Monthly Archives: August 2019

**CHAIN LETTER** PASS IT ON OR ELSE**

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If you don’t pass this chain letter on to at least five people within the hour, you’ll be killed by a witch.

No sense mucking around here. I know a lot of chain-curses go easy on you, promising a disappointing love life here, a lack of financial success there, occasionally threatening to give your hamster a mild head-cold or making your granny spill a cold cup of tea all over her budgie’s little face, or something equally inconsequential. But not here, my friend. No siree.

Witch. You. Dead.

Put it together, esse, and what do you get?

You. Being killed by a witch. An actual witch. Pointy hat, throaty cackle, the lot.

In fact, you don’t have an hour to pass this on. I’ve changed my mind. You’ve got five minutes. As the old rhyming augur goes: Hubble bubble toil and trouble, pass this on or you’ll… be… no… Nope, I can’t get it to rhyme. You’ll be killed by a witch, though. I really can’t stress that enough.

Maybe you’re thinking, ‘And? I could take a witch. Smash her right in her hooked nose and then ram her broken broomstick up her warty arse-pipe before she could even spell the word ‘HELP’, much less spell out a whole spell to turn my arse-cheeks into blacmange or whatever it is these witches do.’

Huh! Maybe in the 1970s, bucko, when witches were oppressed ethnically green women, but welcome to 2019, where your witch – my witch – is an enormous, 25-stone black biker called Cedric, with severe anger management issues. And he’s angry BECAUSE he’s called Cedric. He’s a vroom-vroom, witch-ass motherfucker who’ll beat you like the ginger step-child of a ginger step-child.

Cedric’s so tough he doesn’t even wear leathers. He’s comin’ at you with his balls hanging out of his shorts, son.

Still think you’re hard? Here’s some trips Cedric recently paid to smart-arses who don’t believe in chain e-mails:

  • A little girl got an iPad for her birthday. Her first email was this one. Her six-year-old ass deleted it. Later on, at her birthday party, Cedric turned all of the balloon animals into pig intestines, turned the guy doing the balloon animals into Santa, and then shot him dead in-front of her and forty of her little friends. It sort of back-fired, though, because the little girl was from Yemen, and after Santa’s execution the kids and parents all started chanting ‘Death to the West! Death to the West!’ Cedric is now the most sought-after children’s entertainer in the Middle East.
  • A gun-toting, email-deletin’ Trump supporter in Bradford, Texas was forced to watch as Cedric appeared before him inside a NASCAR stadium and proceeded to use the female bathroom.
  • A recalcitrant fox hunter in rural Lincolnshire was violently disemboweled as he lay in a farmer’s field writhing in agony, while Cedric summoned a million-strong army of fire ants to dance around his testicles. The guy didn’t even own a computer, and had never seen this email. Cedric just thought he deserved it because he was a bit of a dick.
  • Cedric cast a spell on Roderick Peterson from Leeds so that any time he heard a woman laughing, wherever he was, he’d start masturbating. Cedric now has his own show on Channel 5.
  • An eighty-year-old woman in Stevenage got a laptop from her grandson for her birthday, and deleted this email on the very first day. Cedric arrived to turn her blood into electricity and feast on the folds of her decaying brain as though they were strips of kebab meat, but found her clicking on Minesweeper and muttering about how confusing this online shopping thing was, as a YouTube video about adorable hippos blared out on another screen that she couldn’t shut down. She clearly didn’t have a fucking clue, so he spent the afternoon showing her the basics – ‘Is there a little person inside here moving that little arrow, Cedric?’ ‘No, Gladys, you move that with the mouse.’ ‘Eh? No mice in my house, sonny, I keep it neat as a pin.’ ‘No, look, you do this.’ ‘I do that?’ ‘You do that. And then this comes up. YouTube.’ ‘In my day you’d get the slipper for speaking to your elders like that, sonny.’ ‘Look, have you downloaded any apps, Gladys?’ ‘Are you speaking Creole to me? I’m not from Africa, son.’ After six hours Cedric excused himself, nipped to the bathroom, and decapitated himself with a rusty steak knife before flushing his head down the toilet.
  • A man in Paris, called Pierre or some shit, deleted this email as he sat smoking haughtily in a snooty eaterie, and Cedric instantly took away his desire to set fire to things with the rest of the Parisians whenever the council did something they didn’t like.
  • Tam Thomson from Airdrie deleted this email. Cedric appeared behind Tam as he walked through Airdrie town centre, took a look around, thought, ‘Fuck it, he’s suffered enough,’ and vanished again.

