Reflections on the Suicide Bombing in Pakistan

Posted on March 27, 2016 by Jamie Andrew

Nobody give a fuck about Pakistan, no? My Facebook newsfeed isn’t exactly overflowing with outrage and Pakistani flags. I refuse to believe we’re all racist. I mean, this is human pain and misery on a grand scale. We’re not monsters. We’re – largely – compassionate people. We must simply view most Western European/North American/antipodean countries and peoples as the closest match to our own, and so when something happens to them, it makes us think, ‘Fuck, that could happen to us’. Thus we desperately try to ward off the demons of our collective fear through exercises of mass solidarity (not suggesting for a second, however, that the expression of solidarity is devoid of human feeling). When we hear about horrible things happening in Pakistan, to fellow human beings, we receive it as we would news about a serial killer picking off prostitutes or homeless people. We feel a momentary pang of compassion, which quickly passes when we convince ourselves that we aren’t in any immediate danger from the threat. They’re not like me. I’m not like them. That wouldn’t happen to me… Even though there’s some suspicion that Christians may have been the target of the attack. Not white Christians though, eh? Maybe we’re a tiny bit racist. Or selfish. Or human. Or all three.

I hereby extend my sympathy to victims of religious and political violence everywhere, regardless of creed, colour, country, race, religion, age, sex or social standing. We’re all human beings.

Louis Armstrong was wrong. This is a pretty shit world (although admittedly his song wouldn’t have been so catchy had he conceded that).

Comets, chicks and rapping dicks

Posted on December 6, 2015 by Jamie Andrew

It wasn’t so long ago that bearded British scientist Matt Taylor, who was involved in a mission to land a probe on a comet, had his reputation steam-hammered into the ground thanks to the shirt he was seen wearing in the videos and pictures released from launch control. It was a colourful shirt emblazoned with artsy, cartoonish images of naked and semi-naked women, the sort of attire beloved by big, bespectacled men in IT departments the world over. People went ape-shit. Nobody cared that this man was helping to push the boundaries of human knowledge through the exploration of celestial bodies hundreds of thousands of miles beyond earth’s orbit; they cared that his shirt, when viewed through the Hubble telescopes of their eyes, appeared to be beaming back images from the 1950s. He was hounded on Twitter. ‘You meteor-shite!’ they snarled. ‘You Star Wars wanker, you mother-hating space rapist!’ (All of those tweets were from me, incidentally) Inevitably, he was forced to appear on television weeping with contrition like some errant child, each individual tear-drop containing a micro-world of apologies for everything from the extinction of the dinosaurs to Citizen Khan being recommissioned.

If that’s the world in which we’re living and evidence of the stern standards we wish to uphold, then fine: let that big bastard’s tears fall from his eyes and form a gushing river of change that will sweep our culture’s misogyny out to sea. As long as the rules are consistent, and punishment for dissent is meted out in parcels of equal size, then I don’t have a problem with that. But that doesn’t appear to be the case.

Before I expand on that, an admission. I’m rather out of touch with the zeitgeist. At home, I only watch TV shows that I’ve specifically sought out on the back of recommendations or internet buzz. I don’t do live TV, so I don’t do soaps, reality TV, talent shows or chat shows. My current in-car CD collection comprises the hits of Bob Dylan, Ray Charles and Johnny Cash. When I’m not listening to golden oldies, Radio 4 is my station of choice. Whenever I venture from my middle-aged comfort zone by scrolling through the other channels, I inevitably catch a blast of contemporary music and find myself moved to the point of murder by the inane, ear-battering mantras besieging my brain (I felt this way even as a teenager – I think some part of me has always been 35). For the same reason, I don’t do music television. (that, and the fact that I’m unhip as fuck) Which is why it came as something of a culture shock to witness a few hours of MTV whilst babysitting at a friend’s house.

That saucy-shirted scientist with whom I kicked off this article was on the brink of being dragged behind a tractor through a field of AIDS-tinged razor blades for his sexually insensitive taste in clobber, and yet most of today’s male music superstars – especially those performing under the urban banner – seem to have built their careers and fortunes upon singing about overpowering, deceiving or manipulating women both socially and sexually.

In one video, a young gentleman decried women for being materialistic whores, whilst wearing a £10,000 watch. In another video, a trio of gentlemen itemised the things they were gong to do to an unspecified woman’s ass with or without her consent, a grimy and depressing little ditty that had the look and feel of a video manifesto for Rape Club (I know, I know, first rule, we shouldn’t talk about it). In yet another video, a sharply-dressed young gentleman with snakes for limbs spent four minutes calling his girlfriend a slut through the medium of song. And yet these guys, far from being derided on Twitter, are celebrated as heroes. It seems that it’s okay to be a retrograde, chauvinistic thug as long as you sing it and don’t put it on a shirt. Plus, singing about pussy is clearly more important to humanity than landing space probes on a moving comet.

Perhaps Matt Taylor could’ve emerged from the whole fiasco with his dignity intact had he gone on TV and, instead of crying like a big bitch, broken out an angry, sexual rap about the probe mission:

‘You see me comin’, girl, uh,

You see me comin’ through the void of space,

Gonna wreck your place,

Gonna land on you and probe you all up in your face,

Gonna read you girl,

Uh, you need me girl,

Gonna do you hard in full view of the human race.’

And instead of wearing the shirt with the naked ladies on it, he could’ve had actual naked ladies on stage with him, who could’ve rubbed their crotches against his leg as he chucked money at them.

And finally…

While I’m here taking an angry shit on the modern world, from which I’ve been displaced since birth, what in the name of God’s hefty testicle has happened to dancing? It would appear that the best way to wow a club dance floor in 2015 is to dance like a man with an itchy arse having a stroke on the moon. This stinks, primarily because that awkward, twitchy-legged spasm has always been my signature dance move. How cruel for this style to come into fashion only once I’m an antediluvian irrelevance who isn’t even allowed to dance at family weddings for fear of unleashing a tornado of shame and embarrassment.

I once perpetrated some dance-moves on the packed floor of a night-club in Magaluf circa 1998. My style was described as ‘top-half 90s, bottom-half 70s’. If I tried that now the description would remain the same, although the numbers would refer instead to literal ages rather than stylistic decades of the 20^th century.

You’re not required to dance to Radio 4. I think that’s why I like it so much.

PS: I wrote this while wearing a polo-shirt with vaginas all over it. You mean pictures of vaginas, right? Em… yes?

Of … course.

Goodbye.

A Celebration of Public Breastfeeding

Posted on June 27, 2015 by Jamie Andrew

It’s National Breastfeeding Awareness Week, so I thought I’d pitch in with a rebuttal of some of the most common arguments levelled against women who wish to feed their babies in public, and should be able to do so without stigma.

Number 1: The ‘how would you like it if I just took a shit wherever I liked?’ argument

“Oh, that’s interesting,” comes the familiar sarcastic cry from the army of mammary-phobic morons inexplicably allowed to walk our streets unsupervised, “Breastfeeding is a biological function, and so is defecating, so why is one okay in public, and the other isn’t? In fact, since pooing is an almost inescapable daily necessity, shouldn’t we be more supportive of street-shitting than we are of breastfeeding?” They say it with a self-satisfied smirk, believing themselves to have constructed an argument worthy of Plato. ‘Defend your gross act of nipple-sucking now that I’ve lumped it in with jobbies, you Guardian-reading heathen’, their eyes seem to say.

This is a bullshit argument brought to you by the same people who brought you: ‘Letting gays marry? Well why don’t we just allow people to marry their pets?’ If you can’t see the distinction between the process that allows us to eliminate waste from our bodies and the mechanism that enables mothers to provide their offspring with life-boosting nutrients then your high-school biology teacher has failed you, and they should be redeployed to the McDonalds’ serving hatch immediately. Also, you’re a fucking moron.

We are compelled to poo in private, in dedicated, enclosed areas, for the sake of good hygiene and for the good of public health. If the streets were awash with excrement, as once they were, the NHS would implode as it scrambled to find enough cash to treat a hundred million cases of pinkeye a year. We’d all have diarrhoea, all of the time, and our children would go blind from munching on an unknowable number of poisonous people-pats left dotted up our streets like cats’ eyes. Breastfeeding, on the other hand, doesn’t pose any risk to human health or safety. No-one’s going to get their eye taken out by a sling-shot of titty milk, or catch some horrible contagion from a mother’s briefly exposed breast. Also, and this is crucial, nobody – save the most despicable or inebriated of us – wants to remove the stigma and consequences associated with shitting in public. There’s no pro-jobby lobby about to stage a million-strong march on Westminster waving placards bedecked with slogans like “WE’RE DESPERATE FOR EQUAL TREATMENT”, “SQUATTERS’ RIGHTS” or “WE WILL SHITE THEM ON THE BEACHES.”

Which brings us to argument…

Number 2: The ‘Fair enough, you’re breast-feeding your kid, but I don’t see why I, or my kids, should be forced to see that’ argument.

This argument is seen by its proponents as a corollary to the street-shitting argument. The implication here is that there is something inherently gross, shameful or dirty about the act of breastfeeding, and that children should be protected from this highly-damaging sight. After all, it’s a scientifically proven fact that kids who spend even a few seconds near a woman who’s nurturing her infant child can go so maniacally ape-shit for tits that they have to be brought down with tranquiliser darts and treated with ritalin and morphine cocktails for the rest of their lives, lest they become warped and broken-minded sex offenders living in syringe-littered bedsits.

I know that some babies have trouble latching, or can’t, and I’ve witnessed how gruelling it can be for new mothers – sore, sweating and exhausted – to pick up the knack of breast-feeding. I don’t seek to denigrate mothers who bottle-feed. I was mainly bottle-fed, as was my partner. In fact, I can’t think of a single person I know who was breast-fed, at least beyond the first few days or weeks of their lives. Bottle-feeding is as pervasive as it is persuasive, a torch handed down from generation to generation without much debate or forethought. It’s the method by which more and more mothers are choosing to feed their newborns, in the UK and around the world, to the point where breast-feeding is beginning to be seen as some bonkers new-age fad, the boob equivalent of reiki or homeopathy.

