JuicyPips

27/01/12 - Gallic Deliverance

2012-01-27T13:43:00.001Z

When I was little we had a holiday home in Picardy. This isn’t as swanky and middle-class as it sounds – if your dad had a brand-new car when you were a nipper, it almost certainly cost more than our ramshackle, wattle ‘n’ daub, three-up-three-down house in Sarcus – but we loved it and, my parents being teachers, we’d spend all of the school holidays there rebuilding bits of it and enjoying a bit of good ol’ togetherness. We’d huddle around the fire for warmth in the winter, and in summer we’d open the doors to all manner of friends and family who were also enthusiasts of very cheap holidays. Chopping wood, bike rides, barbecues, board games, buying dinner from the bread and meat vans, munching on garlic and saying ‘aw-hee-haw-hee-haw’… simple times, simple pursuits.

The four of us were there one harsh winter, along with my uncle Alan and auntie Nicky, doing what you do on holiday when it’s below zero outside and you’re in a house with no TV aerial: playing Trivial Pursuit and drinking vin rouge by the pint. (Well, I wasn’t drinking – I was about six years old.) We were eagerly awaiting the arrival of my uncle Dick, who was due to appear one evening in Boulogne; he was coming as a foot passenger on the ferry and, on the day of arrival, dad and Alan jumped in the car and drove the 100-odd miles to the port to pick him up. It was a late ferry, so my sister and I were sent up the wooden hill to Bedlington while mum and Nicky stayed up playing cards and drinking gin and doing whatever else people did in 1988. Perming each other’s hair, maybe.
Now, my uncle Dick is a bit haphazard, so it wasn’t a total surprise when his ferry came in and he wasn’t on it. These were the days before mobile phones, of course, so dad and Alan had to use their ingenuity a bit. With it being the early hours and the port largely deserted, they enquired at any office or building that had a light on as to whether any other ferries would be arriving. From the various levels of shrugging that were proffered in response, they deduced that the answer was no, that was the last ferry. Dick must be stuck in Dover. They were in for a Dick-less night.

As they drove away from the docks, an idea struck them: Calais was only thirty miles down the coast – was it at all possible that Dick had got on the wrong ferry and somehow ended up there? Sod it, they thought, they’d come this far, they might as well check.
…and sure enough, there he was; looking sheepish, puffing on a rollie and already halfway through his duty free allowance, he’d been tearing his hair out having realised his error. There was no way of contacting the house at Sarcus (it didn’t have a telephone), so his only option would have been to wait until the morning and catch another ferry home again.
There was much rejoicing. The lads piled into the car and headed back south.

They decided en route to stop off for a drink and a bite to eat – it had been a long journey and they were getting peckish, and the stress and confusion required a smidge of pastis to soothe the spirits. Finding a place open in rural France in the early hours of the morning, however, is easier said than done.
As they barrelled along mile after mile of unlit country lanes, a glint eventually presented itself on the horizon; as they neared, it turned out to be a bar and –hosannah! – it was open. The trio thirstily tumbled through the door, eager to refresh. Taking seats at the bar, they were immediately furnished with sizeable baguettes stuffed with gooey local cheeses and home-cured hams, and into their hands were thrust generous measures of pastis. Spirits were high in more ways than one, with the locals boisterously belting out folk tunes to the live band in the corner, the barman freely distributing liquor like it was water. These were the days before drink-driving was bad – everyone was out of their trees, and gladly. They were in the middle of nowhere, pushing on to the dawn in an aniseed haze.

After a couple of hours of merriment, it occurred to dad, Alan and Dick that they hadn’t actually paid for a single drink the whole time they’d been there. Furthermore, most of their beverages were being handed to them by a couple of lascivious gents who were standing very close to them indeed. Uncomfortably close. And they were plying them with enormous measures with rapacious and escalating insistence. The smiles had gone; it seemed more like getting the Brits drunk was a sinister and inescapable game.
It was around this point that they spotted the two chaps at the end of the bar, enjoying a baguette. You know the spaghetti scene in Lady and the Tramp? Just like that (except that baguettes require rather more chewing, so the effect was much longer and more drawn-out; also they were staring each other in the eyes throughout, which gives the innocent scene a more lustful dynamic).
Realisation dawned. Seemed like maybe they weren’t in for a Dick-less night after all.

The fact that it was a gay bar was neither here nor there really; it’s not like homosexuals are terrifying predators (and the same can be said for Frenchmen)… but a remote clique of chaps who are hellbent on removing all sensibility from some random strangers is an unnerving prospect. Finding themselves in the French wilderness in the dead of night, the wrong side of plastered, heavily outnumbered and unwittingly trading their back-cherries for a couple of litres of Ricard, the Brits felt it prudent to high-tail it out of the increasingly threatening atmosphere before the scene turned into a Gallic Deliverance. Suddenly keen to be back in the warm bosom of the family, they made a run for it; a fistful of Francs on the bar and a cloud of dust in the car park.
Mum and Nicky had been beside themselves with worry; this worry turned to befuddlement as the three men clattered through the door. They’d been gone for twelve hours, they reeked of booze and they kept calling each other ‘Monsieur Ducky’ and giggling uncontrollably.

These kind of stories are common from this era. None of this would have happened if they’d been able to call each other on mobile phones - the spontaneity of yore has been lost in the modern world’s relentless quest for efficiency and connectivity. Remember the days when you’d arrange to meet someone and you’d just have to hang around there until they showed up; if they got detained or lost you’d just do something else? This weekend, why not switch your mobile off and go for an adventure? You might get some free pastis out of it…

The Simpsons: Channel 4 announcers

2012-01-27T13:36:00.002Z

They've definitely got a bet on. I saw this video a week ago and have been keeping a keen eye on The Simpsons on Channel 4 since - I've heard 'The Raisins', 'The Stinkersons', 'The Opinions' and 'The Milk & Two Sugars'. Makes me smile.

One Hour Per Second

2012-01-27T13:32:00.003Z

A lovely visualisation from YouTube, demonstrating the sheer volume of video that's uploaded to the site every second/minute/hour/etc. Click the image to see.

Star Wars Uncut

2012-01-27T13:24:00.001Z

Star Wars: A New Hope remade as a fan film in 15-second chunks. Astonishing on all levels.

Sweatshop

2012-01-27T13:19:00.001Z

A cute little game with a serious message - click the image to work in the sweatshop.
(Give it a try, it's brilliantly done.)

Seventy-four seconds of cringing

2012-01-27T13:12:00.000Z

This is just so lame.

Half a million records

2012-01-27T13:09:00.002Z

How big's your garage? Fancy saving these...?

Avian bluegrass

2012-01-27T12:59:00.000Z

Watch from the start, but oddness/cuteness commences at 1m30s.

Modern movies, retro reimaginings...

2012-01-27T12:55:00.003Z

Movies reimagined for another time & place... click here.

Don't cuss!

2012-01-27T12:48:00.002Z

The fundamental flaw in the 'if you want to hang with us, don't cuss' motif is that, in fact, nobody would want to hang out with this nauseating turd. Because he's a preachy little fucker with a misguided sense of his own importance.

Violin ringtone improv

2012-01-27T12:46:00.002Z

Annoyed by interruptive ringtones? Here's why you should always carry a violin with you...

Cooking with Photoshop

2012-01-27T12:30:00.001Z

20/01/12 - Monkey Tennis

2012-01-20T13:19:00.002Z

Monkey Tennis. Cooking in Prison. Youth Hostelling with Chris Eubank. Inner-city Sumo. Arm-wrestling with Chas & Dave. You all know the famous scene in which Alan Partridge, desperate to pitch a successful idea to the BBC, reels a series of random show ideas off the top of his head; the joke – sorry, I know you don’t need it explaining to you – is that programmes like these would be such mind-numbing, lowest common denominator guff that nobody in their right mind would ever consider watching them.
…except that they would. That satirical point was made back in 1997, and made perfect sense at the time. But now, just fifteen years later, any one of those shows could feasibly appear on television without anybody batting an eyelid. Indeed, ‘Cooking in Prison’ exists – Gordon Ramsay filmed the pilot in Brixton prison in December. And let’s take a look at, to pluck a shit channel from the air, the Channel 5 schedule to see what else may fit that’s already poisoning the airwaves…
OK, we’ve got Celebrity Wedding Planner, Brighton Beach Patrol, Croc Man, Sex: How To Do Everything, Supersize Grime, Essex Jungle, The Man Who Injects Venom, Mist: Sheepdog Tales, Tamara Ecclestone: Billion $$ Girl and World’s Toughest Trucker. Fucking hell, people will watch anything, won’t they?