Do you really want to be like these luckless fucks? You can’t say you haven’t been warned. Stop this chain at your peril. Or, you know, if you fancy being on the tele, or your kid’s got a birthday coming up.

America’s Deadly Shame: The National Panther Crisis

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A Citizens’ Rights group in the United States, NAW TO JAWS, has appealed to President Trumpelstiltskin to undertake an urgent review of Panther Ownership legislation. This follows the mauling of a young boy, Jackson Towtruck, at his family home in Scottsdale, Arizona, the seventeenth accidental home-based panthering this year alone. NTJ say this latest incident is part of an ‘all-too familiar tragic pattern’ that is ‘completely unacceptable and wholly avoidable in America in 2019.’

The boy’s father, Shard Towtruck, had left the panther free to roam in the garage instead of keeping it locked in a secure steel cage. The boy’s decision to play fetch with the panther while his parents stitched slogans into their baseball caps upstairs proved a fateful one that ultimately resulted in the emergency services having to play fetch with the boy’s limbs.

Tragic: Shard Towtruck

To the shock of many in the local community, the father has not only been allowed to keep his panther licence, but has also decided to retain ownership of the panther who killed his son. He told a local news network: “What y’all, snowflakes? A panther rips my son’s face off, and somehow the solution is to get rid of panthers? Maybe it’ll give my other twelve kids a wake-up call about using panthers responsibly.”

While news crews staked out the Towtruck family home, scores of pro-panther activists crowded into the sleepy suburban street, each of them wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan that’s become synonymous with American notions of liberty: PANTHERS DON’T KILL PEOPLE, PEOPLE DO.

Protests against panthers are at an all-time high following a chain of pantherings at schools and government buildings all across America. Some schools have installed elaborate panther-mazes at their entrances to slow down any panthers that might be released into the student body by crazed assailants.

The National Panther Association, always ready to counter-protest anti-panther protests, has called for teachers to be be-panthered in class. NPA spokesperson Bolt Grundy reminded the association’s million-strong members: ‘The only thing that can stop a bad guy with a panther is a good guy with a panther.’ The former head of the NPA, the famous actor Chortles McMonkey-Chariot, last week echoed the organisation’s most famous proclamation, coined by the organisation’s founder, that they could ‘have his panther when they prise it out of his cold dead hands.’ A few days later, McMonkey-Chariot’s panther turned on him and chewed his leathery old body into a hundred different dessicated sections, after which first responders had to prise his cold dead hands out of the panther’s mouth.

The President burying McMonkey-Chariot on the White House lawn

President Trumplestiltskin has praised McMonkey-Chariot, a man he described as being ‘almost as famous as me.’ In a press conference on the White House lawn, Trumplestiltskin went on to stress his support for panther owners across America. ‘We love panthers, black panthers, but not the kind who wear those funny hats and black jumpers, and not the one from that movie, not the ‘black’ black panthers, just the black panthers, the actual panthers. Black panthers shouldn’t have black panthers, because they’re animals, and I don’t know if they have panthers in Mexico, but if they do, the wall will have to be higher, because they tell me panthers can jump. But I’m going to jump over the White House. And I’m going to do that easily. I’m the best at jumping. No-one does jumping better than me. Especially not the Mexican jumping beans. God damn Mexicans.’

The notion of panther ownership is a particularly hard one for protest groups to unpick and counter. After all, the right of US Citizens to bear panthers is written in to the national constitution. It harks back to a time when defenders of the fledging nation state were urged as a point of patriotic duty to carry a panther with them at all times in case they had to repel an invasion party of British troops, who were renowned for their deadly surprise attacks using hordes of coked-up foxes.

NTJ has been criticised by the NPA for its suggestion that citizens should arm themselves with guns to protect them from rabid panthers. ‘GUNS?’ said NPA spokesperson Bolt Grundy. ‘GUNS? Are you crazy? Do you know how fucking dangerous those things are?’