Maybe if more children could see breast-feeding in action, and have its function and benefits rationally and gently extolled to them by their parents or guardians, there would be a much needed sea-change in our attitude and culture. A good thing, too, because the benefits of breast-feeding are legion. For the baby, breastfeeding means increased protection against a host of bugs, afflictions and diseases; an improved ability to homeostatically self-regulate; a higher likelihood of developing good communication and language skills; and a lower likelihood of developing things like diabetes and heart disease in later life. For the mother, breastfeeding means a decreased likelihood of brittle bones and post-birth anaemia; a decreased likelihood of developing ovarian and breast cancer; a closer bond with their child, and, of course, a financial saving of approximately £600 a year.

For the father, breastfeeding means a decreased likelihood of having to fuck around with bottles and sterilising kits for six to eighteen months, but an increased likelihood that his precious breasts, those vaunted fun-bags he thought were his exclusive domain, will be off-limits for a very, very long time.

And with that tongue-in-cheek, cheeky tit-shot we arrive very aptly at the next argument…

Number 3: The ‘bare boobs are indecent and sexual’ argument.

This argument is of course connected to the previous argument in the minds of those who would cling to it: breasts are sexual, and so having them out in public is inappropriate. It’s all about context, really. Breasts can be sexual, but let’s not forget that men find them arousing – deep in their primal core – precisely because of their ability to support their theoretical offspring. Breasts don’t exist in a vacuum; divorced from their primary function, they’d be about as alluring as a knuckle or a liver. Breasts exist to sustain life, and ultimately men’s fetishisation of them is both a regrettable by-product and a corruption of this purpose.

Before I morph into Germaine Greer, let me state for the record that I’m certainly not immune to my biological impulses, and find myself rather a big fan of breasts. But, let me repeat the word again: context. There is nothing sexy or sexual about a woman breast-feeding, and if you think that there is then you belong on a special edition of The Jerry Springer Show, togged up in nappies and sucking a dummy. Do you think male gynaecologists go home and masturbate over the thought of all the vaginas they probed that day? Hunched and sweating, muttering to themselves: “I knew you wanted me to… take that glove off, girl.” Context!

If my partner suddenly whipped her top off in a busy nightclub and started jiggling provocatively I’d feel rather aggrieved, and ready to fight any man who ogled her. But when we’re in public and she pulls a bit of boob out to feed my son, hell, even a full boob, it elicits no stronger a reaction from me than were she to scratch her arm. It’s normal and natural, and if I feel anything it’s pride, and a sense of security that my little boy is getting all of the natural, life-giving nutrients he needs.

Remember, those of you who agree with or actively employ the arguments dealt with in this piece: women don’t feed their babies just to piss you off. They feed them because they’re hungry, Einstein. A breast-fed baby – up to a certain age – pretty much only cries when it needs fed, and it is cruel – and detrimental to their development – to leave them wailing without immediate resolution. Because of this, mothers don’t always have the time to dash off to a darkened room, or cover their head with a towel like a budgie at night-time, just to appease your fuckwitted, Cro-Magnon thinking. Why should they in any case? And, no, breast-feeding mothers can’t just stay at home to save you the sight, because being a full-time, 24/7 carer for a tiny human being can be arduous and isolating (as well as incomparably beautiful and enriching) and mother and baby deserve a break, and the chance to get out and about wheresoever they please.

There’s no justification for adopting a negative stance towards public breast-feeding. The fabric of the country won’t unravel. The world won’t end. But more babies in the future might just get the chance to reap its benefits. We owe it to them.

But if you really feel you can’t be supportive, then at the very least be neutral, and keep your nose out of other people’s breasts.

http://www.breastfeeding.see.nhs.uk/

Thoughts on ‘Love’

Posted on December 30, 2014 by Jamie Andrew

I recently participated in a charity event called ‘Scrapbooks and Rapbooks’, where I read from the diary of my 16-year-old self. The event inspired me to dig out these two complementary yet contrasting pieces on the subject of love. I say ‘pieces’. More like pieces of shit. Especially the first one, the poem. It’s basically a few nifty lines surrounded by a sea of overly sentimental faux-profound pretentious fuckery. Instead of going to all the effort of penning a poem I could just as easily have written ‘I KNOW A COUPLE OF BIG WORDS, NOW WILL YOU PLEASE FUCK ME???!!!’ on a piece of A3 paper, photocopied it and stapled it to trees and lamp-posts throughout the local area. As a strategy, it wouldn’t have worked, but at least it would’ve been honest. I wrote the poem when I was 17, and it makes me want to vomit up my heart and squish it underfoot like a dying fish.

The second piece, which is more of a rambling essay-of-sorts, I wrote when I was 25, and was inspired by an episode of Ross Kemp on Gangs. I wonder if you can also tell that I wrote it not long after a break-up, another in a long-line of healthy relationships my younger-self was addicted to machine-gunning to death in fits of faithless, fickle, sexually feckless behaviour.

I don’t know if ‘enjoy’ is the correct word in this context, but I certainly bid you to tolerate the following musings. First up, the piss-ass poem. Bits of it really are reminiscent of a song written by David Brent.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Science Vs Religion

–

A paradox, a fraud amongst feelings,

A laboured lie cursed upon souls:

Of all the bonds that bind a man,

None can be so false as ‘love’.

–

Our minds control our destiny, not our hearts,

And what we feel can run no deeper than the

River of blood that runs through us all –

A deformity, a bastard born of man,

A twisted, deceptive purity! Inconceivable! –

it grows from our ignorance, not our instinct;

what lunacy a force as such could join the

feelings fortified in man.

–

To grieve a child can not be love.

Can it not be seen that creator weeps when creation fails?

What we grieve in loss is not empathy for the lost

But for an emptiness in ourselves –

Pity for a hole in us, not in earth.

–

To take a woman can not be love.

Nothing more can couplings be than means to lust and procreate,

A web of neurones, nerves and volts, making mortal drives seem great!

Another held above one’s self –

That’s tantamount to suicide!

–

Then dead am I.

–

For this that shudders down my veins,

From pounding heart, through all my brains:

but bubbling broth of DNA?

Have faith, my friend, join hands, let’s pray:

–

Once fingers fondly skirt the flesh,

All limbs entwined and hearts enmeshed;

Once the cliché’s been embraced

the ugly beast in each soul faced;

Then once you’ve watched the whole world die

Deep down dark, in mans mind’s eye,

And asked yourself (but please don’t lie),

Tell me, friend, but did you cry?

–

No?

–

My friend, once you’ve experienced that…

Atheism, as your doubts, will crumble to dust.

To ask how love can be is futile.

To simply know that it does must suffice.

–

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Excruciating, eh? Anyway, on to the next one.

Love

In a television documentary series entitled ‘Ross Kemp on Gangs’, British actor Ross Kemp travelled the world to spend time with various gangs renowned for their brutality. The episode I watched featured the town of Auckland, New Zealand, where Kemp chronicled a native gang called ‘The Mongrel Mob’.

The Mongrel Mob’s members all feel shunned or abused by society in some way. Thus they have formed a clan of like-minded sociopaths hell-bent on visiting violent retribution upon society for these perceived slights and wrongs. Some of the group rage against society with a twisted sense of propriety and righteousness ; others gravitate to the group simply because they enjoy raging for destruction’s sake.

In this particular episode Kemp spoke with an elderly member of the Mongrel Mob about the role of women in the gang dynamic. It became clear that the gang members valued not subservience in their women – as a master would a pet – but instead didn’t value women at all. Those women who were permitted entry to a Mongrel Mob clubhouse entered on the proviso that they left their human rights at the door. They were expected to surrender themselves into the Mongrels’ fold as nothing more than shrieking, sucking, walking, fucking vaginas.

One of the old charmers recalled to Kemp a distant time when, in one of these very clubhouses somewhere in the dilapidated suburbs of Auckland, he ripped off a woman’s pants with his teeth, and then used them to pull out her tampon. The tampon, as you might expect, was soaked in blood – as, very quickly, was the chap’s face. Naturally – as you do in these situations – he then asked a male friend to lick the blood from his face, and then invited his acquiescent comrade to share with him the tampon feast. Maybe this recital will have more impact if I present it in plainer English: they ate her fucking tampon.

Kemp asked the romantic so-and-so why he thought the woman had tolerated being treated in this manner. “She was in love with me in those days,” he replied.

Kemp, stony-faced, asked what happened next. I got the feeling Kemp wasn’t holding out hope for a sanguine ending to the tale. Neither was I. “I made love to her on the bar in front of me mates,” said the Mongrel, somewhat softly.

Did I really hear that? Did you just really read it? Love? A guest appearance from such a word in this old man’s lexicon seemed as incongruous as Kemp himself appearing in an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. [VOICE OF PRESENT-DAY JAMIE – I WROTE THIS PIECE IN A PRE-EXTRAS WORLD. YEARS LATER, RICKY GERVAIS WOULD INDEED CAST KEMP IN PRIDE AND PREJUDICE. VERY FUNNY IT WAS, TOO.]

If this act was performed in and, if we assume, received in the spirit of love, then what can the rest of us mean when we lay claim to the same concept? What price a declaration of love when its currency has been devalued so by wretched creatures such as these?

But then words are nothing more than representations of concepts; arbitrary symbols that refer to a framework we have erected to make sense of the things and ideas around us. They aren’t the actual thing that they represent, merely esoteric representations presented in a form tangible to certain human groups of representations of things filtered through our fallible, objective senses; and isn’t pinning down the nature of love a million, billion times more baffling than trying to unravel the middle section of this nonsensical and heavy sentence? [VOICE OF PRESENT-DAY JAMIE – MAYBE IF YOUR SENTENCES WERE BETTER AND MORE COHERENT IT WOULDN’T BE SO MUCH OF A PROBLEM, JAMIE]

We must remember, however, that The Mongrel Mob has chosen the Nazi interpretation of the swastika as the symbol of their ‘struggle’ against society. The irony that the Nazis were a mob of mongrels who would gladly have purified this assortment of mainly ethnic, dim-witted alcoholics with extreme prejudice is sadly lost on them. So, perhaps their definition of love should not be unquestionably accepted as definitive.