So, if it really is that easy to come up with a marketable load of old tripe for public broadcast, let’s try putting in exactly the same amount of effort as Alan did and see what popular nonsense we can create.
[Switch on Dictaphone. “Idea for a programme…”]

Holmes Under the Hammers
Downtrodden celebrity beard Katie Holmes is encouraged to engage in a series of unpleasant and degrading carnal acts with the entire West Ham squad, many of whom carry actual hammers to imbue the scenario with a little pathos. She clearly doesn’t require much cajoling, the implication being that the on-screen squelching is nothing compared to her day-to-day Cruise-inflicted atrocities. Keep an eye out for the cheeky look on Papa Bouba Diop’s face. He has no idea what’s going on, but he likes it.

Winter Wipeout
Alex Winter, the less successful half of Bill & Ted, is locked in a dusty, windowless shed with nothing to do but play the hit 1995 PlayStation game ‘Wipeout’ on a decrepit and faltering console. He’s hooked up to a drip and a catheter to ensure that all physical and mental energy can be devoted to playing the game. Endlessly. Any error in gameplay – clipping tunnel walls with his wings, say – results in the administering of a mild electric pulse to the frontal lobes. Full-on wipeouts force the temporary reversal of drip and catheter function, with hilarious consequences.

Bargain Hunt
The estate of expired playboy Formula One driver James Hunt is up for grabs! We follow pantomime villain Bernie Ecclestone as he rakes through Hunt’s old belongings, auctioning off anything he thinks will raise a few quid and burning the rest. Only you can save the Hunt estate! But will Bernie realise the true value of those seventies pit jackets and Castrol merchandise, or will you be able to wangle a bargain…?

The One Show
A tedious investigation into the workings of a streamlined binary language, in which zeroes are eliminated and information is encoded solely in the inflection, pronunciation and scale of the number 1. SPOILER ALERT: Base-2 doesn’t work without zeroes. Waste of time.

Mrs Brown’s Boys
[Some pointless load of old fucking shit.]

The Graham Norton Show
A genuinely impressive exercise in engineering ingenuity. A group of college professors devote several years of their lives to building a perfect replica of a 1967 Norton Commando out of graham crackers; a necessarily delicate and fastidious endeavour beset by myriad pitfalls – crumbly carburettors, porous tyres, and the ever-present danger of absent-mindedly eating bits of it. They eventually get it to work, powered by a cream-cheese fuel. One of them has been starving himself throughout the entire process so that he’s sufficiently slight to ride it without breaking it. They show it to people.

Don’t Tell the Bride
A patchy and confusing effort in which people attempt to discourage one another from revealing which playing cards they’re holding in their hands whilst travelling in retro Toyota touge-runners equipped by the tuning outfit Bride. Requires quite specific knowledge of poker terminology and semi-obscure aftermarket competition tuners, always requires explaining, and doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. (Features lots of bright colours, though – ideal late-night viewing for stoners.)

Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps
In an effort to reinvent herself as culturally relevant in a market increasingly dominated by the chirpy likes of Jamie Oliver et al, Delia Smith takes cookery back to basics by eliminating the cookery altogether.
These weekly hour-long episodes follow her to a variety of rural pubs in which we get to see her spend rather too long choosing which of the two generic draught lagers she’d like to try that week, demonstrate the poor bar etiquette common to all TV celebs (‘serve me now, I’m famous – these plebs won’t mind’) and spout shit Jilly Gooldenisms about how the Scampi Fries complement the Carling. Odious.

Big Brother
A chilling dramatisation of a timeless dystopian novel, which absolutely does not piss on the literary legacy of the notion of ‘Big Brother’ by making everybody automatically associate the phrase with a bunch of worthless fame-hungry pricks being filmed trying not to fuck each other in a brightly-coloured house.

I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!
Famous criminals are justly punished for their crimes as if they were normal people. Ashley Cole is jailed for shooting the work experience kid. Gary Glitter is confined indefinitely to solitary confinement for being a filthy fiddler. OJ Simpson goes back to the big house. Don King is brought to justice for those two people he killed. Matthew McConaughey is incarcerated for being the nauseating phallus he so indisputably is. And so on. We watch their spiralling descent into madness as they fruitlessly beg for mercy. See? Fame didn’t grant you impunity after all.

The Million Pound Drop
An elderly man, selected for his uncontrollably shaky fingers, is convinced that he’s inherited a million pounds from a wealthy but hitherto unknown relative. Hidden cameras follow him to collect the loot. A flashmob immediately descends upon the fiscal carnage as he accidentally drops it all on the way home. He goes back to his unfortunate, penniless existence, hating the world and waiting for the reaper. Numerous Facebook fans involved in the flashmob now have new trainers.

The Biggest Loser
We watch with an increasing sense of exasperation as loser “comedian” Michael McIntyre desperately tries to be amusing without coming across as slappably smug. And fails. Hard.
Then we switch over, because he is shit.

University Challenge
Socially inept university students are tracked by camera crews as they struggle through the two perennial university challenges: trying to buy as many groceries as possible for a fiver, and trying to copulate with anything that happens to move nearby. Laugh as they’re knocked back by the cool kids! Grin as their mums come to visit and happen across the unopened packs of condoms in the bathroom cabinet! Chuckle as they slowly succumb to scurvy!

8 Out of 10 Cats
Ten cats are forced through a series of near-impossible tasks; freeing themselves from brick-laden sacks at the bottom of rivers, escaping from microwaves, untying themselves from train tracks and so on. Horrifically cruel and occasionally disgusting, but with an impressive 80% survival rate that really demonstrates the vital instincts of the domestic feline in ultimately quite a heartwarming manner.

Undercover Boss
Bruce Springsteen (a.k.a. ‘The Boss’) painstakingly re-records the Rolling Stones’ 1983 album ‘Undercover’, playing all instruments, singing all vocals and, in a bold move, recording his efforts over the original master tapes. Ultimately pointless, but worth persevering with for his hilariously inept attempts at a cockney accent on the track ‘Too Much Blood’.

There’s got to be a hit in there somewhere. Make it happen, Tony Hayers!

Markets of Britain

2012-01-20T13:10:00.000Z

A slice of Serafinowicz/Popper splendour from '10.

Fast Food – Ads vs. Reality

2012-01-20T13:07:00.001Z

The lesson: McDonald's are more honest than most fast food outlets. Or something.
Click here.

Every Presentation Ever

2012-01-20T13:00:00.000Z

[sharing observational comedy for purposes of amusement]

New York in camera

2012-01-20T12:51:00.003Z

A lovely set of photos of everyday NYC life - click here.

The d'ohs of Homer

2012-01-20T12:46:00.001Z

The Prodigy a cappella

2012-01-20T12:45:00.001Z

This is spectacular on so many levels.

Voices of change, captured unfortunately

2012-01-20T12:34:00.002Z

Click here.

The inappropriateness of Saved By The Bell

2012-01-20T12:33:00.001Z

The weirdest ad you'll see this week

2012-01-20T12:29:00.001Z

...the moral being that if your boiler breaks, your mum will go mental.

Vintage Hollywood bloopers

2012-01-20T12:27:00.000Z

Ineffably charming.

13/01/12 - Ode to the album

2012-01-13T14:00:00.003Z

Thanks to the iPod, music just isn’t special any more.
Christ, that’s a horrible statement. Sorry, let me explain myself…

In the good old days - the sixties and seventies; before my time, but the time when my parents were growing up – recorded music was something special, something to be cherished. Each album was an event, to be hunted down and appreciated holistically and repeatedly. There was none of this ‘download a track here, download a track there’ nonsense – you had to actually go to a shop and buy the album you wanted. You’d devour it whole, appreciating the album as it was intended by its creators; the first track is the opener for a reason and there’s method behind the running order of the subsequent tracks, the cover art has depth and significance, and so does whatever liner notes they chose to (or not to) include. It was a thing. And because vinyl was chunky and substantial, you had to have somewhere to keep it, and it was always obvious. You couldn’t buy an album and forget about it.
This specialness helps to attach memories to music. On the day that Ian Dury & The Blockheads’ ‘New Boots & Panties!!’ album was released in 1977, my dad went to every record store in Canvey Island trying to find it, asking each baffled proprietor ‘excuse me, do you have New Boots and Panties…?’. Picture that. He was lucky not to get a thick ear, cheeky sod. In fact, when you think about it, half the stories of that generation have some sort of über-cool musical significance; my wife’s parents, for example, actually met at a Beatles gig at the Cavern Club. How rock ‘n’ roll is that? You can be sure they remember that every time they flip ‘Rubber Soul’ onto the turntable. The rhythm was all-pervading, it was everywhere in everybody’s lives.
I remember when I was growing up, my parents had maybe fifty or sixty records. (Compare that to the amount of music on your iPod right now…) I knew every one of those records inside out. Still do, in fact. The Rolling Stones’ ‘Sticky Fingers’, ‘Let It Bleed’ and ‘Exile on Main Street’, Graham Parker’s ‘The Up Escalator’ and ‘The Real Macaw’, Led Zeppelin’s ‘II’, Budgie’s ‘If I Were Britannia I’d Waive The Rules’… we knew them all by heart. Because that’s what we had.