‘No, I really think the best thing we can all do is just keep on thinking and praying.’

Movie Review – The Queen’s Corgi

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The Queen’s Corgi is such a tonally discordant movie that watching it risks dislocating your amygdala. Its ideas, scenarios and moods ping across the screen like balls in a haunted pinball machine, careening into the flashing, dinging pads of plot, theme and character with such vicious speed that it’s hard to know whether you should be laughing, wincing, praying or reporting yourself to Childline for letting your kids watch it in the first place.

The movie begins with the kindly and considerate Prince Phillip gifting a Corgi puppy to the cooing and gushingly maternal Queen Elizabeth. There’s your first note of discordance. Everything’s predicated upon the falsehood that Prince Phillip and Queen Elizabeth are nice, regular, normal people just like you and me, and not, respectively, a maniacal, fox-blasting, dead-eyed, colonial throwback and a bejewelled joyless void who delivers her annual Christmas message to the nation with all the warmth and conviviality of a statue being held at gun-point.

It’s a strange time to be putting a soft sheen on one of the world’s most prolific hoarders of hereditary wealth. The United Kingdom is on the cusp of a no-deal Brexit, a potentially seismic event with the power to unite the lower and middle-classes in an orgy of hardship and poverty; consequently, I found it pretty tough to empathise with a character who, towards the end of the movie, greets a fire in her palace with the merest of shrugs. To put things in perspective: I almost had a rage-related stroke when I found out the price of the family-sized tub of popcorn. Mind you, the creative forces behind this movie are Belgian, so maybe rubbing the UK’s face in the truth of its own fawning subservience in the run-up to Brexit was a deliberate and, on balance, very funny thing to do.

The opening portion of the movie shows us Rex’s life as the Queen’s most adored Corgi and wearer of the coveted Top Dog collar [In the UK, Rex is voiced by Jack Whitehall, about whom the kindest thing I can say is, ‘At least he’s not James Corden.’].

If Rex is high on the Queen’s pedestal, then he’s positively subterranean in the considerations of everyone else at the palace: Prince Phillip resents the pampered pooch for supplanting him in the Queen’s hierarchy of affections; the Queen’s head servant is disgusted at having to demean himself in the service of a bolshy dog [at one point the poor little man has to follow the dog around the garden holding an umbrella over its head so it doesn’t get wet, only to be deliberately pissed on for his trouble – and that, to me, is a perfect allegory for the Royal Family’s feelings towards its supposed subjects]; but no person or group in Buckingham Palace hates the prissy little pillock as much as his canine bunk-mates, who variously bemoan him, despair of him and, eventually, actively try to murder him.

Things start to go wrong for Rex – as it does for most people – as soon as President Donald Trump arrives. Trump comes to the palace as part of a state visit along with his First Lady, Melania, and their First Dog, Mitzi, the latter a preening, pampered, cossetted little bitch who’s only in it for the money [hush now, be nice].

While Trump is the butt of many jokes during his short time on-screen – about his hands, his hair, his tone-deaf braggadocio and, obscenely for a kids’ film, his rape allegations – he’ll almost certainly come across to kids as a lovable, eccentric oaf, a far cry from the hateful, narcissistic demagogue we big people know and loathe from the almost daily deluge of unhinged pronouncements we’re exposed to through the media. Making Trump cuddly again is a strange creative choice, on a par with putting a cartoon Hitler in a kids’ film, and making him a smiling, jazz-loving juggler who cares for sick cats.

In the spirit of re-cementing the so-called special relationship, the Queen agrees to marry off Rex to the Trumps’ beloved Mitzi, precipitating a highly unsettling sequence in which Mitzi chases a terrified Rex around the palace ostensibly attempting to rape him; an X-rated, reverse Pepe le Pew, if you will.