But isn’t that the point? I could profess love to a calculator, and no man on Earth would have any right to question my commitment or feelings towards the object. I could love that calculator more than a man loves his wife. I could love a sunset, or a painting, or a dung beetle. I could love with an unmatched burning intensity a woman who steals my house, or love a woman I’ve just brutally raped. I could love fifteen women at once. What do I, do we, mean when we say that? How is my love for a woman the same as or different from the way that any number of men love women; or that women love men, women women, and men men?

I’m sure we all have our own sense of truth in this matter. The English language may be standardised, but the emotion of love (if it can be called an emotion) varies in its form from person to person, culture to culture. I have read many interpretations of and theories about love in books on religion, psychology, sociology, philosophy, biology, anthropology and history. [STILL DON’T KNOW MUCH ABOUT THE FRENCH I TOOK, THOUGH] I’ve read comprehensive studies and reports (even Cosmo-fucking-politan), asked many friends and acquaintances, searched my own thoughts and feelings, and still I’m not sure whether or not love even exists.

We all agree what it means and feels to be angry, sad or afraid. But ask us of love and each will offer a different and ‘definitive’ translation: the woman married for 60 faithful years to a loving husband will cite the trials and tribulations of holding together a union over six decades as the epitome of love; the woman who holds her newborn child in her arms may know no greater case for the manifestation of love than the feelings stirred in her by the tiny pissing puke-bag under her care [I’VE GOT A SON NOW. HE IS INDEED A TINY, PISSING PUKE-BAG, BUT THE BEST TINY, PISSING PUKE-BAG IN THE UNIVERSE, AND I WOULD CRAWL NAKED OVER IRRADIATED BROKEN GLASS TO KEEP HIM SAFE]; the teenager who stands at a girl’s house in the early hours of the morning with a bunch of flowers and a fluttering heart believes that no-one has felt such strength and purity of love as he has at that moment, believes that love itself wasn’t born until his eyes fell on the object of his affections; the men at the altar, both the priest and the groom, have different ideas about, but perhaps equal intensity in their feelings, of love, for God and woman respectively (some may say the two aren’t mutually exclusive); the man who cheats on his wife but still loves her; the Muslim man who loves his daughter but kills her to restore family honour; the woman who takes an overdose of pills through an overdose of love; the stalker who waits unseen outside of his idol’s home with a wedding ring in one hand and a knife in the other; the woman lying at the bottom of the stairs in a broken, bruised heap, her husband towering over her triumphantly on the landing above: all love.

And the man who makes love to a brutalised woman on a bar in the presence of his mates.

All love.

But, again, that’s the point; if indeed there is a point. None of us can do more than see the world through our own eyes. My analysis of love, however more elaborate, is no more or less useful than any analysis that may be offered by a member of the Mongrel Mob. Whether you believe in love at first sight; or that love is forged through hardship over time, or whether you believe that love itself is a questionable concept doesn’t matter so much as the thought that all of this belief is just personal conjecture.

Yes, it’s interesting to discover how highly people revere love and the idea of love, or what in regards to it they believe to be true, but it can never be anything more than merely interesting. Revealing about the person doing the soul searching, yes; but not conclusive: never definitive.

In this respect belief in love – perhaps specifically romantic love – requires a similar leap of faith to belief in God.

I could state that we are all animals and no more capable of romantic love than starfish or kangaroos. To attempt to convince you of this I could fashion an intricate argument that harnessed power from the fields of zoology, anthropology, biology and every episode of Trisha; tell you that survival and reproduction is our over-riding goal, and even our love for our offspring is essentially love for the continuation of our own genetic and ancestral line. Which would tie in very nicely with what I might claim next: namely that all love emanates, at root, from the self, to the self. I could even rattle out a witty little aphorism that runs a little like this: ‘You can’t make people fall in love with you; you can only help them to fall in love with themselves’. Pretty trite and catchy, yeah? I could tell you that you’ve all watched too many bloody movies and that real life is more like The Sopranos than Ghost.

I could even, if you so wish, quote a study which found that the brain of someone supposedly in love exhibits the same waves and patterns as the brain of a bona fide lunatic. Is there a man or woman alive who wouldn’t agree with that? I could even, in final desperation, disavow love as a Frankenstein emotion, or expose it as nothing more than other emotions like guilt, anger, pride, fear and vanity wearing a clever disguise.

Would it matter? If love is indeed the new religion, then its associated supporters and fundamentalists will care not for any of my opinions. And why should they? Faith is their bulwark. Maybe it’s yours too.

It’s nice to hear and say sometimes, isn’t it? To love and to be loved. What would we in the West do without it? Besides, what’s the alternative? To remove ‘love’ from the dictionary, to wipe it from our hearts and minds would be as successful an endeavour as one faced by your average grumpy, secular British father should he wish one year to ban Christmas from his house. Sure, it’s a load of overly-sentimental tacky shite that has significantly decreased in impact and worth over the millennia, but just try explaining that to your kids or your wife.

Which of these likely lads do the odds favour to sustain a meaningful union long enough to have children?:

Man A: “I love you, darling. Will you marry me?”
Man B: “You see, sweetheart, love is an artificial construct born of our own narcissism and naivety. Something foisted on us and indoctrinated into our fragile minds from birth. Often one of the first words we’ll ever hear. It’s perpetuated in the classrooms, the churches, the cinemas. And, interestingly, the Marxists believe that love ultimately leads us to marriage, which in turn ensures that the working man is sufficiently pacified and preoccupied to almost guarantee that he will never wish to or be able to revolt; he’ll be nothing more than an efficient cog in the machine, thus preserving the balance of power in society and protecting those in its higher echelons. Anyway, since everybody else seems to be doing it, and since I don’t want other men to be able to sleep with you too easily, do you want to put this ring on?”

You’d die alone, wouldn’t you?

So maybe you agree with me; and maybe you don’t. Maybe you think that love is one of the constant forces of the universe, and I’m just a cynical, selfish, failed-romantic motherfucker. Your opinion, then, is as irrelevant to me as mine is to you. It doesn’t mean you still can’t be right.

In conclusion, then: it seems to me that if love can mean so many different – and often contradictory – things to so many millions of different people, then the word and the idea begins to be stretched to the point where they are rendered almost completely meaningless… but then what do I know? I don’t believe in God either.

Maybe He loves me anyway.

Scotland Decides… What to Watch on TV

Posted on September 25, 2014 by Jamie Andrew

Let’s take a look at what’s happened to TV in Scotland – and Britain beyond – in the wake of the referendum result. Welcome to a Scotland where every TV programme has something to do with independence, a lack thereof, or the wankiness of government.

To contribute to a future edition of this TV Guide, please email your submissions to theotherjamie@hotmail.co.uk, including your name and location, and if enough people get involved I’ll do another one.

Fawlty Powers

Cameron Fawlty is desperately trying to keep the guests in his run-down hotel happy so that his business doesn’t collapse around him. He does appear to be trying rather harder to please the rich guests, especially the ones with Home Counties’ accents, but let’s not get cynical, that’s probably just coincidence. Cameron is helped along by his luckless servant Man-No-Very-Well, of whom Cameron remarks to other guests: “I’m terribly sorry, he’s from Caledonia.” Get ready to shriek with laughter as Man-No-Very-Well is repeatedly struck over the head and threatened with a loss of earnings and a reduction of his liberty.

Tonight’s episode is everyone’s favourite, ‘The Scottish’, where we get to hear the immortal line: “Don’t mention the Barnett Formula! I mentioned it once but I think I got away with it alright. So, that’s two Scotch eggs, a dismantled NHS, a billion barrels of oil, a West Lothian question, and four deep fried Mars Bars.”

Not to mention: “Well you started it.” “No, we didn’t.” “Yes you did, you elected Salmond.”

Miliband of Brothers

Ep 6. A Scottish battalion – low on weapons and ammo – is coming under heavy fire from Westminster forces at the Battle of Referendum. General Miliband sends them a telegraph from HQ 800 miles away ordering them to stand down and allow their bollocks to be shot off by the enemy, who aren’t really their enemy, even though it might seem that way because they’re in the process of being attacked by them. Miliband vows that after the battle he’ll definitely send more weapons and ammo. Definitely. One hundred per cent. Possibly. Well, maybe. Put it this way, he’ll seriously think about thinking about talking about thinking about it. “Thufferin’ thuccotash, chaps,” signs off Miliband. “We’re all in this together! Thee you on the other thide!”

Lamonty Python’s Lying Circus

Johann Lamont and the Scottish Labour Party are back, and just as side-splittingly hilarious as you remember them. Includes the all-time classic ‘Dead Party’ sketch:

Johann Cleese: “Look, matey, I know a dead party when I see one, and I’m looking at one right now.”

Michael Failin: “No, no, it’s not dead, it’s, it’s restin’! Remarkable party, the Glaswegian Red, int’it, ay? Beautiful plumage.”

Johann Cleese: “The plumage don’t enter into it. It’s stone dead. This party has ceased to be. This is an ex-party!”

Get ready to guffaw your head off at more of your old favourites, like the Argument Clinic sketch (“Hello. I hear Scottish Labour is going to be a strong, credible force in the next election.” “No it isn’t.” “But Labour stands for the working man against people like the Tories.” “No it doesn’t.”), The Four Scotsmen sketch (“I used to get out of my bed and go down the mines to work for twelve hours a day, and when I got home, I’d always go to the polling booth to vote for Labour. But you try and tell the young people today that… they won’t believe you.”) and, of course, the funniest sketch of all, The Ministry of Silly Cunts.

The Far Right Stuff

Join your host Nigel Farage for his mirth-filled mid-morning magazine show. Joining him today are Nick Griffin and Paul Golding. Why not call in and share your views on immigration with the guys? (Unless you’re an immigrant, in which case don’t waste our fucking taxes on a phone call.). The Far Right Stuff hopes to relocate its studios to Westminster in 2015, and go on to ensure even better coverage for viewers in Scotland.