Broadly speaking, we can say that the sixties and seventies were the vinyl era, the eighties were all about cassette tapes, the nineties (and early noughties) were the time of CDs, then it went online. I was lucky to straddle the cusp of tape and CD, wherein the ideals of the vinyl album still held but the music was a little more portable.
Recordable cassettes allowed us to share music with friends. ‘Home taping is killing music’, cried the industry, but they couldn’t have been more wrong; home taping perpetuated kids’ fascination with music, broadening horizons that ultimately bolstered the industry as a whole, encouraging another generation of adolescents to spend their spare time going to gigs and hanging out in record shops.
Most of my pocket money was spent in Gatefield Sounds and B-Side the C-Side, respectively the local independent record store and a second-hand music exchange – it was the latter that spawned my fondness for rarities and collectibles. You see, I had this ingrained love of the album – these snapshots in time created for us by our music idols, representing their own perspective on that particular period, captured forever in a bundle of musical memories – and, once I had sufficient spare change to start collecting my own, I became obsessed with completism: if I’d bought an album I really liked (Mansun’s ‘Attack Of The Grey Lantern’, say, or 60ft Dolls’ ‘The Big 3’), I’d collect all of the associated singles in all their forms, as well as any demos and imports I could get my hands on. These were the times, remember, when releasing a single actually meant something – when people would have to make the effort to go to the shops to buy it, and bands would reflect this effort by releasing a single on two CDs, cassette and 7” vinyl, with different b-sides on each. You could be really snobby about it. ‘What, you haven’t heard the acoustic version? No, not that one, the demo? You mean you only bought CD1? Huh…’

I hate downloading music. If I’m going to buy an album or a single, I’ll buy a physical copy of it and store it in a rack, so that if I want to listen to it I’ll have to find it and make the effort to play it. The band went to great lengths to create it in exactly that format, so it’s the least I can do.
In my whole life, I’ve probably downloaded no more than around twenty songs, and they were all from MySpace in about 2005. (And, to be fair, they were by bands like Milburn and Bromheads Jacket, whose CDs I then went out and bought in a shop.) I’ve only ever bought two tracks from iTunes – they were ‘Damn Damn Leash’ by Be Your Own Pet and ‘Bug Powder Dust’ by Bomb The Bass – which are now lost on an old, scrapped version of iTunes on a defunct laptop. I object hugely to the shitty strategy of only allowing you to listen to things you download on an Apple device – I’ve paid for the fucking track, why shouldn’t I be allowed to burn it to a CD and listen to it in the car? I should own that copy of the track, not just rent it from Cupertino on a limited basis.
(Don’t worry, I tracked down an original promo copy of ‘Damn Damn Leash’ on CD - complete with cover hand-painted by the band - on 991.com, and the Bomb The Bass album ‘Clear’ was sourced from the play.com marketplace – they’re mine now. I can listen to them wherever I want.)

So anyway, back to my opening statement about the iPod. Now, it’s a bloody clever little device, and I love mine to bits. (Fourth-generation classic, circa 2005. Still going strong.) However, the gadget’s ubiquity adds to the maelstrom of musical indifference demonstrated by a lot of people these days. This is illustrated most vividly by the people you see who are still using the fucking awful white earbuds that come with iPods. These are so crap for listening to music with, you might as well be hearing reel-to-reel tape, underwater, through a tin can attached to a bit of string. They’re horribly weak and tinny, and they have NO BASS. None at all. And no dynamism. You lose all perception of the magic captured in the studio, you’re just listening to a faded and discoloured facsimile of the music you’ve paid for. People who use these earbuds don’t really want to listen to music in any meaningful sense; they want a background noise that they can ignore, to drown out reality. They could just as easily be listening to white noise.
So the equipment’s all wrong, but so’s the attitude. Downloading a song here and a song there and smooshing them all together into a little music box is sacrilegious to the creative process that spawned the tracks in the first place. There’s nothing special in treating music like an all-you-can-eat buffet. It’s disrespectful.

I said earlier that ‘the rhythm was all-pervading, it was everywhere in everybody’s lives’; you could argue that this is still the case today, that people spend far more time listening to music than ever before because the technology allows them to do so. But it’s not the same. Listening to it and hearing it are two very different things.

Maybe I’m just a crotchety old sod.

James Bond: bit of an arsehole

2012-01-13T13:53:00.000Z

Tiny Faces

2012-01-13T13:50:00.001Z

Click me.

The Joy of Books

2012-01-13T13:48:00.000Z

Mapstalgia

2012-01-13T13:38:00.001Z

Video game maps, drawn from memory. And it's as simple as that. Click here.

Transformers trilogy: abridged

2012-01-13T13:34:00.000Z

BOOOOOOOM. BAAAAAAANNNNNNGGGGGG. KA-BOOOOOOOOOOOOM. Phssssssss... ... ... ... KA-SPLLAAAAAAAAAMMMMMOOOOOOAAAGGGHHHHHHHHH.

Waterstone's/Waterstones

2012-01-13T13:25:00.005Z

In their second rebrand in as many years, Waterstones have lost their apostrophe. They've been coping with the loss in rather good humour - you can follow their Oxford Street branch's thoroughly entertaining Twitter feed here, and see the story archived here.

Business Mouse ep.3

2012-01-13T13:18:00.000Z

His latest capers, expanding his portfolio.

News bloopers 2011

2012-01-13T13:17:00.001Z

Flute beatbox

2012-01-13T13:08:00.001Z

Two things I can't do, done at once. Show off.

Abandoned brothels

2012-01-13T13:04:00.002Z

Wanna see some creepy photos of long-empty whorehouses? Click here.

Alchemical Doritos

2012-01-13T13:01:00.000Z

06/01/12 - Definitely the best man...

2012-01-06T13:29:00.001Z

My bestest friend Sam got engaged a little while ago. He was my best man back in June ’10 and he’s asked me to return the favour. Is this a good idea? Well, who can say…?
He did a damn good job at my wedding; either nothing went wrong, or loads of things did and he did spectacularly well at making sure we didn’t know about them – either way, he’s set quite a precedent. It’ll be difficult to emulate. Take this story as evidence:

My sister got married in May last year, and I was an usher. Not as high-profile as being best man, but still with certain important (nay, pivotal) duties. As guests milled around outside the manor house in which the wedding would take place, eagerly awaiting the arrival of the bride, one of the bridesmaids handed me a little silver bag. ‘Put this somewhere safe,’ she said. I found a little shelfy cubbyholey thing at the back of the room where the ceremony was to happen, then went about my ushering; forgetting to seat people, scuffing my shiny shoes on the gravel, waving my phone in the air in a vain attempt to get reception in order to call the driver and find out where the bride was, that kind of thing. All went well, it was a lovely service, and cheerfulness was abundant. Fast forward a few hours and there we are, sitting at the top table in the reception venue a few miles away. My sister leans over to me and asks for the little silver bag, which I’ve obviously forgotten all about. I’m poking around the corners of the dusty attic that is my brain, trying to create a useful connection between the words ‘little silver bag’ and anything I’d actually seen that day, all the while smiling and nodding and making placatory noises. Ping! There it is – I’d seen a little silver bag in the boot of the car. We were staying at the pub next door to the reception venue, so all I needed to do was sneak out, scurry through the hedge, retrieve the bag and return, the hero of the hour. (Or, at least, the not-shit usher.) So that is what I did. I snuck. I scurried. I retrieved. I returned. I handed the bag over.
It was my wife’s make-up bag. An entirely different little silver bag.
It was at that moment that I remembered the little silver bag that the bridesmaid had handed me. The one that I put on the little shelfy cubbyholey thing at the manor house. The one that presumably was still on the little shelfy cubbyholey thing at the manor house. The one that, as I was now being informed by an enraged bride, contained the speeches and the music for the first dance. There was more sneaking and scurrying to be done.
I fled the scene and ran next door, scampering across the gravelly car park toward the car. Gravel and brand new leather soles do not mix well, and gravity got the better of me; I found myself performing that hopeless half-running-half-falling manoeuvre, the move that has all of the inevitability of a solid faceplant but with the added humiliation of fruitlessly trying to save oneself by windmilling the arms and emitting a slo-mo ‘nooooooooo!’. I hit the ground knees-first, and somehow – with a certain quick-witted flair and panache, I thought – managed to turn the fall into a forward roll, landing on my feet and continuing the run in one fluid motion. I was covered head-to-toe in dust and bleeding profusely from both knees, the rented wedding trousers torn in a painfully obvious manner. I leapt into the car and Colin McRae'd it back to the manor house which, helpfully, had a hump-backed bridge before its entrance, forcing me to attain several unexpected feet of air as I powered across it at a very naughty speed. Tearing up the seemingly never-ending tree-lined drive, I eventually arrived at the entrance in a cloud of dust and tyresmoke. To find that the place was shut. Bugger.
Still, I’d come this far. After a bit of jiggling and jimmying (and no small amount of violence and swearing), the mighty oak door yielded and I tippy-toed in. I slid as noiselessly as I could across the creaking floorboards of the hall - my shiny soles proving that they were some use, after all - and padded into the ceremonial room. Hosannah! Glory be! The bag was still there! As were a number of rather cross-looking people, who I presumed owned the place. Weighing up my options, I could either explain myself (very easily and innocently done), or I could just grab the bag and scarper. And the second option seemed a lot quicker. So that’s what I did. I pounded back through the hall, dove into the car and, with a banshee wail from the tyres and an urgent whistle from the turbo, effected my egress.
Yumping back over the bridge, I yanked the lever marked ‘Ludicrous Speed’ and raced to the reception, pulling a variety of unlikely overtakes that would make even James Bond re-evaluate his perception of physics. Screeching to a halt at the door, I ran back to the top table and flung the bag at my borderline-incandescent sister. I was filthy, wounded, ragged, panting and had committed at least four crimes.