It’s genuinely upsetting, and not something to which I was comfortable exposing my young children, aged 2 and 5. I’m no lily-livered snowflake, folks. I’ve let my kids watch Watership Down, the original Hellboy Movies and Shazam. I believe that while movie violence can be downplayed and even laughed at when it’s cartoonish in tone, and death is a sad and irreducible part of life to which kids are inevitably introduced through movies – and usually kids’ movies at that – their first grapples with the idea of sex and romance shouldn’t be filtered through the prism of a terrifying sexual assault, regardless of which gender is leading the charge. Another reason why Trump’s inclusion in the movie, given both his history and Mitzi’s behaviour, is weirdly inappropriate.

After Rex accidentally bites Trump in the cock [OK, I enjoyed that bit], resulting in Trump and his hellish entourage roaring off in a huff, Rex finds himself out of favour with The Queen. Although quite why Rex would still exalt her after she sanctioned him for a raping is anybody’s guess, and just another of the movie’s myriad baffling character motivations. Rex ends up banished and betrayed by fellow Corgi, Duke, who leads him away from the palace and tries to drown him in a freezing river, thereafter fabricating a blood-and-fur crime scene in the palace grounds so that none of the humans are moved to look for him.

Rex ends up at the local pound, and quickly falls for Wanda, a dog of regular stock who only reciprocates his feelings once she see’s able to confirm Rex’s identity as property of the palace, aka absolutely minted. Strike two against my children’s burgeoning psycho-sexual development. Thanks, movie.

Unfortunately for Rex, winning Wanda’s heart and escaping back to the palace won’t be easy, because the pound cum prison functions by night as a vicious doggy fight-club, and Wanda is the main squeeze of a raging pile of working-class muscle called Tyson (voiced, somewhat inevitably, by Ray Winstone), the pound’s top dog.

The power of friendship doesn’t quite triumph over the power of violence, given that it’s Rex’s growing friendships within the pound that give him access to the violence he needs in order to defeat Tyson, but at this point I don’t think anyone – least of all me – was expecting any sanguine, family-friendly messages. Generally, though, when the movie isn’t busy being tonally inappropriate, it’s busy being incredibly formulaic.

Rex, along with Wanda and an assortment of dogs of all creeds, shapes and sizes, return to the palace to teach Duke a lesson, namely in allowing him to be crowned Top Dog so that the Queen will send him off to America to get repeatedly raped by Donald Trump’s dog. Em… great, I guess. Yep. That’s… that’s fine. The Queen, in another uncharacteristic bout of woman-of-the-people-ness decides to let Rex’s low-class friends and girlfriend remain at the palace with him to live happily ever after, which it’s just possible is a reference to Meghan Markle joining the Royal Household, but might just be an attempt to salvage some sort of a happy ending from the rather horrible rape coda.

I’ve had a stab at condensing the movie’s moral message. Here goes… What the film appears to be saying is, if ever you let your privilege go to your head and become callous and arrogant and unpopular with your peers, you might just need the humbling experience of almost being raped as part of an arranged marriage scheme to show you the error of your ways. And if you do end up in a prison fight-club for poor people owing to the actions of a jealous peer, then never forget that you can get your revenge on them by seeing to it that they’re raped and deported in your place.

Did you get all that, kids? Lovely, isn’t it?

All told, this movie might make your kids laugh in some places, and gasp in others, and the animation is certainly bright, clean and fluid enough to hold their interest, but if you’re looking for a warm and fuzzy classic to watch with your kids, you’d be better off considering full-blown grown-up movies like The Shining or Reservoir Dogs. At least they don’t pretend to be nice or wholesome.

And, perhaps crucially, neither of them have Donald Trump in them.

THE VERDICT

out of a possible

From Poo to Pregnancy

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If you ever fancy a lesson in cause and effect, or the insidious evil of cosmic ordering, just try sitting on a bucket swing in a play-park ten minutes’ walk from home, lazily rocking back and forth in the hazy summer sunshine as your kids run and skip and jump from chute to chute, and dare to utter the words ‘Well, this is nice.’ See how quickly one of your grown kids waddles towards you shouting, ‘I need a poo!’

This happened to us last week. The play-park suddenly transformed into the US retreat that preceded the Fall of Saigon; there were screams, children being slung over shoulders, people running in terror and confusion. Operation Frequent Wind indeed. This time, though, it was an evacuation in order to prevent an evacuation.