BBC News

A new series of the hilarious comedy.

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

The exciting tale of an ordinary faction of loyalist Rangers Supporters who use their super-powers to stamp out the twin evils of Republicanism and Nationalism. In today’s episode, the gang is threatened by a wee 9-year-old girl waving a saltire in George Square. Donning their trademark Union Jack body-suits and balaclavas, and with a cry of ‘WE ARE THE PEOPLE’, they bond together and crack out their mightiest super-powers of all: the powers of “kicking fuck oot ay cunts an’ that” and “settin’ fire tay some cunt’s bin coz he’s prolly a bleck or a Tim.”

Mighty Corstorphine Flower Arrangers

In this spin-off show, a group of rich old Tory women from Edinburgh form a guild, which they use as a cover to fight the forces of fairness, justice and progressiveness. Watch out for their special power of saying ‘NO THANKS’ really loudly, and their devastating super-attack of ‘not wanting to risk the value of their husband Gerald’s stock portfolio’.

Lamont and Eck’s Friday Morning Take-away

Johann Lamont and Alex Salmond are back for a special post-referendum edition of the popular studio-based game-show in which Alex Salmond desperately tries to give autonomy, prestige and democracy to the Scottish people, and Johann Lamont tries to take it all away again.

Look out for the hilarious round where Lamont has only five minutes to terrify as many old people as possible by phoning them up and telling them that they’re going to lose their savings. Tonight’s first special guest is the woman from that advert who thinks the best time of the day is when they’re all out and it’s nice and quiet. Tonight’s other special guest is Tommy Sheridan, who’ll probably try to fuck her.

Cameron-nation Street

Just to recap the story so far: The Cabin was forced to close due to the opening of the town’s ninth Tesco Megastore just two streets away. Ken Barlow hung himself once he realised that his state pension was only six pence a month. Twelve residents have died since it now costs £6000 for a tub of paracetamol. All of the street’s houses have been repossessed. Actually, nobody lives on Cameron-nation Street anymore. Tonight’s episode is just a 30-minute static shot of the street, accompanied by the sound of an unseen man screaming himself to death. Last in the series.

Or if you’re in the mood for a movie instead, how about Danny Alexander Champion of Fuck All or No Country Because of Old Men.

No means No? Yes… For now.

Posted on September 19, 2014 by Jamie Andrew

We live in a peaceful democracy, which is why the will of the majority will be accepted – however reluctantly – without calls for people’s heads on sticks, fights or riots. Emotionally, we on the YES side will take stock and move on; we will continue to battle for a better future for our children, and to participate fully in whatever comes next.

But the suggestion from some quarters that YES voters should ‘get over it’, ‘stop spitting out the dummy’ or ‘get back in their box’ is as insulting as it is disgusting. I voted YES because I believe in the tenets of free healthcare, free education and free childcare – among many other things – which was and is within the power of an independent Scotland to be delivered, protected and guaranteed. I voted against nuclear missiles, the callous indifference of Westminster, policies that widen the wage gap and create and prolong poverty, the resurgence of the Tories and their ideological opposition to the things I believe are crucial to a fair and decent society, and the rise of UKIP and the far right in the south. I believe Scotland possesses the will and the resources for full autonomy over its own affairs, for a better and richer society – both materially and spiritually – for its people.

Today, what has not been taken from me, is under threat of being taken. I cannot help but feel disappointed and angry.

Remember how often those heading the Better Together campaign told us that Independence was a one-way street; that there would be no going back from it? Well, I hope a lot of people wake up today and realise that the same might prove equally true of deciding to remain in the union. Let’s see what happens next.

For all of our sakes, let’s hope that the faith of the NO voters is rewarded, and something good comes out of this result; that the extra powers promised don’t turn out to be as substantial as mist and ghosts. Let’s hope that we don’t find ourselves forgotten or sidelined in the call for more powers for other parts of the UK; that we don’t find ourselves bent over the oil barrel and fucked into submission.

The coarse, gleeful laughter from the NO campaign headquarters last night is still ringing in my ears. I can’t shake the feeling that many in this country cast their vote in a spirit of ‘I’m alright, Jack.’

Well, my infant son’s called Jack. He’s going to remember you said that.

This isn’t over.

A Stroke of Luck

Posted on April 8, 2013 by Jamie Andrew

“I didn’t say ‘bomb Argentina.’ I said Ballymena!”

UK chancellor George Osborne revealed today that the coalition has been slashing the welfare budget these past few months so that ‘there would be enough money in the national coffers to give Maggie one almighty whore of a fucking funeral.’

‘We’ve known for some time that The Unspeakable One’s time was drawing near, thanks to an ancient Mayan prophecy that was discovered a few decades ago scrawled in a Guatemalan cave,’ said Osborne. ‘That, and the fact that she’s been shitting herself to death for the past month.’

Iain Duncan Cunt added: ‘We’ve done a whip round of JSA, DLA, pensions and housing benefit, and used the mandatory generosity of the plebs to put together a fitting send-off for the Iron Fuhrer. In a special twist, and just for a laugh, we used some poll tax money as well.’

Tributes were led by David Cameron, who told BBC reporters: ‘I’d’ve done her. And I’m talking up the arse and everything.’ Cameron also praised the ‘hard work of George and Iain’ in securing funds for the funeral, a move he fully supports. ‘The old, the vulnerable and the poor have been plunged deeper into their misery, all in the name of financing Margaret Thatcher’s state funeral,’ continued Cameron. ‘It’s what she would have wanted.’

A massive, gaping hole. Which is just one example of what people are saying about Margaret Thatcher.

A massive, gaping hole. Which is just one of many lovely things that people are saying about Margaret Thatcher.

The funeral itself will take place on the site of one of the coal mines that Thatcher closed down in the 80s. These past few months, MPs have been busy rounding up benefits’ claimants, OAPS and the chronically disabled, who will all be tossed into the mine shaft to form a pyre.

‘We would’ve used coal miners, too,’ smirked Cameron, ‘but we couldn’t seem to find any.’

Once the pyre is in place the corpse of the ex-PM will be lowered into the shaft by telekinesis, powered by Thatcher’s own residual evil. David Cameron will then take his place above the shaft, don a top hat, and spend the next ten minutes using a giant pipe to pump a volatile mixture of petrol and stolen milk into the hole. Boris Johnson will help him toss in the ceremonial Molotov cocktails, as they both piss themselves laughing and give each other high fives. The colossal fire will be used as a backdrop for a night of Tory merriment and ritual slaughter, during which it is expected that at least 50 Guardian readers will be sacrificed. So that’s all of them.

Margaret Thatcher was the United Kingdom’s first female Prime Minister. Now that she’s dead she joins history’s other esteemed female trailblazers, like Elizabeth Bathory, Myra Hindley and Bevery Allitt.

Thatcher’s vengeful return in the guise of an ancient Babylonian demon is expected early next week.

CLICK PIC FOR MORE BIZARRE NEWS STORIES IN ‘ICKE DON’T BELIEVE IT’

Pack Your Bags, Obama

Posted on November 7, 2012 by Jamie Andrew

Obama – looking cool as fuck.

My girlfriend is eagle-eyed. And not just any old eagle. Or indeed any old eyes. This is an eagle that’s had its eyes experimented on, reconstructed and augmented by boffins in a secret government lab six-miles underground, using technology harvested from the Roswell space-craft. The eyes cost £6 billion, and can zoom in on an alien tramp scratching his arse, up an intergalactic alley-way, at the opposite end of the universe. In case you missed the subtle allusion: these are some top-notch eyes, people.

Pat: he’ll put his Sharp-est tool in your box.

Oh, and she’s sharp. But not any old sharp. She’s Pat Sharp. You dig? Pat Sharp who’s been turned into Terminator 2, melted down and then used to forge the sharpest sword in the history of the universe, a sword so sharp that even God himself put a big impregnable finger on the end of it to see how sharp it was and went, ‘OW! That’s one mother of a sharp-ass sword.’ Anyway, you get the idea.

We can be watching a movie, and she’ll turn to me and say: ‘That tiny scratch on the main character’s third finger was on his second finger in the previous frame.’

She’s like some sexy Rainman, pointing out plot absurdities, black holes of logic and blink-and-you’ll-miss-them continuity errors that Stephen Hawking himself would struggle to spot.

‘The T-shirt on that extra in the crowd scene was a slightly darker shade of mauve in the previous shot.’

What the fuck! How did she notice that? I’m in awe of her.

But sometimes, just sometimes, she comes out with something that’s so brain-damagedly beautiful – such a delicious, impossible blend of cleverness, stupidity, innocence and cunning – that I just want to mulch her down into a smoothie and drink her into my soul.

Bags packed.

We were talking about Obama’s second term, and she scrunched her face up into a serious little ball of thoughtfulness and asked: ‘So, if Obama had lost would they have evicted him from the White House? Did he have to pack his bag the night before, just in case, like they do in Big Brother?’

BOOM! Amazing, right? She’s like my very own little long-locked, sexual Karl Pilkington, who also cooks a mean sausage casserole.

And now we’re all imagining Davina McCall on the White House lawn, microphone in hand, screeching: ‘Barack, I’m coming to get YOOOOOOOOOO!’

Space: The Final Cashier (or ‘An Old Man Sells Star Wars’)

Posted on October 31, 2012 by Jamie Andrew

Harold Shipman’s at it again!

News of Lucasfilm’s purchase by Disney, and the prospect of a new trilogy of Disney-produced Star Wars’ sequels, was met with the anger and reprobation of a bunch of people who really shouldn’t give this much of a shit about the creative direction of a space-based fairy-tale movie franchise for small children. An enormous 48-year-old fat geek, who only got his hole once in his life and only then completely by accident, told us: ‘I feel like Lucas has sold my soul for corporate gang-rape. All six Star Wars movies were pure art, like Wim Wenders’ films set in space, and this cheapens it. I’m so angry I could trash everything in my house, and I probably would, if I didn’t live here with my mum and dad.’