So good luck, Sam. This is apparently what I do at weddings.

London's NYE 2012 fireworks

2012-01-06T13:25:00.000Z

Hands down, best in the world.

The universe: it's quite big

2012-01-06T13:04:00.002Z

In the immortal words of Douglas Adams, 'space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.'
To get an idea of just how frighteningly vast it is, click the image.

Festive QI, with Brian Blessed

2012-01-06T13:01:00.001Z

That's your lunch hour sorted.

Lists of Note

2012-01-06T12:46:00.003Z

A compelling new offering from the chap behind Letters of Note. Click the image to see.

Tractor Jazz

2012-01-06T12:41:00.002Z

More reliable than a drummer?

Retrode

2012-01-06T12:35:00.003Z

This thing allows you to play SNES and Mega Drive games on your PC - how cool is that?! Click the image to see...

How many Mobies?

2012-01-06T12:30:00.001Z

The finest ever thirty seconds of NMTB.

Cliff swears at kids

2012-01-06T12:29:00.001Z

Where's your messiah now...?

Moscow Timelapse

2012-01-06T12:26:00.001Z

22/12/11 - 2011 JuicyPips Guide to Alternative Christmas Grub

2011-12-22T15:14:00.002Z

Well, ho ho ho! The festive season is upon us; the ground is crisp with frost, the shops are full of green and red things and the nation’s windows glitter with tinsel and hope. Tis the season to be jolly! Or, at least, less grumpy. There’s good stuff on telly, you’ve got a weekend pass to ingest shamefully gluttonous quantities of food and booze and, if you’re lucky, you’ve got a few days off work. Lovely. Hang your stocking at the foot of the bed and wait for him to come. Giddy excitement.
So, to ease your digestive tract through the festive season, here’s the 2011 JuicyPips Guide to Alternative Christmas Grub.

Bouncy Puddings
…is not the name of a Carry On film, but a delicious festive dessert. You may well have experience of making Christmas puddings before? It’s almost literally a piece of cake (in that it’s actually a whole cake; I was employing the colloquial usage of ‘piece of cake’ to imply something that is easy – you may have spotted it); get a load of raisins and chopped cherries and shit (not actual shit, I’m being colloquial again), mix it all up with some Armagnac and cake things, bosh.
The twist here is to trickle in the fresh secretions of hevea brasiliensis, the common rubber tree. It’ll add slightly to the chewiness of the pudding, but this minor discomfort will be more than compensated for by the increased practicality of the dish. Knock it off the table and it’ll bounce right back onto the plate. Perfect for visiting relatives who are a) old, b) smashed or c) both.

Spit-roasted Robins
Not what you’re thinking, get your mind out of the gutter. Little robin red-breasts make for a delicious festive snackette; the name itself indicates that they’re predominantly formed of tasty, tasty breast meat. They’re very easy to catch too, as they spend quite a lot of time sitting still. You’ve seen it on Christmas cards – no snowy scene is complete without a robin sitting on a pillar box, gate post or icicle-laden branch. Just get out there with a big net and catch a few. Once you’ve got a carrier-bagful, simply plunge a knitting needle through each one and rotate them over a tealight (try building a Lego spit powered by a Tamiya motor or a drill, shouldn’t be too hard); drizzle a little sesame oil over their feet and faces as they turn. Delicious.

Mince Pies
Put some actual fucking mince in them. You know, ground up cows. Stop the lies.

Christmas Crackers
Really tricky one, this, but worth it if you can pull it off. You’ll need an industrial quantity of Ritz crackers - or Tuc biscuits, they work too - and a bucket of Lego men; use the homeless ones you displaced when building your robin spit. You’ll also need some paper hats and a selection of terrible, terrible jokes. (Google ‘Michael McIntyre’ for inspiration.) With great care and precision, dismantle all of the crackers into their component biscuit molecules, and reform the mass into one enormous biscuit. Be careful to leave a cavity in the centre of your Christmas Cracker to house the paper hats, shit jokes and little Lego men carrying out various industrious Lego tasks. (You don’t need to worry about adding a snap like in a traditional cracker, as this kind of cracker has its own inherent crunchiness when pulled.) It’s a lot of effort to go to for quite a weak gag, but your guests will be impressed by your massive biscuit. And they’ll all be obliged to wear hats that are covered in biscuit crumbs. “lol”.

The Multibeast
A bird stuffed with various other birds is one of those ideas that’s been in and out of fashion for centuries. Personally, I love a turducken – a turkey stuffed with a duck and a chicken – although I reckon the naming strategy requires a rethink; starting the name with ‘turd’ isn’t a great idea for something you’re going to put in your mouth. Doesn’t ‘duckenkey’ sound more fun…?
No, forget all that ‘random selection of poultry and game birds’ nonsense. What you want to dominate this year, boys and girl, is The Multibeast. You start with a vole. (Fill it with earwigs so it’ll keep its shape once you’ve boned it. [Not like that, sicko. You’re going to eat this. I mean ‘taken the bones out’.]) Stuff it into a hamster. Stuff the hamster into a pigeon. Ram that into a stoat. The stoat goes into a cat. Continue in this fashion until you’ve ticked off all the pages in the Observer’s Book of Rodents, Larger Mammals and Big Jungle Bastards. By the end of the process you should find yourself standing proudly before a whole bison wrapped around approximately four hundred incrementally smaller creatures. Your oven won’t be big enough, so you’ll need to circulate slowly with a blowtorch. Or maybe break the door off your microwave and position it in front of its face or something, I dunno. Then eat the whole thing. (Then die, possibly.)

Cocktails
A delicious cocktail is a traditional way to start Christmas day, is it not? When I was growing up, the Snowball was the eye-opener of choice – Advocaat and lemonade – whereas these days it’s more likely to be the wholly appropriately-named Christmas Morning; a splash of sloe gin topped up with Champagne. But why be traditional? Take the advice of a couple of naughty girls I know and try this: the Patented Emily Holl & Katie Peden Ballbag Smasheroo. It goes like this…
Wake up on Christmas morning. Stagger to Oddbins. Notice that it’s closed. Ignore this fact. Launch a bin through the window. Steal every bottle of Buckfast. Drink the lot.
It’s what Jesus would have wanted. It makes his little angels look more, er, angelic.

Horrible food that you don’t like
C’mon, that’s what Christmas is really all about, isn’t it? Eating food that doesn’t taste very nice? There’s a reason that Christmas pudding and mince pies are traditionally associated with the yuletide season and not any other time of year: nobody actually likes them. Stop lying to yourselves and pretending to enjoy it – if you all just admit that you find the bitter taste of weirdly pulped fruit unpalatable, we can stop the madness.
Sprouts? Nobody likes bloody sprouts. Name one occasion this year that you’ve cooked or ordered them by choice. It just doesn’t happen. Vile little things. Eat Me dates? People only buy these because they have a funny name. They taste rank. Toblerone? OK, Toblerone is very tasty, but it’s not a natural shape for a food; the harsh, solid triangle is not conducive to oral health in a species with comparatively weak gums. Too pointy. Yule log? Looks like a massive shit. Bread sauce? Delicious if prepared correctly, but invariably ends up looking like someone’s already eaten it.
Yeah, ignore all of that. Start with the robins, pound through The Multibeast, have a crack at a bouncy pudding, then just nail the Bucky. Winner.

A Brief History of Santa

2011-12-22T15:00:00.002Z

...or Father Christmas, or Saint Nick, or whatever.

2011 in pictures

2011-12-22T14:54:00.002Z

A lot happened this year. Prepare to be heartwarmed and depressed in equal measure by some typically beautiful photography from the Boston Globe - click here and here.

