badly researched, and Dani Behr is fucking in. She's about a month older than me. Which makes her 15 in 1990. Wasn't she still doing Grange Hill, then?
Also on the downside: it means that all the crap stuff about the '90s, like The Girlie Show, Bruiser and many more things to horrible to contemplate, will be dug up again.
On the upside: Katie Puckrick. The dirtiest sounding name I ever did hear. I'd marry her tomorrow, if it wasn't Comic Day...
One final thing before I go.
Katie Puckrick. Dear God in Heaven, she's beautiful.
The Comics Pimping Experiment hasn't gone the way I hoped it would. Maybe I should have asked people to pass the page on to their buddies. Maybe not. I think it's a case of misconception or preconception.
Today, I resumed my career as an Angry Viewer. Many moons ago, I was on the BBC TV programme "Points of View," talking about a soap opera.
Yes, that's how bad it got last time I was unemployed.
Tonight, I was watching Futurama, the sci-fi comedy carton by the creator of the Simpsons. One of my favourite shows, this cartoon is as funny as the Simpsons has ever been, even if the mass-market appeal hasn't quite been there.
Bender: Robot. Drunk. Kleptomaniac. Poster child for the hypocrisy of censorship?
Tonight's double bill was supposed to be great: the first show was a moving story about the search for identity, thinly veiled behind a parody of "Married with Children" (the female lead in both shows is the same woman). The second show a satire on the hypocrisy of bureaucracy. With a Big Song Finish.
The shows were cut to ribbons. Ginsu-fine,
All the ribald humour (read: anything slightly saucy) was cut, whether it ruined the scene or not. In one scene, a character literally appeared to jump off his couch. The Married With Children parody was ruined entirely. And it was annoyingly obvious where all the cuts were, to boot!
I was lucky enough to see these shows when they first aired, on cable TV last year. And people are missing out.
It got me so mad, I actually wrote to Channel 4.
You see, there was nothing in the show that would be considered more...ribald...than Friends, for example, which airs in the same slot. Or Hollyoaks (which is about a community college where everyone is blonde, slim and beautiful - and thirty), for that matter.
One could argue that there's a difference between a soap opera aimed squarely at teens and young adults and a cartoon comedy show aimed at the same group. Well, sure. But Futurama is a far cry from South Park. And it deserves to go out uncut. To do otherwise does a disservice to the audience, as well as to the creators. It suggests that satellite TV audiences are more sophisticated viewers than terrestrial ones. It patronises the viewer.
And this is what I mean about preconceptions. It seems obvious that there's a deliberate double standard going on here. It's probably related to the fact that Futurama is a cult-audience, science-fiction, cartoon. Individually, this would be enough to give a show the kiss of death. All together, and not even Hemmingway and Disney could save it from the chopper. It's a cartoon, by the Simpsons fella, so it must be for kids, but ooh, what's this? A knob joke? AAAAHHHHHH!
There's another double standard to consider. This show isn't one of Channel 4's own shows. Nor is it from one of those stables that would cut them off if they dared to monkey with the show (like Friends). So, combined with its low public recognition (I'm probably the only sad bastard with enough time on his hands to know the shows so well and care about it enough to write in and whinge), Channel 4 think they can get away with butchering a show so that it just isn't funny anymore.
Of course, they could also be worried about the content causing offence or being inappropriate. But then, why show it at 6pm? Move it to the 9pm slot. Just as long as they don't bump it to the early am, like they did with Babylon 5, also a victim of the Moronic Editors Scissors.
This is a channel that prides itself on challenging the outmoded and broadening horizons. This is a channel that showed a mock-documentary on the perception of paedophilia in the media - twice in 24 hours - and thumbed its nose at every negative critic under the sun.
Well, what does that mean, Channel 4, when you cut gags out of a comedy show and patronize your already small audience?
Matthew Craig, getting down off his soapbox, August 22nd, 2001.
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