We intermittently dashed and quick-marched our way back home through a warren of paths and streets. To speed things along my wife and I carried a kid each, but those little suckers are heavy, so we had to keep putting them down on the ground and herding them along like ducks to allow our backs time to recover.

I was in charge of airlifting Jack, 4, our eldest, the kid whose words had precipitated our urgent and perilous journey. I could’ve gotten him home in a fraction of the time, but for obvious reasons I wasn’t terrifically keen on carrying him on my shoulders…

When we were still a few minutes from home, Jack won a crucial battle against his brain and body, and was able to charm the snake back into the basket. This bought us some precious time. He was still tottering along like a penguin, but no longer whining and groaning like a soldier who’d lost his legs to napalm.

‘We still need to hurry, though, Jack,’ said his mum. ‘You don’t want to poo yourself, do you?’

‘No,’ replied Jack, very enthusiastically. ‘But you can poo yourself, mummy, because you’ve got that plastic thing on your butt. It’s just like a nappy.’

Plastic thing on her bu… ah. The penny dropped.

‘No, that’s not a nappy,’ said his mum. ‘That’s for… well, sometimes mummy… bleeds…. out of her bum.’

I could see the cogs turning behind Jack’s eyes, threatening to turn those two viscous blobs into a matching pair of question marks, a slot-machine jackpot where the prize was unending confusion and psychological scarring. ‘Don’t lie to him,’ I said to my wife through one side of my mouth, but loud enough so that everyone could hear it, therefore rendering the whole side-mouth thing completely irrelevant.

There was a moment’s silence as we mulled over a way to be truthful to him without inviting ever more difficult questions. ‘Well,’ said my wife, taking my cue and advancing cautiously, ‘I sometimes bleed through my…well, through the bit at the front.’

‘The hole,’ I chipped in. I quickly remembered we’d settled on ‘vagina’ during a previous discussion on a related topic, so attempted a course correction. ‘Vagina. The vagina hole.’

My wife shook her head at me. I had to redeem myself here.

‘Well,’ I began, ‘you know how ladies can carry babies, but men can’t? It’s because ladies and men have got different bits on the outside and the inside.’

Jack nodded. I shot my wife a searching look that seemed to ask, ‘Have I just committed a transgender hate crime?’

I’d started so I’d finish. ‘Ladies make eggs inside of their bodies, but not every egg turns into a baby. The ladies bodies make an egg once every month, see, just to the lady is always ready to have a baby if she wants to. And if the lady isn’t ready to have a baby, then the body gets rid of the egg, and that’s why the lady bleeds from her… you know. But if she’s ready, she can use the egg to grow a baby.’

Jack nodded thoughtfully. There were more questions bobbing beneath his consciousness like icebergs. ‘How does a lady get the egg ready to make into a baby?’

‘Well, the lady needs an, em, it’s like… it’s like when you started growing inside mummy. Mummy first needed a seed from daddy to make her egg grow into you, into a wee baby.’

Jack nodded again, up and down, very fast: like a shotgun being re-loaded.

Here it comes…the kill shot… CHIK-CHIK…

BOOM!

‘How did your seed get into mummy so it could make the egg grow into a baby?’

[The reckless old man drops down to his knees, and prostrates himself before the universe, rocking backwards and forwards shouting, ‘WHAT HAVE I DONE? OH GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE??!’]

The way I see it, you’ve got two choices at this point.

Choice 1: go down the whimsical route. Skip along the Yellow Brick Road tipping your hat to Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, while flinging out lies like rose petals. What’s that you ask? By what mechanism did my seed reach your mother’s egg? Why, by magic of course, young man! I shoved on a top hat and white gloves, shouted out Abracadabra, tapped your mummy’s tummy ten times with my wand, and then pulled you out by the ears. Don’t like that answer, eh? In that case, I shrunk myself down to the size of an ant, shimmied through your mummy’s belly button into the tummy beyond, drilled my way into the egg you were hiding inside using a tiny corkscrew, spat through the shell with a straw, and then sat on your egg until it hatched, at which point your mummy gave birth to both of us at the same time. Em, what else have I got here? Em… babies are from space? I planted some tomato seeds in a tub of soil and made your mummy eat it? [wipes sweat from brow] We won you in a raffle? BABIES DON’T EXIST I MADE IT ALL UP?