Best fails of 2011

2011-12-22T14:49:00.001Z

Twelve minutes of pure comedy gold. And lots of people really hurting themselves, obviously.

Homeless Are Copywriters

2011-12-22T14:24:00.001Z

Click here.

Giant festive zoetrope

2011-12-22T14:20:00.001Z

Lovely. Just lovely. The old-school fairground clickety-clackety sound is particularly endearing.

Kim Jong-Il dropping the bass

2011-12-22T14:15:00.001Z

Let us remember him this way. Click here.

Wintry Words With Bill Bailey

2011-12-22T14:13:00.000Z

Railcard rejects

2011-12-22T14:09:00.002Z

It was exactly a year ago that we looked at this chap's rejected Railcard photos. Click the image to see how he got on this year...

Advertising With Bells On

2011-12-22T14:06:00.001Z

Startled browsing at 0:54 is pure class.

Why do sprouts make you fart?

2011-12-22T14:02:00.000Z

Because of this, that's why.

Wander Monster

2011-12-22T13:57:00.001Z

This is very cute indeed. Man draws half-finished cartoons and leaves them in his son's lunchbox. Son finishes. Click here.

Call of Duty in real life

2011-12-22T13:55:00.000Z

16/12/11 - Studio 54, 2007

2011-12-16T13:35:00.001Z

Last night was the office Christmas party. (I’m writing this on Monday, so what I really mean is ‘the office Christmas party is in a few days’, but that won’t be the case when I click ‘send’ on this. Phew – confusing, isn’t it? The linear passage of time conflicts no end with my inner DeLorean.) So, in the recent past, but actually in the present, but preparing to send this in another present, I’m guessing I’ll be a little bit hung over. [Friday edit: This turned out to be true. Fucking hung over. Want to die.] Given that I presumably won’t have the wherewithal to relate stories from Thursday night - er, last night, that is - here’s something that happened at the 2007 Christmas party.

The theme was Studio 54, which immediately led people into debauchery before the night had even begun. How could it not? It was filthy. There was an ice sculpture/vodka luge that ensured that everybody in the room was liberally saturated with Smirnoff. There were dwarves circulating with canapés. There were bikini-clad Valkyries smeared in gold paint. To be honest, I can’t remember that much of it, except that it was in a venue on Drury Lane so I was making lots of Monty Python gags and laughing slightly too much at myself. As usual.
I remember walking for a very long time through frozen London in the wee small hours, ending up at an after-party at Jenni Cowdy’s place. That girl knows how to drink. And I don’t recall much of what happened there either. Then I woke up on Patrick Cooke’s floor in Pimlico. I was in a very bad way.
The hangover really was a problem. I staggered from Pat’s flat at about midday (he’d gone into the office at 9, the swot) and managed somehow to bumble to work without being sick on myself, which was no small achievement. I was wearing last night’s retro suit – soaked, of course, in vodka and absolutely reeking of the stuff – and some quite thick eyeliner which I couldn’t work out how to scrape off. I nibbled tentatively at a sandwich, gave up and went home. I’d been in the office for about half an hour.
I was living in Redhill at the time, and by the time I got back there it was about three in the afternoon. This is not a good time to be wandering around Redhill reeking of vodka and wearing eyeliner; if I wasn’t swaying so dangerously, I may well have been violated by the locals, or chased out of town with pitchforks and fire. But thankfully I got away with it. I went straight to bed, obviously.

At about 6pm I was awoken by the sound of the telephone. It was my friend Sam, suggesting we go out for a few beers in Reigate. I did not want to do this, but he’s a very persuasive man. His sister was there too; she is also very persuasive. She made us drink loads of tequila.
I was experiencing a second wind, so I thought it was all fine and dandy. I knocked back shot after shot like a trooper, then I went home to bed at about 1 or 2am.
I couldn’t move the next day. Well, I could just about crawl to the bathroom to wee, but that was all I was capable of. The agony! The chaos! The weird blinking lights! I just lay in bed, retching and whimpering. I certainly couldn’t take in any solids or fluids. It was like the cold turkey scene in Trainspotting.
The next day wasn’t much better.
The day after that I got a taxi to Gatwick, boarded a plane to Toulouse and went to my parents’ house. I gave them a cursory hello and went straight to bed, calling back instructions to bring soup. I told them that I had flu and, bless ‘em, they didn’t remark upon the fact that it was clearly a serious case of alcohol poisoning. I stayed in bed for a week.

That’s what our office parties do to you. If you’re reading this, it means that I’m still together enough to copy/paste; if not, then I’m too introubulated to send JuicyPips and this will languish forever in my drafts folder.
Pray for my soul. It’s got sick on it.

Dubstep Snowman

2011-12-16T13:34:00.001Z

Better than it sounds.

Twitter by post

2011-12-16T13:31:00.001Z

A really lovely idea, this - click here.

Cello Wars

2011-12-16T13:28:00.001Z

Devastating Explosions

2011-12-16T13:23:00.004Z

This is, somehow, an extension of the Old Spice 'the man your man could smell like' campaign. Click the image and see if you can work out why.

Improbable catch

2011-12-16T13:21:00.001Z

Surely not...?

Your Best Shot 2011

2011-12-16T13:18:00.001Z

Flickr users' favourite photos of the year. Eclectic.
Click here.

Pulp Fiction in chronological order

2011-12-16T13:14:00.001Z

Now we just need this kind of treatment for Memento and we'll be all set.

sKate Bush

2011-12-16T13:11:00.001Z

God bless you, internet. Clicky.

09/12/11 - The Dolphin

2011-12-09T12:15:00.002Z

Underage drinking: scourge of Britain, destroyer of communities, embarrasser of parents. But from a teenager’s perspective: awesome.
There comes a hairiness/shrillness-diminishing tipping point where you can just about get away with getting served in pubs, but it takes years of being kicked out of places having taken slightly too long to answer the ‘when were you born?’ question, or made some (literally) schoolboy lexical mistake at the bar like asking for ‘a glass of beer, please’.
When I was about fifteen or sixteen-ish, we used to hang out on the Tankerton Slopes – so called because the land slopes down toward the sea, of course - in the evenings drinking cheap cider. Is that a normal age to start that kind of thing? Too early? Too late? Whitstable was a small town, stuck in the eighties; not the boho arty hub it seems to have morphed into now.
We tried to get into the Tank – a.k.a. The Tankerton Arms, now sadly bulldozed and replaced with flats – where the sixth formers used to drink, but it was always humiliating to have to slink out past the cool kids having been once again turned away from the bar. So we used to send Simon to Threshers.
Simon was, and still is, an enormously hairy creature. This isn’t such an impressive boast when you’re hurtling towards thirty (or in Simon’s case, bullishly headbutting thirty, smashing it to pieces and collapsing in a sweaty heap on the other side), but at such a tender age the facially hirsute hold a tremendous advantage.
As is generally the way with chain off-licenses in small towns, the Threshers in Tankerton (on the roundabout near the tennis courts, you know the one…) was run by an affable, short-sighted old buffer with a heart of gold and a severely diminished sense of reason and the law. We used to send Simon in with a list – a list! – of booze to buy and a handful of cash. Eight cans of Stella for Will, here’s six pound coins. Lesley wants a bottle of the best white wine you can get for four quid. Eight cans of Strongbow for Dan, there’s a crumpled fiver here somewhere…
There is actually a lot to do on the beach at night, principally because there’s no-one else there. Much of it revolves around trying to convince/force one another into the sea. The rest, though, I can’t tell you about. (Largely because I can’t remember.) Although, due to a complex web of lies spun out over a number of years, I can shamefully reveal that the beach hut we occasionally annexed that belonged to the parents of one of my friends – let’s call him Mr Pantsonfire – actually belonged to, er, someone else. So when we were breaking in because he’d ‘forgotten the keys’, we were actually just breaking in. Sorry, random stranger. We did always tidy up afterwards.