The Death Star – A deadly giant bollock hovering in space.

The twitto-verse, the realm of Twittingdom, the Twitanium steel wordosphere, Dick Twittington and his knapsack filled with fucking tweets – or whatever bullshit marketing-speak is currently being used to describe the short sentences that people type into a wee box on a social networking site – is aflame with the erm… burning… fire of… passion of people getting all… hot and ignited… and… ach, blast this ineffective flame-based metaphor all the way to roaring fucking Hell: a lot of people are talking about the future of Star Wars, okay? That’s what I wanted to say. In a non-flaming nutshell, that’s about the crux of it. Right? Just leave it. OK?? Anyway, there are millions of people who seem to care more about Disney’s Death Star taking aim at Planet Geek than they do about the devastation caused by Hurricane Sandy, global disease and poverty combined. A starving Ethiopian was asked for his reaction to the Star Wars news, but he was too busy dying of thirst to comment.

So what do we know about Disney’s plans for Star Wars?

‘Motherchucker, get this spaceship in the air or I’ll horn your young ass.’

Well, we know for sure that there will be some major character changes in the new trilogy. R2-D2 will be replaced by a wise-cracking, talking goat with attitude, voiced by Chris Rock. This ‘new’ character, Gh-oato Superstar, will forever be admonishing C-3PO with lines like, ‘No way I’m getting’ on no space ship wich yoo, you uptight, John Inman motherfucker. This goat ‘aint gonna be the butt of some three-eyed, six-titted motherfucker’s jokes. Find me a field an’ leave me there, honky.’ Changes to C-3PO won’t be quite so all-encompassing, but they will be radical. Although his personality will remain the same his appearance will change some 2000 times over the course of the three sequels.

‘C-3PO always struck me as a little, well, dull and samey,’ said some guy at Disney whose name we forgot to write down, ‘So that’s why, in the new films, he’s going to have the ability to change his colour and armour at will, instantly, and as often as he likes.’

How could you not warm to the adventures of a sexually confused, metal English butler and his wee pal, the Tesco Value pedal bin on wheels.

When we insinuated that this new change might have more to do with the ability to issue a wider and more profitable selection of C-3PO action figures, and less to do with what’s best for the plot, the Disney man stabbed an Ewok in the throat, and then ran down the street laughing like a crazy bastard. Filled with panic and horror we rushed to help the adorably cute and choking creature, but once we remembered that Ewoks aren’t real and that it was probably just a dwarf in a costume, we went for a coffee instead. Don’t worry, though, dwarves are immortal. Aren’t they? Or they’ve got special powers or some shit.

Changes abound for Han Solo’s hairy side-kick, due to the long-standing fear of Disney executives that Chewbacca’s name could be viewed as subliminal advertising for chewing tobacco. ‘We don’t want America’s children hawking into spittoons like it’s the Wild West, getting mouth cancer and then keeling over like victims of Vader’s telekinetic throat-choke,’ said Disney CEO, Dave Jewstein. ‘Or even getting Chew-baculosis! HAHAHAHA! Oh, I crack myself up, I really do. Anyway, that’s why, in the new films, we’re renaming him: Chewba-cocacola.’

Jar Jar Binks: in a world gone bat-shit crazy, this animated fictional character is despised more than Hitler.

Building on the universal popularity of Jar Jar Binks, Disney have outlined a new character called ‘Ting-Ting Kablammo’, whose slitty eyes and hilarious catchprase – ‘Me no rikey these raser guns’ – will go down a storm with the ‘0-3yrs’, ‘heavily brain damaged’ and ‘people from Greenock’ demographics.

Harrison Ford will return, this time playing Indiana Jones, and Mark Hamill will be back, as an extra in one of the bar scenes.

Sneak Peak

Star Wars VII will be set on the planet of Toy, with the action focussing on Luke’s children, who are eking out a meagre, miserable existence under the tyrannical rule of Toy’s evil dictator, the Grand Merchandiser. With his army of dreaded Action Figures, and uncompromising brutality, the Grand Merchandiser looks set to make Vader and the Emperor look like a pair of bum-fingering space pussies. Audiences will be treated to some stunning set-pieces as rebel forces, led by Luke’s youngest sons, Pluto and Goofy Skywalker, battle the Action Figure army through the giant roller-coaster theme park that borders The Grand Merchandiser’s impregnable Disneyland Fortress.

Rivals

Fuggedaboutit, Vader.

HBO also fought for control of Lucasfilm, and only just missed out on the bid. Executives at the cable network had already outlined their vision for the franchise, which would have kicked off with Star Wars 7: Motherf***ing C**ts in Space, starring James Gandolfini and the late David Carradine.

STAY TUNED: We’ve been privileged to see a promo poster for Star Wars VII, which features a fat, middle-aged man in a Yoda T-shirt feeding £600 and his dignity into a shredding machine.

(And, yes, geeks, I know the title of this ‘report’ references Star Trek before it’s pointed out to me with geek-like glee. Or gleek. And how do I know this? BECAUSE I’M ONE OF YOU!!! I just don’t like Star Wars that much.)

Bore Drummond Safari Park – Part 2: Lion Bastards

Posted on October 25, 2012 by Jamie Andrew

After savaging David Dickinson, this lioness used his balls as toys.

And so to the lion enclosure. Lions are great, aren’t they? Surely they must be the bee’s knees, the cat’s bollocks, the mane men, the pride of the park? Well… not really; the first few minutes I spent in their enclosure, slowly looping around the track, was about as exciting as watching my own domestic cats rolling around and licking their balls, albeit on a slightly larger scale. OK, I did see a couple of lions having sex, but that didn’t last long. Certainly not long enough for me to take advantage of my nascent hard-on (To wank along to the scene outside, of course. Not to run out there and join in a giant lion gang-bang. I’m not a pervert, for Christ’s sake!).

He’s going for the sexy shoulder bite, but she still couldn’t give a fuck.

I could relate to the lion, though. Mid-way through the sex the female got bored, ejected his catty cock from her liony labia, and staggered off. She slumped down on a patch of grass fifteen feet away from him, and started to have a kip. I don’t know if lions are capable of feeling dejected, but this guy looked pretty fucked off and miserable. No wonder the males go out on the savanna and kill things. It’s not to eat: lions are actually vegetarians. They just disembowel springboks to make themselves feel manly again after their wives have booed off their shagging skills.

In fact, hang on. That’s not even true, is it? The males do a tiny bit of the hunting, but it’s the lionesses that do the bulk of the running, ripping and killing. So the lions are crap in bed, don’t provide food for the dinner table, and just sit around all day growling at other guys and preening their big hair and doing their nails. I think the pandas might have some competition in the 2013 ‘Who’s Up For A Bit of An Extinction?’ contest.

‘I said Hakuna Matata. HAKUNA MATATA WAKE UP YOU BASTARD!!!’

I drew my car up alongside a group of lions that were sleeping on the grass and tried to coax them into action by burring the window down and blasting up the volume on the radio. It sort of worked. One of them waggled its ears a wee bit. Hardly the stuff of Attenborough. I don’t know what I was expecting, to be honest. A full-on lion rave?

Luckily, there was excitement – and danger – on the horizon. Two lions, who had been relaxing next to a cluster of tree stumps further up the enclosure, started stalking towards my car. Their stares were cold and unblinking, and I’m sure I detected a twitch of primal hunger on their lips. Then, just as my heart started thumping in my chest, they meandered lazily past me and flopped down next to the other lions who were sleeping at the other side of my car, and joined them in a kip. You lied to me, Disney. You said these cunts were fun, and could talk, and form religions and shit. But they’re crap.

If only I’d had the presence of mind to smuggle in a couple of sheep from the field outside I could really have livened things up – given a few children one or two interesting things to say to their psychiatrists in later life.

‘Now, Jeannie, can you trace all of the recent bad events in your life back to one discernible root cause, perhaps in your childhood?’

Jeannie rocks in her seat, grasping her knees with white knuckles, saliva foaming at the edges of her mouth. ‘Yesssss,’ she stammered. ‘The day …the…lovely… sheep died.’

This… never happened at the safari park.

So, disappointingly, the lions did fuck all. You can hardly blame them, I suppose. If a bus-load of lions had visited my flat on a typical Sunday afternoon I doubt they would have witnessed anything more exciting than the odd bit of dish-washing, ball-scratching or half-hearted masturbation. Actually, that’s not true. I probably wouldn’t have been doing the dishes.

Still, why would a bus-load of lions come to my flat? And what maniac would transport them there? Somebody needs to answer these questions.

Have you ever heard a lion’s roar? I mean, not on TV: in a safari park, or in the wild? When your bowels can pick up the sound first-hand? Later on that day, when I was pottering about elsewhere in the park, I heard it. Rumbling, growling, roaring. Like it was coming from everywhere in the park at once in one rectum-rocking symphony of primal terror. I was glad to be hearing that sound in the safety of an open-prison for beasts, rather than out on the savanna with a packed lunch and a spear.

The next enclosure contained many bison. But who, apart from other bison, gives much of a fuck about bison? Moving on…

‘Get busy swimming… or get busy dying.’

Ah, the sea lion show. Now you’re talking. I never fully realised the unbridled happiness and joy an animal could bring to my heart until I saw those slippery guys cynically exploited by the promise of food into performing hilarious tricks. The trainer claimed that the sea lions always enjoy themselves while putting on the show, and I guess the club-shy bastards’d better show it if they ever want to eat again this millennium. To be honest, though, the faux-cynicism I’m affecting here could find no purchase-hold in my head or heart during the ten or so minutes I was privileged to watch those two adorable creatures at work.

That tasche will be coming off for Movember.

While they were sitting still and awaiting instruction, their heads bobbed and rocked about in a figure of eight motion, which brought to mind a sub-aquatic Stevie Wonder. When active, they darted and dived into and out of the water, balanced balls on their snouts, imitated seals, called on command, climbed stairs and jumped off of high boards. I loved them!