Choice 2: HBO meets X-Hamster. Give a harrowing, biologically- and sexually-accurate blow-by-blow account of the entire process from start to finish: all four, grueling minutes of it. ‘Let me tell you about your conception, Jack. First thing’s first, your mum is a fucking live wire. Jesus, she makes my balls feel like they’re in an earthquake. So, anyway, one minute we’re watching Gogglebox, and the next minute I’m gobbling her box. She’s got one leg dangling over the back of the couch, and the other one kicking out like a Go-Go dancer, I’m certain she’s going to split down the middle, and of course I’ve got a face like a man who’s fallen in a vat of vaseline. I’m brick-hard too; the wee fella can’t wait to go spelunking in that hole – the same one you were going to come out of about nine months later… Jack… Jack? HONEY, THE KID’S BEEN SICK AND FAINTED!!! Poor little fella, he must have a bug or something.’

In the end I opted for a third way. Parental choice isn’t a two-party state. There’s no either/or. You’ve got to think on your feet; riff like a jazz musician. Option three: be both honest and highly obstructive at the same time.

‘There’s more to this, son,’ I told him. ‘Things you’re not ready to know yet, and believe me, there are things you don’t want to know yet. For now, it’s enough to know that mummies make eggs, and daddies can help make those eggs into babies.’

He seemed satisfied with that answer. Either that or he was so busy trying not to shit himself that he no longer cared about the tummies and big bleeding bummies of the world’s mummies. I vow, though, that when the day comes for Jack to know more about the finer points of this subject I will boldly, and without hesitation, immediately, and without delay, tell him to ask his mother.

When we got home – just in the nick of time, I hasten to add – Jack merrily plopped out his poo, leaving his mother and me to poke the turtle’s head of sexual knowledge back up into our guts until we were good and ready to let the stink out.

I guess what I’m saying is: smell ya later.

Sci-fi and Superhero Mash-ups and Beat Downs

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You can’t beat a good cross-over. You can’t beat a bad one, either. There’s something about two or more superheroes or systems or creatures existing together in a space they wouldn’t (or couldn’t) normally occupy  that excites our inner movie directors and statisticians. We love it when the Marvel and DC superheroes get together for a jolly good team-up, or when two or more Doctor Whos band together to fend off evil, but we especially love it when there’s cross-pollination between brands.

This is more common occurrence in comics and graphic novels, where the 11th Doctor has boarded the Starship Enterprise, Captain Kirk has found himself on the planet of the apes, Judge Dredd and Batman have battled Aliens (yes, those ones) and Predators and each other, and Superman has faced down Muhammad Ali.

It’s better, and much more fun, of course, when forces come together to kick the ever-loving shit out of each other, which is why I’ve assembled the fan-made videos below, to share a little of that exquisite, child-like glee with you.

I wonder if soap opera fans fantasise about Pat Butcher beating down Vera Duckworth, or JR Ewing vs Cthulhu…

Anyway…

Batman vs Alien vs Predator

This is one of the earliest examples of the fan-made mash-up genre you’ll find on-line, and it’s arguably much better than the largely execrable big-screen attempts to mesh the worlds of Alien and Predator.

Batman vs Darth Vader

There’s a whole award-winning series of these shorts now, very professionally produced, showing titanic – sometimes surprisingly brutal – battles like Spiderman vs Darth Maul, Iron Man vs Optimus Prime, Wolverine vs Predator, and Homer Simpson vs The Punisher (OK, I made the last one up). This one’s pretty darn good, though.

Darth Vader vs Buzz Lightyear

And this one, too. What’s not to like?

Super-Hero Bowl

A very bloody cartoon of every popular genre figure you can think of from the last 60 or 70 years being brought together and violently killing each other.

Galactic Battles – A Crossover Fan Film

If spaceships, Star Wars, Halo and Star Trek are your thing, get your tissues and a hot bucket of lard at the ready. You’re about to cum.

Icons of Horror – Part 1

What if all of the supernatural villains from the 70s, 80s and 90s got together for a bit of a rammy?

Pigs in Space – Featuring the Tenth Doctor

And finally…