Gradually, more and more of the group – thank Christ – began to look slightly less ridiculous and out of place in the context of the public house. And, for reasons that escape me, we took to going out regularly in Canterbury. Yes, we had the caravan (Google ‘JuicyPips caravan’ for that story) as a cheap hangout, but for pub life Canterbury was where it was at. I guess it was because we were all satellited around the city in Herne Bay, Whitstable, Faversham etc, so it was the most democratic place for us to go; that way, we’d all have to travel. Or maybe it was because there were loads more pubs there, and a couple of clubs too.
No, wait – it was because my friend’s older sister’s boyfriend worked behind the bar at The Dolphin and we knew we’d probably get served. Yeah, that was it.
In the early stages - Simon was the only one with a full beard (he’d had it since he was eight), but the rest of us were starting to look a little bit stubbly and were talking less squeakily, like that other Simon from The Inbetweeners - we found two Canterbury pubs that were happy to accommodate the kind of patrons that were only just old enough to hold driving licenses (which were crudely doctored with Tipp-ex and pink highlighters with a general nod at playing the game; if they’d asked for ID and we’d supplied something semi-credible then it was our fault and not theirs); namely The Dolphin and The Cross Keys, although we weren’t altogether welcome in The Cross Keys after the tequila/hospital incident (Google ‘JuicyPips drunkenness’ for details). [n.b. this was in the late nineties; for legal reasons, I'm obviously not implying that these pubs serve underage people now...]
The Dolphin embraced us as their own. On a Friday and Saturday night, it was pretty much an unspoken rule that we’d have the big tables out the back, offering easy access to both bar and pool table. We trained them in obscure drink orders; the Ladyboy, for example. This was a time when I’m Alan Partridge was still fresh and new, and they enjoyed learning that ‘a Ladyboy’ meant a pint of lager, a gin & tonic and a Baileys. They even started to give them to us on a three-for-two deal; buy a pint and a g&t, get a Baileys free. It was our place – a sticky, cheap, dirty little pub full of questionable characters, yet weirdly very much our scene.
By the time we were old enough to go to nice pubs, of course, that’s exactly what we did. Just like our actual homes, the opportunity to fly the nest was one to be keenly looked forward to and was the subject of much discussion. A whole city of pubs, and so much to explore. Live music in The Three Tuns? Lovely. Poteen on special in The Beer Cart Arms? Super. Shepherd Neame mini-festival in The Old Buttermarket? That’ll do nicely. Tom’s got a job at The West Gate Inn? Maybe he can slip us a peanut…

The summer after our first year of university, when we were all eighteen or nineteen and very much allowed to go there by law, officer, we went back to The Dolphin. Y’know, for old times’ sake.
It was bloody horrible. I haven’t been back since. If you Google them now you’ll see that their website proudly boasts ‘The Dolphin: it’s a pub’. Tells you all you need to know, really.
Never go back, children.

Misery Bear: The Teddynator

2011-12-09T12:05:00.000Z

The most powerful photos of 2011

2011-12-09T12:02:00.001Z

...courtesy of Buzzfeed. Click here.

Real-Life Nyan Cat

2011-12-09T11:59:00.000Z

Rapping Paper

2011-12-09T11:52:00.001Z

Why not start the festive season with an obvious pun? Your little gangstas will appreciate it. Click here.

Celebrity Siblings

2011-12-09T11:35:00.002Z

As the name suggests, Celebrity Siblings is a blog about the siblings of celebrities - click here to see. Some are more bitter than others...

Extreme Christmas lights!

2011-12-09T11:26:00.002Z

Fucking hell. Imagine living next door to this guy.

Fashion?

2011-12-09T11:23:00.001Z

I know nothing at all about fashion. The only conclusion I can draw from this site is that everyone in Helsinki is slightly unhinged.

Vietnam Timelapse

2011-12-09T11:20:00.001Z

02/12/11 - Travel systems

2011-12-02T14:01:00.002Z

‘Pushchair’ is one of my favourite words. It’s the only word in the English language that contains the letters ‘shch’ consecutively^{[citation needed]}. So you can imagine my glee when I started to research a pushchair purchase recently; a complex consonant cluster and an opportunity to buy something with four wheels? My two favourite things smooshed into one activity, that.

So, a pushchair is quite a simple thing, right? It’s just a quite small collapsible chair on castors. That’s gonna be, what, twenty quid? Thirty?
No. I was, and remain, an utter fool. This kind of gear is a) really complicated and b) surprisingly expensive.
First of all, we’re not buying a pushchair at all. We’re buying a ‘travel system’. This involves choosing an appropriate chassis (another word I love – it amuses me that Americans are unable to pronounce it correctly) upon which to affix a sort of Moses basket thingy that allows the little ‘un to lie flat. After six months or so, you can swap this bit out and clip in a seat that angles them up properly – most travel systems have clever adaptability that allow you to have the baby facing you or facing outward, presumably depending on how likely they are to be projectile vomiting on any given day. You also need some kind of compatible car seat, which in turn may require some form of adaptor to work with your car’s ISOFIX points. Then you’ve got all of the associated sun-shades, changing bags and what-have-you that, of course, all have to be made by the same company or they won’t fit properly. And it’s all stuff that you kind of need. Once you’ve added it together, you’ve spent about six hundred quid.
My first car cost me £250. In fact, a lot of cars I’ve owned cost rather a lot less than £600. A travel system doesn’t even have a bloody engine, you have to push it with your own human hands! This smacks of an overspend, but the baby paraphernalia industry has you by the balls: ‘you used these to make the baby, now we own them wholesale’.

My two key criteria (bearing in mind that it was going to be an eye-watering sum whichever one we ended up choosing) were weight and size – specifically, narrowness. We live on the first floor, and our staircase is precisely one centimetre wider than a standard-sized washing machine (go on, ask me how I know this), and thus it had to be something thin so that we could actually, y’know, physically get the baby into the flat. Little bugger’d get nippy living in the porch. And lightness was key too – carrying it up and down the stairs will be cumbersome enough without the added irritation of turning it into an impromptu workout. What we’re really after here is the 1958 Lotus Elite of travel systems.
I said this to the woman in Babies R Us. ‘What we’re really after here’, I said, ‘is the 1958 Lotus Elite of travel systems’. She looked at me like I was the unstoppably befuddling cretin that I’m increasingly convinced I may well be, and opted to talk to my wife instead. Wise move. The two of them discussed folding techniques, accessories, wipe-clean-ability and sturdiness of construction while I systematically worked through the systems one by one, seeing which I could fold down into its smallest possible format with one hand and with the least blood loss, and steering them at high speed around the store to test the handling. (I may, at this point, have been poking my tongue out of the corner of my mouth and/or been making ‘vroom vroom’ noises.)

We live in Wandsworth, parts of which are very much Yummymummyville. The de rigueur travel system for poshos is the Bugaboo Cameleon, although there seem to be two key requirements for owning such a statement system: firstly, at least one of you needs to be a city trader or a lawyer or something. They’re frickin’ pricey. Secondly, you need to have a Range Rover to carry it around in. We’ve failed on both counts, so the Bugaboo’s out.
A friend of mine recommended the Quinny Buzz on the grounds that it folds up small enough to get in the boot of his Triumph Herald. I was excited by the prospect of the Buzz, I have to admit; it’s a three-wheeler, so the potential for Trotter-related hilarity is strong. Or you can wheel it around backwards and pretend it’s a Morgan. But tested alongside its rivals, the Buzz is pretty heavy, so that was off the list too.

I could reel off all of the models we tested, but I suspect that it would make for rather dull reading. The upshot of all of this is that we’re probably going to get an Oyster. My wife likes it because it’s very narrow, impressively light, super robust and can be folded up with one hand. I like it because the chassis has mighty torsional rigidity so you get a bit of cocked-wheel oversteer in fast corners, like a 205 GTi. Horses for courses.

The other dads-to-be gave me disapproving glances throughout my testing procedures. I suspect that this was because they weren’t allowed to run around the shop going ‘vroom vroom’…

Street Talk with The Beards

2011-12-02T13:58:00.000Z

A hilarious bunch of hirsute bastards.

Batman Running Away From Shit

2011-12-02T13:55:00.001Z

The below still doesn't do the concept justice - click it and you'll see what I mean. It rocks.

November fail compilation

2011-12-02T13:51:00.001Z

Eight-and-a-half minutes of schadenfreude, compiled by TwisterNederland8.

Texts From Bennett

2011-12-02T13:47:00.002Z

I really hope this is real. Bennett sounds like an absolute looper. Clicky.

Retro warfare

2011-12-02T13:44:00.001Z

Rebranding baby girls

2011-12-02T13:28:00.001Z

An interesting little project from Fast Company - click here.

Halfords ad: alternate ending

2011-12-02T13:25:00.000Z

lol, etc.

Self Pop Tarts

2011-12-02T13:20:00.001Z

Self-explanatory, really. Clicky.

24/11/11 - Peacocking

2011-11-24T13:45:00.004Z

When I was a kid, being on television was a really big deal. I made a calendar when I was about twelve and sent it in to Live & Kicking (who were running some kind of calendar competition, obviously – I’m not in the habit of mailing unsolicited hobbycrafts to kids’ TV shows on the off-chance that they might enjoy it) and, for a split-second, the Bevis name appeared on BBC1. On Christmas day, no less. It was hugely exciting – although I missed it happening, I think I was in the shower at the time – and my family treated me like a celebrity all day. Earlier that year, my mum had given a soundbite to the local news in protest against something or other that was happening to a nearby roundabout; she appeared on screen in her yellow cagoule, momentarily militant in the face of, er, something, and everyone we knew crowded around their tellies to witness a familiar face on the box. That kind of thing was thrilling back in the blissful simplicity of the early nineties.