But possibly the greatest thing one of the creatures did, something that made me laugh uncontrollably each time it happened – that I think is one of the simplest yet best things I have ever seen an animal be trained to do – was clap! It clapped! It sat on its podium, threw back its head and slapped its flippers together like a mad-thing. And my face lit-up like a Syrian government building each time. Usually the sea lions did it in tandem with the audience, which somehow made it even funnier. Perhaps I’ve found my happy place – what’s the sound of one sea-lion clapping? I don’t care. It’s brilliant! Still, there’s room for improvement: if they can somehow teach them to smoke it’ll be fucking awesome.

‘Here I am, MIMED-SEAL DELIVERED, I’M YOURS!’

I’ve heard it said that it’s good for the mental faculties to absorb at least one new fact a day, so yours is coming up a few sentences from now. If you discover that you already know the fact I’m about to share with you, then go and open the dictionary and find a word you’ve never heard of and learn it, so you don’t feel left out.

Ahem, here goes: the way to tell the difference between a seal and a sea lion is by looking at the ears. Apparently the seal has internal ears, and the sea lion has protruding ears. This is fantastic, for a number of reasons, but most crucially: we now know that a sea lion can do an even better Stevie Wonder impression than we first imagined.

OUR JOURNEY AROUND THE SAFARI PARK CONCLUDES THIS WEEKEND.

Bore Drummond Safari Park – Part 1

Posted on October 24, 2012 by Jamie Andrew

Baaaaa-oorrrrinnnngg.

I hadn’t been to the safari park since I was a kid. As I drove up the winding, field-flanked road, all I could see were lazy battalions of sheep. Surely things hadn’t changed this much? Sheep the main attraction of the safari park? If I was going to part with a tenner then I wanted to see animals that I had never eaten before. Or, at the very least, animals that were capable of eating me back.

OK, of course there were wild animals. Maybe there wasn’t as varied a selection as you would find in a zoo, but at least the whole experience felt marginally more humane: no big, sad gorillas with their haunted, ‘pass me a blade’ eyes; or hyper-tense tigers who looked close to dashing their grrrreeeeaaaat big brains out against the reinforced plexi-glass windows; or even waddling brown bears trapped in two-by four-feet enclosures, dreaming happily of their days having cigarettes ground out in their eyes back at the Russian Circus.

Nothing even a millionth as exciting as this happened on my trip.

Well, it looked a little more humane; but I’m not one hundred percent sure that it was. Yes, animals are afforded greater freedom in a safari park as opposed to a zoo, that’s true. However, part of me thinks that subjecting animals’ lungs to a daily pollution-output that’s equivalent to that generated by an eight-hour-long traffic jam is less than kind, and should the animals ever learn to talk I find it unlikely that their first words will be a chorus of ‘Thanks’. And if that turns out to be the case, it’ll be a very sarcastic thanks, drowned out by wheezing and coughing.

I drove through the three animal enclosures. To my great disappointment, the first enclosure contained creatures that were only marginally more impressive and entertaining than the sheep I’d encountered at the gates; there being a heavy emphasis on deer, and bulls with great big bloody horns, which didn’t exactly fill me with wonderment and awe.

Yaawwwwnnnn. Get fucked, Bambi.

I got the feeling that just before the park opened back in the sixties those in charge had looked around, scratched their heads, and thought, ‘Hmmm, it’s good, but it’s a bit empty, isn’t it?’, and one of their number had scurried into the nearby woods and returned with an armful of hedgehogs and squirrels, and somebody else had given a shake of the head and said, ‘Nah, but you’re thinking along the right lines; get back in there and think bigger!’

OK, there was something to be said for the bulls with the gigantic horns – those things were so big and so wide that they could have pierced either side of a bus – but I didn’t want to see shit, every-day animals with extra bits added on to them. I wanted to see strange, alien animals from the darkest – and lightest – most far-flung reaches of the globe. Not deer, ducks, cows and motherfucking seagulls. When I think safari, I think Kenya. And when I think Kenya, I don’t think seagulls.

‘Hey! Yo! Over here! Fuck the giraffe, mate, check out our quality flying!’

To be fair, the presence of the seagulls probably wasn’t part of the plan; it’s just that the little cawing bastards get everywhere. Wherever there is garbage, or the promise of garbage, there they’ll be. They’re especially attracted to buildings containing clusters of humans who don’t want to be woken up at 5am by the sounds of seagulls fighting over a Pringle and shagging, the noisy feathered cunts.

I don’t know. Perhaps the gulls were just jealous of the safari animals’ exotic celebrity status, and wanted a slice of fame for themselves. In support of this theory, just try taking a picture of an animal in the park next time you’re there – any animal at all – and take a good, long look at the photograph. I guarantee that in each one you’ll find a stupidly grinning seagull – possibly beaming out from behind a bison – that’s just jumped into shot, giving you its best thumbs-up. Well, sort of a feathers-up, but you get the idea.

I read somewhere that urban seagulls that live within a 30-mile radius of the park hang around the bins behind B&Q so they can dip themselves in half-empty tins of fluorescent orange paint, and then fly back to the park and dive bomb into the lion enclosure. ‘Who, me? Yeah, I’m exotic. I’m from Africa, actually, yes. I’m a Senegal Seagull, doncha know? Make sure you get my good side.’

{joke deleted as it involved the camel ‘having the hump’}

Thankfully, somewhere amongst the shit animals and seagulls, there were a few camels strutting about to liven things up. Well, I say liven things up – they’re hardly party animals. But they do move a little like those fluffy, head-bobbing puppets that you operate with the cross-handle and the strings, and that can only be a plus-point. Besides, a camel isn’t something you see every day in Scotland (unless you work in the safari park, I suppose – it’s all relative), and they did meet my criteria of being an animal that I haven’t yet eaten. Note the ‘yet’ in that sentence, camels: I’m coming for you, you tasty sons of bitches. Actually, I might let you live, given that you can both read and access the internet, and are therefore a super-intelligent creature with much to teach our species. Well played, camel. Well played.

If you haven’t seen The Mist, do so NOW. If only for the last few minutes, which will have you laughing like a monster.

I’d only ever seen camels on television, and I hadn’t realised how massive they were. As one of them lumbered towards my car it reminded me of that scene near the end of The Mist, where they’re driving through the fog and encounter that big fucking gigantic spindly thing that makes a noise like a haunted foghorn. So, yeah, camels are big. And ugly. And smelly. And humpy. What’s that? You want me to take over from Attenborough after he dies? No problem. My knowledge of the animal kingdom and its nomenclature is extensive. You want to know about sharks? Personally, I find them pretty swimmy and taily. And bitey. Bow down, Davey. Your documentary days are over. {Since writing this I’ve actually ridden a camel, but I can’t say too much about that until after the court case}

OUR JOURNEY AROUND THE SAFARI PARK CONTINUES TOMORROW…

Violence – It’s All in the Game

Posted on October 3, 2012 by Jamie Andrew

I’ve been thinking about that age-old question: do violent video games make us violent, or do we make these violent video games because we’re a violent species? Well, I say it’s an age-old question. It’s a pretty new question, really. My history’s not perfect, but I don’t think they debated it during the Hundred Years War.

‘What chance ‘av we got strategising against ze English when zey play so much facking Spess Invaders?’

To be honest, I think even Pong’s arrival was too soon to be debating the issue:

‘I want this horrid, bad influence of a game banned immediately. My son’s been playing it all week and he’s just nailed himself to a plank of wood with roller skates on it and now he’s sliding up the wall flinging cricket balls at people!’

This is where I’m from. And this is where I’ll always be. I’m trapped in you, 1980s.

I’ve been playing a lot of Grand Theft Auto (GTA) Vice City on the PS2 recently. I know, I know. Viva das zeitgeist. Finger on the pulse and all that. Maybe I’ll watch some Quatermass on Betamax as I’m playing it, while phoning you on a shoe-box-sized mobile phone to tell you all about it.

GTA doesn’t half make me aggressive – which is strange. Third world debt doesn’t make me angry. Starving kids don’t make me angry. Job losses in my home town don’t make me angry. But running out of time on a virtual mission to kill as many prostitutes as possible using only a flame-thrower? FUCK YOU, WORLD. FUCK YOU ALL THE WAY UP YOUR HOT MOLTEN CORE!! Only the accidental snapping off of the pissy little key on a tin of corned beef can even bring me close to such heights of rage.

It’s surely not normal that a game can make me think to myself, calmly and rationally: ‘I’m pretty bloody annoyed I failed that tricky mission. I think I’ll just go butcher some police officers until I calm down a bit.’

Because in the real world my arse jitters like a hedgehog in a cement-mixer when I drive past a cop car, even when I’m obeying the law and have nothing to hide. Cultural conditioning, I suppose. And human decency. And perhaps even a certain pussy-assedness. But in the virtual world, I’m chasing them down the street with machetes and rocket launchers, shouting quotes from Scarface.

This is surely unprecedented in humanity. Never before have tiny little pretend people – non-living avatars composed of motes of electrical magic in a make-believe world – been subjected to such florid and disgusting abuse: ‘GET OUT OF MY WAY OR I’LL KILL YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY YOU FUCKING COMPUTERISED CUNT!’ Shakespeare should watch me play and take notes for his next sonnet.

I’m a reasonably placid person in ‘real life’, so I’ve been wondering why GTA has had this effect on me. I’ve concluded that:

I don’t like losing at silly little games because I’m a big fucking baby.
I’ve no sense of perspective.
Aggressive competition and disgraceful violence is wired into my pathetic, throwback monkey brain.

More musings on this topic in the next few days.

Cunt of the Week (13 September 2012) by Hannah Baillie

Posted on September 13, 2012 by Jamie Andrew

It was a relaxing, lying-sweating-in-your-bed-eating-a-chicken-n’-mushroom-pot-noodle-with-the-blinds-shut Sunday morning. I was lying alone (no change there) and began flicking through my Sky box. As I’m sure most of you know, there’s not a huge amount going down on the telebox on the Sabbath day, as of course most television producers are out taking part in communion.