The modern concept of fame is something that irritates me enormously. It’s a subject that I could bang on about for ages (and frequently do [and have done many times before in JuicyPips, actually]). In the olden days people were famous for doing, achieving or knowing things; Brunel was famed for his engineering ingenuity, Capability Brown revolutionised the British countryside with his madcap landscaping, Edison invented pretty much everything, Archimedes will forever be associated with hydrostatics. The other side of this was infamy; Burke & Hare, Typhoid Mary, Ned Kelly – they were famous for deliberate misdeeds and acts that civilised society consider to be, at best, distasteful. But now that line between fame and infamy is blurred. It’s perceived as equally valid to be famous for making an arse of yourself in front of millions – singing badly, eating a witchetty grub, whatever – rather than actually doing something even remotely worthwhile or beneficial. So what’s the point in working at something when a wilful lack of effort can receive similar plaudits?

This is partially, but by no means entirely, X Factor’s fault. And I’m not knocking it as a show; I watch it every week, it’s cheery, mindless escapism that demonstrates a genuinely charming snapshot of the human desire for betterment and achievement. But it also demonstrates modern Britain’s nastiest, most unpleasant character trait: there isn’t a specific word for it, but it’s a combination of laziness, a misplaced sense of self-worth, the desire to be recognised for one’s talents whilst simultaneously showing a belligerent lack of acknowledgement of their shortcomings, and a sense that the world owes one something and that one deserves to receive accolades solely on the basis of wanting them. I’m going to invent a word for this right now. That word is ‘slappingjohnlogiebairdinthefaceism’.

Reality TV has a lot to answer for. I forced myself to watch a lot of it at university under the broad and loosely-defined umbrella of ‘dissertation research’. Yes, a large part of my (rather poorly received) dissertation was an acerbic rant about the facile shitness of reality television. The genre's roots lie in game shows, as you might imagine, which were and are the portals to allow average Joes onto the small screen without having to really put any work into it. And game shows stretch way back to 1938’s Spelling Bee, so this desire to be on screen and grab a pocketful of fame’s glitter is nothing new. It’s more the dogged pursuit of fame at any cost that’s beginning to define an unpleasant new 21st century behaviour.
The rot began to set in with MTV’s The Real World back in 1992, which subsequently became the channel’s longest-running show and is credited with spawning the latter-day reality genre. It was structurally similar to ITV2’s recent The Only Way Is Essex in that it showed real-life events to a degree, but these were shaped by the whims and direction of the production team to make stuff actually happen – largely because other people’s lives really aren’t that interesting; folk just go to work and go to the shops and watch telly and have a nice cup of tea, much like you do. (For further back-up of this, see Big Brother: the first UK series in 2000 was genuinely interesting as an anthropological social experiment, but as soon as the second series came around the contestants weren’t a diverse crowd of different characters, they were just fame-hungry pricks peacocking for the cameras; they knew how much footage would be broadcast, you see, whereas the contestants in the first series had no idea. A group of people sitting around doing nothing makes for fucking boring television [until they get cabin fever and start to punch each other, that is], which is why they’re fed with pointless tasks. It stagnates quickly.)
Have you seen the movie EDtv, incidentally? Probably not, it bombed at the box office, but it’s actually quite good; think of The Truman Show but with the dystopian horror of awareness. The moral is that accidental fame is a bitter pill.

Now, there are plenty of people who are on TV on merit. That’s a truism; people wouldn’t watch television if it wasn’t worth watching - Kevin McCloud, Huw Edwards and Julia Davis can all be proud that they’re working hard at being good at what they do and became famous by consequence, rather than approaching it the other way around. That’s good. But there’s a worrying trend of celebrities that, frankly, should be bloody ashamed of themselves: they’re taking part in celebrity reality television. And that’s a sub-genre that doesn’t need to exist. Aggie MacKenzie, Dom Joly, Tim Lovejoy – what the hell are you thinking? You’re already on TV, you selfish twats. No-one gives a shit if you can dance on ice, make a stargazey pie or live in a sanitised jungle for a bit and eat perfectly safe but unpleasant-tasting parts of animals. It’s tremendously fucking tedious.
I am clearly in a minority with this opinion, given the popularity of such shows. But it does irritate me that these celeb forays, once solely the preserve of Children in Need or Comic Relief, in which we’d see someone we recognised from the telly doing something other than what we knew them for, are now on the box all the bloody time. Chewing gum for the eyes.

The basic problem today is that we’ll watch any old shit. And the saddest element of this behaviour is that if you manage to get on screen for whatever reason, it really doesn’t matter. Slappingjohnlogiebairdinthefaceism has killed television’s mystique, and now that we’re so far down this execrable road, there’s no turning back. Enjoy intelligent programming while you can, because the TV of your children’s future will be 100% (or, in reality TV language ‘110%’, ‘one hundred million percent’, etc) dross. All filler, no thought. It’ll no longer even pretend to be a mirror of ‘reality’; we’ll just be watching each other doing fucking nothing.

Fenton! FENTON!

2011-11-24T13:32:00.002Z

You've probably seen this by now, but if not, enjoy:

This meme rapidly spiralled this week, with a seemingly never-ending series of YouTube spin-offs. Here's a random sample...
n.b. It was originally trending as 'Benton' before the owner cleared up the dog's actual name, hence the Benton/Fenton disparity.

Pepper Spraying Cop

2011-11-24T13:26:00.002Z

A rapidly-growing meme, 'Pepper Spraying Cop' centres around Lt. John Pike, the campus police officer photographed nonchalantly pepper-spraying a group of non-violent student protestors at UC Davis, California. Click here for the internet's revenge.

'Best DVD Commentary Ever'

2011-11-24T13:11:00.001Z

Arnie really doesn't get the point of DVD audio commentary, does he?

Thai Flood Hacks

2011-11-24T13:03:00.001Z

Ingenuity in the face of adversity. Heartwarming, isn't it? Click here.

Mario Post-It stop-motion

2011-11-24T13:00:00.000Z

This must have taken ages.

Hip Hop Dressage

2011-11-24T12:57:00.001Z

18/11/11 - WFJB

2011-11-18T13:28:00.003Z

Mo’ money, mo’ problems. Less money, er, mo’ problems. It’s easy to get caught up in a middle-class spiral of woe-is-me hand-wringing; after all, if we didn’t have a daily checklist of niggles to fret about, how on earth would we get through the day (or justify that sixth cup of soothing tea)? A large electricity bill, a slow-loading computer, a wait for the postman that’s longer than expected, someone not stopping for you at a zebra crossing, running out of milk at an inopportune moment, finding that a bird’s crapped on your freshly buffed motor – modern life is fraught with irritating distractions.
The other day I found myself counting up my demons. (That’s a bastardised Coldplay lyric, how middle class is that? Although I’m always the first to evangelise that when Coldplay’s first album, Parachutes, was released, it was quite cool to like them and it was a genuinely good album, I just wish they’d left it at that instead of disappearing up their own dinner party on-sale-at-the-M&S-counter arses. Hey ho. Perhaps it’d be cooler for me to quote Jay-Z and say ‘I got 99 problems but a bitch ain’t one’? But no, I don’t want to do that. Jay-Z is a dick. [And it’d be disrespectful to my ‘bitch’, who isn’t actually a bitch at all; in fact, she’s very lovely indeed.]) I pinpointed a few things that are sitting heavily and pointedly at the base of my brain, occasionally jabbing at my thinkbox with their lemon juice-soaked cocktail sticks and ensuring that I’m constantly a little annoyed and tetchy.

First of all, the roof on my flat leaks. I mean properly leaks, with water running down the bedroom walls when it rains. That’s not good, is it? The windowsill looks like a mini-Atlantis. Our inept landlords dealt with this in their own inimitable style – sending four separate people to come round and look at it, none of whom actually did anything about it, then forgetting about it for a while until we reminded them, then sending someone to stretch a tarpaulin over it, which a) doesn’t actually keep the rain out and b) very quickly came loose and flapped around noisily for days, meaning we couldn’t get any sleep. Now, in the grand scheme of things, this isn’t really that big a deal. It’s not our flat – we’re renting – so we don’t have to pay for any of this. Given the number of people in the world who have actual problems, like not having a roof, does this matter? No. Not at all. But it gives me something to moan about. And in post-Meldrew Britain, that’s sort of important, isn’t it?