–

Just as I was about to shove a fork up my nose (to create some actual decent entertainment) a Blast-Fae-The-Past flashed before my eyes. I skipped merrily down memory lane. My heart and mind were engulfed in nostalgia. My very CHILDHOOD AROSE FROM IT’S GRAVE!!!!! Well, OK: Supermarket Sweep came on. Now, I’m only 20, but I still remember this show from my old skiving school days like it was yesterday.

–

For those of you who may not be too familiar, Supermarket Sweep was a game show filmed in the late 80’s/early 90’s, hosted by fake tan guru, Mr. Dale Winton. The concept is pretty simple (yet hilarious): six contestants are given three trolleys with which to run around a supermarket (studio full of food donated by Asda) so they can pile as much food as they can into them. The winner is whoever has the highest priced contents in their trolley when it’s tallied up at the checkout. Now, let me make this clear: a bit like how I feel about my mother, I’ve got a love-hate relationship going on with this show.

–

On the one hand, it’s a fun, unique game show that’s pumping full of adrenaline with giddy, up-for-a-laugh contestants. On the other hand, it’s a cheesy pile o’ pish that features a bunch of pastel-coloured-jumper-with-scrunchie’s-in-their-fluffy-90’s-hair-wearing douchebags that are seen jumping up and down like retards thinking that 200 quid is going to change their lives.

–

But is that the entirety of what sweep has to offer when the contestants are seen going ‘wild in the aisle’?! Of course not! Our palm-tree-tie wearing Winton also sets these bucktoothed souls a couple of challenges along the way; whether it be scooping up a bag of Pick N’ Mix, or an inflatable bonus.

–

The remaining four that go away without winnings are not left with nothing. Dale gives them a gift no amount of money could buy in my most favorite part of the show: the end credits. After Dale says, ‘Now remember, next time YOU’RE at the checkout, and you here this beep *beep beep*, think of all the fun YOU could be having on SUPERMARKET SWEEP!’

–

And then all the contestants, along with Dale, begin waving, and waving……. and waving and waving and waving and waving, until the cameras cut. I always fantasize about which of the penniless contestants is going to sue the show for repetitive strain injury on their wrist.

–

I hope you enjoyed my cunt. Thank you and good night.

–

Hannah Baillie

THIS WEEK’S GUEST WRITER Hannah Baillie is 20 years old, and exists in Edinburgh. She is currently studying hairdressing but one of her passions – if not her main passion – is comedy! Now and again you’ll maybe see her in some Joseph Fritzel basement of a pub, telling ‘jokes’ on a Friday night. After completing high school she worked part-time as a For-Midgets-Only prostitute (HANNAH BAILLIE FUN-FACT – She’s fucked The Time Bandits, and jerked off the wee one from Game of Thrones), in order to save money to travel round America.

Whilst in the US she got to work aiding Mexican illegal midgets across the border into America in shopping trolleys. Baillie called it ‘liberation’. The FBI called it ‘kidnapping and sexual assault.’ When feds apprehended Baillie in Texas she was dripping with dwarf goo and shouting: ‘What use are those stupid wee T-Rex hands on my muff?’

Realising that there was more to life than being enthusiastically tea-bagged by scores of tiny men, Hannah decided that she’d be quite good at scalping people instead. So, if you look like you’ve been made love to by a bush, backwards, and like a wee ch ch chuckle vision along the way….why not find Hannah’s salon and say HI… But don’t say HI HO.

–

Cunt of the Week (03 Sep 2012) by Ross Leslie

Posted on September 3, 2012 by Jamie Andrew

Matt Bendoris – high quality journalism guaranteed.

I seriously considered making my ‘Cunt of the Week’ the pathological liar and teen romance high school preppy, Paul Ryan, after that performance at the Republican National Convention. I could also have added the embarrassing ‘turns’ by Romney-bot and former American hero, Clint Eastwood, however I remembered Jamie’s normal readership includes such intellectuals as Richard Hunter and Gregor Wappler, so I just left it as I didn’t want their brains to hurt.

Therefore, step forward future sexual assaulter Matthew “Matt” Bendoris, for your journalistic car-crash of an interview with a fit lady, the super-talented Scottish violinist, Nicola Benedetti. Link to said article is here – http://www.thescottishsun.co.uk/scotsol/homepage/news/mattmeets/4502198/Matt-meets-Scots-violin-queen-Nicola-Benedetti.html – enjoy for yourselves.

Now, of course, you get what you deserve if you happen to read The Sun, hopefully a form of genital warts; that being said, and I believe this to be a true fact, 97 per cent of male Sun readers already have genital warts. Seriously, check it out on the Internet. And I wasn’t reading The Sun in online or print format, so don’t start by saying, ‘Haha Ross, your cock is all warty, too.’ It’s not, and I have photos to prove it, right? Anyway, yes, let’s get back to the cunt. (not with those warts you won’t, dirty – Jamie)

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a red blooded male who likes to have the sex with ladies, and have done so on hunners of occasions, absolute hunners man. I have the humans I have procreated at home to prove it. Because of this I am well aware that Benedetti is a good looking woman; however, I wouldn’t try to mentally prepare her for a sexual assault whilst interviewing her for a national newspaper and then clearly take the huff halfway through because she clearly finds me physically disgusting.

Nicola Benedetti

He then says that she doesn’t take the bonniest of photos sometimes, and she is a bit beaky. Google image this weedy, specky cunt: he looks like Harry Potter in the first movie. He then gives us a blow-by-blow account of what she is wearing, and describes her physical attributes, sweat clearly pouring onto his keyboard as he types the words.

But what does any of this have to do with fucking music!? I am not a classical music fan – I’m more of a Carly Rae Jepsen man – but she is very talented in her field and it might be an idea to ask her some questions about that, eh? I suppose she has to take her share of the blame for agreeing to speak to the cunt in the first place, or at least her agent should be fired, but maybe her agent is still pissed off she didn’t want to get her vagina out for FHM-Zoo-Nuts, or whatever it’s called these days.

He does then ask a little about her music, but this is buried amongst references to her boyfriend being a lucky man, as he somehow snared this one – perhaps by being a man, and not coming in his pants when he first saw her; and then, worryingly in this boozed-up country of ours, he mocks her for only having FOUR drinks on her birthday night out. ‘I bet she didn’t even start a single fight in a taxi queue,’ he thought to himself.

I actually emailed him when I read it to congratulate him on his fine journalistic work, and asked if he had managed to get out the semen stains from his underwear. His response?: ‘Cheers’. Why argue with a fucking moron, Leslie, why do it? In summary: Bendoris – fuck you, cunt.

Ross Leslie

THIS WEEK’S GUEST WRITER: Ross Leslie hasn’t been doing comedy for very long, but in his short-time on the Scottish stand-up circuit he’s already won Scotland in Session’s ‘Fuck You I’m Funny’ competition, been a finalist in The Shack’s Massive Comedy Gong Show, and been violently and lubelessly hate-fucked by the circuit’s premier sexual terrorist, Vladimir McTavish.

Leslie’s first ever gig was a gong show; a gong show being the harshest, most brutal comedy environment known to man. It’s the stand-up equivalent of D-Day. Less a baptism of fire, and more a baptism of the raging and eternal flames of Hell. It certainly doesn’t do wonders for your nerves or will to live, so for Leslie to have spent the majority of his first thirteen gigs gonging it means that the man has balls like space-hoppers. Or he’s completely insane.

Jonathan King. NOT from Fife.

Ross Leslie wasn’t just born in Fife. He IS Fife. If Fife is a Kingdom, then Leslie is its king – much like a blue-bottle is king when it’s perched atop a particularly gooey mountain of dog shite. We continue the royal theme with a little known fact about Ross: he was the disgraced pop guru Jonathan King’s first victim, and the only one of King’s victims not to press charges. ‘I knew he was lying when he said he’d make me a star,’ swooned Leslie. ‘I just wanted that wonky wee mouth gorging on my stauner.’ Leslie still visits King in prison six times a year for conjugal visits, and he always takes with him a Thomas the Tank Engine rucksack containing a jizz-stained school tie, an 80s shell-suit and a giant tub of mashed bananas.

PS: I apologise for the hurtful and disgusting lie I made up about Ross in this biography. Let me set the record straight. Ross Leslie is NOT from Fife.

FOLLOW ROSS ON TWITTER: @misterross

CHECK OUT ROSS’S BLOG: http://mum-blings.tumblr.com/

I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For…

Posted on September 1, 2012 by Jamie Andrew

My behind-the-scenes webhost program tells me which browser search terms have led people directly or indirectly to Jamie Andrew With Hands. Granted, for some of the entries my website will have been on page 633 of 120,000 of the search engine’s results, but never-the-less: here are some of the more amusing search terms. Type these in and sooner or later you’ll find this site, although you’ve got to wonder what some of these people were actually looking for in the first place. I’ve sorted the searches under appropriate headings.

Cunt

what a cunt: Hardly surprising that this search should lead to me.

sheep shagging cunt: My grandfather may have been from Aberdeen, but I find this insulting.

cunt beauty contest: It may relate to the piece on this site about the ‘Miss Falkirk 2012’ competition, but I’m holding out hope that there exists somewhere in the world a vaginal beauty pageant. Miss Piss Flaps or something. ‘And now that the swimwear section is over, we move on to the talent contest. Bring on the ping pong balls, the American football and the cans of Irn Bru.’

why are bus passengers all cunts: Probably keyed in by a pre-postal bus driver, seconds before he recreated the movie Speed on the First 60 service to Alloa.

photos being taken of cunts: This is either the Scottish vernacular for ‘photos being taken of people’ – and why would you search for something so banal? – or the user was searching for photos of photos being taken of female genitals. Indescribably weird.

fat mexican cunt: The nationality is unambiguous – the person being searched for MUST be Mexican – but must the owner be fat or the cunt itself? I guess we’ll never know. And for that we should be thankful.

see our cunts all lined up: But why?

cunts lined up for fucking: Ah, I see. Guiness World Record attempt?

hairy man cunts: Oh dear. Is this what the future holds for the Ladyboys of Bangkok once they get a bit older? ‘Ladies and gents, please welcome to the stage the Hairy Man Cunts of Motherwell!’

very nice cunts very nice cunts: So good they searched for it twice. If they were so concerned about cunt quality, perhaps they should have searched for ‘exceedingly good cunts.’

turkish people are cunts: Ah, must be a bit of Googling from the German minister for Immigration.