Debt. That’s another thing that concerns me. I was a prolific spender in my youth, and thirty-three cars and a few thousand CDs later I find myself paying a third of my paycheque back to the bank every month in order to quell the relentless tide of interest on my substantial debts. I get a Christmas card from Lloyds TSB every year, they have a framed picture of me on the wall at head office, and they always wave cheerily when I enter my local branch, rubbing their hands together at the prospect of receiving more guilt-cash. So, while I do get paid a fair-ish wage for what I do, I’m no better off day-to-day than I was ten years ago when I was earning £12k p.a. This is annoying, and something I think about every day.
…but compare this to the panic of the PIIGS in the Eurozone, and it doesn’t matter one iota. If you can (just about) afford to repay your debts, then you really don’t have that much to complain about, do you? And I don’t regret a penny of the money I frittered, because I had a damn good time. It’s a pisser that I can’t ever afford to go to the pub, but I can always just stay home and watch EastEnders, in which much pub-visiting occurs. It’s almost as good as being there.

I can’t afford to put a deposit on a house.
Oh, boo fucking hoo. Who can? Yes, when I was younger I assumed that I’d be on the property ladder when I reached thirty and that definitely isn’t going to happen – again, something that annoys me constantly – but sod it, I do live somewhere. With a baby on the way, I’d like nothing more than to be creating a fancy baby room, perhaps painting some kind of inexpert mural and daubing black and white spirals on the ceiling for the little ‘un to enjoy, but that’s just not the way it’s working out at the moment. A coat of magnolia will have to suffice.

None of this is really that important. But I’m going to paste below something that I think is important; an extract from my grandfather’s memoirs. I received a copy of this earlier in the year, and wanted to share it with a wider audience after Remembrance Day.

...in 1939 the conscription bill meant that I would be called up in the second draft. I volunteered to join the army in the first group and joined six months earlier than I needed to.
I was posted to Yeovil in the Royal Artillery. My uniform was stamped ‘Made in 1916’ – two years before I was born! I had puttees and breeches and I wore this uniform for a year until it was changed for battle dress.
On the day war was declared the sergeant major asked if anyone knew anything about motor cars. I raised my hand and as a result I and a few others were sent to Aldershot the same day, and then to Hounslow Heath in first world war huts, in which some parts of the walls were electrified from the poor condition of the wiring!
On 16th September 1939 I travelled down to Southampton. In the hold of a ship and escorted by destroyers, we crossed the channel. Next morning, 17th September, I awoke in Cherbourg harbour on my 21st birthday. Then we travelled by rail from Caen to Nantes and by lorry to La Capelle-sur-Erdre. At the Chateau Gesvres we were to establish our base.
At first we slept in farm buildings and commandeered accommodation. We erected the marquees for base transport stores depot. I was put in charge of workshop tools and spares.
I went on leave to England in late 1939 and on my return brought back German measles and it spread throughout the unit. It was very cold that winter under canvas. Meals consisted of corned beef stew. There always seemed to be some of the paraffin stove fuel in with the stew.
I was granted leave in the spring and married Hilda Lillian West on 11th May 1940 in Romsey Abbey. Then back to France, but as the Germans had invaded we set to smashing up our equipment. I started a nosebleed which could not be stopped and so was sent to hospital at La Baule to have it cauterised. Told that the area would soon be overrun by Germans, I walked and wandered trying to find a way back to my unit, finally joining the file of refugees with their carts, animals and all. I was lucky to be picked up by an army canvas-covered ambulance. This took me the most part of the way back to La Capelle. On my return I was straightaway put on guard duty, along with a comrade by the Erdre river bank. We were there all night but were not relieved as expected in the morning. We returned to camp to see what the trouble was and found most everything packed up and gone. A corporal shouted “Where the bloody hell have you been? Get on the lorry.” He gave me permission to get my Lewis gun from my tent and off we went. Our lorry arrived at the outskirts of St Nazaire where we stopped at a bungalow to fill our water bottles (which was refused). The French were very hostile and said we were running away. At this point I saw bombers attacking the town. It took about an hour to reach the waterways and there we saw small boats ferrying troops across the harbour. These were survivors of the Lancastria which had been bombed. With 3,000 troops and 1,000 refugees it was somewhat overloaded when just prior to its departure a bomb fell down a funnel, exploding the fuel stores and causing it to sink rapidly. Many were trapped below decks and those abandoning ship were engulfed in burning oil. Survivors, many wrapped in blankets, were given priority being largely accommodated on a small ferry boat with the Scots Guards. It was a very hot day and as we left port we stripped our shirts off and went on deck... there shortly followed a further air raid. I rushed down and collected the Lewis gun. On deck this got caught on a sail. Two others helped me and we fixed it to the stations of a lifeboat. An unbelievable amount of shrapnel was flying about. I could not believe that they had closed the water tight doors! When the attack was finally over, I went below and being exhausted I fell into a deep sleep, waking late the next day. We were well out to sea with no escort. Late afternoon we docked at Falmouth and were given refreshments arranged by NAAFI & WRVS. We were put on a train to Salisbury and this, I realised, would take me through Romsey. I wrote Hilda a letter and threw it from the window as we passed through Romsey station. It was luckily found and delivered to her at home. The train eventually took us to Bognor where for the next few months I was billeted in a hall that had been an aircraft base in WW1.
We did training all day every day, such as how to use petrol to set the sea alight if the Hun arrived! Every night we cooked a meal on Bognor beach. During this time we saw much of the Battle of Britain taking place overhead.
In the late autumn a train took me to Ashchurch, a new depot. Most of the transport parts and all the vehicles had been lost in France. I spent months working with a smelly diesel crane sorting spaces in the hangars. A large packing case dropped on my hand breaking my wedding ring - I was not injured, but I never replaced it.
We were allowed a sleep out pass. Hilda had been conscripted to work at the Smiths factory in Cheltenham making bomb sights and engraving altimeter dials. She fell pregnant (my fault) and I got posted to ROAC at FELLNA and became staff sergeant. I was in charge of spares for Router Group Vehicles, Bren carriers, light tanks, Jeeps and tank transporters. I had a large staff of civilians, some ATS and some mentally disabled pioneer corps, who did much of the heavy work on tank bogey wheels and tracks.
The air raids were not so bad now but the V1 & V2 attacks were very frightening. We worked long hours and often nights. One morning I awoke to find I was the only one of 40 still in the hut. It turned out that the major assembly hangar had been hit by a V1 and I had slept through it all!
Just after D-Day I was kitted out for the Far East and conveyed by train to somewhere in Shropshire to sail from Liverpool, but the A-bomb was dropped and we were sent to Newhaven instead. Then to Dieppe, across France and Switzerland to Milan. On this journey I was in charge of some deserters from the Highland Regiments and I was very glad to hand these over to their regiments! I had a smallpox vaccination that was defective and quite a number of us had vaccine fever. We spent two weeks in Imachi Barracks which had a message on the door stating that it had been opened by Mussolini.
Next we were entrained down the East Coast to Taranto. On this line all of the bridges had been destroyed and latterly replaced by flimsy sectional bridges which we had to negotiate very slowly. At Taranto we ate at the field station and I found a little boy taking from the bin where we scraped our plates. He told me that if I had a tin of beef he had a pretty sister at home. That was her price! This heartbreaking moment has stuck in my mind since.
From Taranto I travelled to Malta, where we had bubonic plague in the docks area and a plague report was printed daily in the Maltese Times. There were myriad sprays and powders to endure. I befriended the petty officer on HMS Sheffield who told me of their role in the sinking of the Bismarck…

Walter F.J. Bevis died earlier this year, a few short months after Hilda – his wife of 71 years. Having witnessed the bombing of the Lancastria, he spent much of his life mired in what we now call ‘survivor guilt’, constantly feeling unable to enjoy himself or take pride in his achievements under the weight of all the deaths that he felt made his own continued existence hard to justify. But he was a good, hardworking, industrious and loving man; successful in his work, a father of four equally successful sons, and an ever-doting husband, right to the end.
I didn’t visit them enough in their final years. I really should have done. So I just wanted to share this – a tale of a time that seems surreal and otherworldly to a comparatively privileged, happy and safe 21st century society.

I’m not preaching at you to forget your troubles; I’m just saying that, y’know, it could probably be worse. Might as well enjoy yourself a bit, eh?

Thanksgiving advice with William Shatner

2011-11-18T13:26:00.000Z

National Geographic Photo Contest 2011

2011-11-18T13:18:00.002Z

NatGeo's photo contest always features a near-endless stream of astonishing images. Click here to see this year's entrants.

Catvertising

2011-11-18T13:15:00.002Z

Current top-rated YouTube comment says 'Pussy has always been the driving force behind marketing.' Pretty much sums this up.

Unhate

2011-11-18T13:11:00.001Z

Seen Benetton's provocative new campaign? Click here.

The history of English in ten minutes

2011-11-18T13:06:00.002Z

A lovely little thing from the Open University.

What news anchors do during breaks

2011-11-18T13:03:00.001Z

They must spend so long practicing this...

40 memes in one song

2011-11-18T12:59:00.000Z

Can you spot them all...?