Which brings us to the next category of searches:

Foreigners

on holiday in marmaris the turks shagged her later she told her hubby: Oh, you romantic fool, searching for such a tear-jerker! Could you not spell Romeo and Juliet? Or maybe the searcher was a horny cuckold reliving the story of his wife’s infidelity, a tub of wallpaper paste and an empty toilet roll tube at his side.

scottish fat fucked in marmaris: Dunfermline man leaves tub of dripping in his hotel room; Turkish cleaner fucks it. That’s my guess, anyway.

do turkish men pay for blonde girls: No, you racist. Just because blonde women don’t want to sleep with you for free on holiday doesn’t mean that the Turks you see with little British floozies draped over them have paid for it. For greater success, my friend, try the Turkish technique out for yourself. You’ll only need two things: lies and alcohol.

cockmail persian: Sounds like some dodgy Iranian cartoon character to me.

greenland piss: Is this some sort of delicacy? I’ve heard it goes really well with…

reindeer shit: …yeah, that’s right. Think I saw it on Gordon Ramsay. Greenland piss and reindeer shit. Or is it Icelandic goat spunk with reindeer shit? I can never remember.

greenland wanking: Well, what the fuck else is there to do in Greenland, except gut seals and go sledging? For added fun why not add a splash of wanking? Little tip, though. Don’t leave your willy unsheathed for too long in those sub-zero temperatures or your little tip will break off in your hand like a false nail.

And with that we segue into the next category of searches:

Famous Folk

richard and judy wank: Is this a declaration (if so I don’t want to see the evidence), or a wish to see it happen? Merciful Jesus. Or maybe ‘The Richard and Judy wank’ is a new sexual sensation, similar to ‘You Say, We Pay.’ I’ve got it! A guy’s girlfriend/wife turns her back as he goes through her female contacts on Facebook, describing them to her as he beats off. If she gets twenty of them right, her prize is his promise not to be looking at her sister’s tits at the point of ejaculation. We’ll call it ‘You Guess, I’ll Mess.’

has louis walsh ever gotten a blowjob: Why would Louis Walsh disseminate this information? And why would anyone want to know this? Unless they wanted to be his first…

eagles cheerleader jamie fingering herself: I typed this one in, as it sounded… interesting? Incredibly disappointing. I ended up watching Thora Hird fingering herself instead. Save.

And now a less fluid segue…

Shagging and that

quad amputee model fucking: And you thought my comedy set was amoral.

postman fucking village housewife: As long as his black and white cat wasn’t involved.

fucked by a snake: Mounty Python? I don’t know why anyone would want to watch that. Just watch normal shagging, you degenerate. Willies are a bit like snakes anyway, aren’t they? Well, mine is. Foul and leathery.

dog fuck: Oh dear. Jamie Andrew With Hands would never condone that… unless you mean:

dundee sluts shagging: (see above)

ya.fucking.fat.orange.shag.bag.road.airdrie.scotland: The internet is so inclusive even the mentally ill can enjoy it. Well seeing they’re from Airdrie, though.

www pussy s in hands.com: I just checked. This website doesn’t exist! Which is a shame because I thought this was my chance finally to see Jamie the Eagles’ cheerleader fingering herself. Fuck it. I’ll just watch Thora Hird again… Get those thick grey tights off you, you old beauty!

jackface sexe: I looked into what Jackface was. A lot of intriguing answers. The last one made me laugh. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=jackface No mention of it being a masturbatory cum face, though. Would have placed that at number one.

buckie women raped: Some sick puppies out there. Inaccurate anyway. I’ve seen women who drink Buckie. You don’t rape them. THEY rape YOU.

posh pussy: The singer or the class? The cunt or that cat? Questions, questions.

prostitutes in grangemouth: The standard is low, but there aren’t many towns out there where you can get a syphilis-themed blowjob for the price of a bottle of Buckfast.

she was rubbing my cock: A search engine is a strange place to boast this. Perhaps he thinks the computer is his pal, like HAL 9000, and he’s just keeping him in the loop.

what is a twat wand: I’ll get back to you on that one. Sounds like a Harry Potter-themed dildo to me, though. I typed this into google and found a porn-site with a video called NAUGHTY MILF JAMS MAGIC WAND DOWN MOUTH AND TWAT. I thought, ‘Hmmm, intriguing. I haven’t encountered this niche depravity before. Women sticking magic wands inside themselves.’ But it wasn’t a wand. It was a fat old man’s cock. Which wasn’t very magical to be honest. There’s another video advertised on the same page of the site, which is called DIRTY GIRL BOINKS HUNG STIFFY. Who named this porn video? A 12-year-old boy who’d just watched an episode of Scooby Doo?

And now to our final category

Grannies and Trannies

pictures of single grannies in grangemouth: It’s not as off-putting as it first sounds. Most grannies in Grangemouth are 23 anyway.

porn granny jk: Jakey? JK (as in Rowling)?

grannie fucking: Oh my.

granny sex queen: I googled it. No crowned geriatrics, although there was a link to MY MATURE GRANNY: FACIALS. Feel free to have a butcher’s, my filthy little readers, but I’m giving that click a miss. Unless one of you gets in touch to say it was Thora Hird again, in which case it’s showtime.

granny stiflin vagin: I’m lost for words.

tranny with the last name andrew: OI!

Cunt of the Week (28 August 2012) by Peter Wood

Posted on August 28, 2012 by Jamie Andrew

It’s a new season for the singing competition that has every wanker who has ever picked up a hairbrush travelling to London, Newcastle and Glasgow to audition for this tripe.

X-Factor: living the dream. All I have to do is wangle it through the live auditions, then listen to the judges’ bullshit about how I’m an artist – strange, how do they know that I paint? Same comments, every fucking year: ‘You’re born to sing’, ‘You’re a star’, ‘I can see your album in the bargain bin in Asda…em, I mean HMV’.

I can sing, I have a nice, cute face, a floppy hairstyle. I’ll maybe wear that quirky hat that I’ve always wanted to wear. UK today: where if you have a voice, you have a future. McVicar, Rose West and Ian Brady are all practising with a hairbrush for the 2016 auditions.

PETER: ‘I can’t give good head, but check out my new tattoo.’ (That’s what Peter wanted to say about the photo; it’s not a cyber-based admission of his own poor gobbling technique, which I can confirm is excellent – Jamie)

New season, same shit judges. You have Louis Walsh, the gimpfucknugget, then you have Gary ‘I have a personality that could make paint dry’ Barlow. Then there is the blowjob queen that can give head as good as Paris Hilton, and the mystery judge, ooooohhhh… what cunt will it be this time? They did have the forgettable Kelly Rowland that can sing, unlike Tulisa Constatvillas… Constanvialla… constonant, please, Carol. However, have you tried singing along to her songs? It’s like trying to sing along with Usher, heaps of hmmmmms and uuuuuhhhh, and then some rambling pish, and thank fuck there’s a chorus.

Back in the competition, the producers have paid for their botox, and made them wear a white t-shirt to show off their abs! Sing a cover, and they’re off through to boot camp, where you have to pretend to be all nice to the other hopefuls. Which is a bit like a comedy competition; secretly it’s all high 5’s, and ‘You go, girl/boy’, but secretly you’re like, ‘I hope this bastard dies on his/her arse.’ Then into the room, which is like Scotland/England/Wales/Ireland at school. Have I made it through? Wait a minute, this could be the room that goes through: we’re all cute and got killer abs and perfect hair and teeth! No, wait, there are 4 gingers in this room and 4 fat guys and a guy that seems to be just banging his head off the wall. Mind you there was that woman that was telling me she was on smack for 5 years and lost her whole family, including a leg through a combine harvester accident, and then of course her dad died and she left the keys next to note that said I should enter X-Factor.

Next stop, the judges’ houses. Oooohhhh, will I be going to sunny Spain, America… what? Where? Ireland with Louis Walsh and some dick from Boyzone; no, sorry, Getalife. Oh, this is life changing.

‘So if I spank you in the gimp mask I’ll get a place in the live shows?’

What, Louis, you want me to put my cock where for a shot at the big time? Could I not just give you a light paddling? I know if I put my cock there that I could get the record contract, but I am not that way inclined. So will a paddling while you wear your gimp mask get me a place on the live shows?

The live shows, I’ll have to make up some bullshit story about being abused by my granddad, but it’s not been done. That should make up for the fact that I don’t have children. I have just read through the first song choice: what the fuck, Bon Jovi? Ah, well, I’m boned.

So when it comes to the ring for me, and I am going to become more desperate than a fat girl on Babestation? So I never made it through to the final. And so what? The winner will have less fame than One True Voice. I mean, where are the winners? What happened to Leon Jackson; what happened to the first bloke and Cheryl Cole? 14 million people will pick up a phone to vote for two abortions called Jedward. Also, all we do is increase Satan Cowell’s bank balance, to cause more wars and conflict and deaths. To paraphrase the late Bill Hicks: ‘If it’s a choice between eternal Hell and good tunes, and eternal Heaven and X-Factor… I’m gonna be surfin’ on the lake of fire, rockin’ out.’ X-Factor = Cunts.

Peter Wood

THIS WEEK’S GUEST WRITER Peter Wood has been doing comedy for the last 4 years, and is currently producing sets for next year’s Glasgow Comedy Festival and Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Peter has placed in the semi-finals of the Scottish Comedian of the Year competition in 2009 and 2011, and describes his sets as fresh, original and funny. His favourite comedians are Mark Nelson, Paul Sneddon (aka Vladimir McTavish) and Raymond Mearns. Peter used to run a successful comedy night in Aberdeen, called ‘Best in the Field’, which literally took place in a field on the outskirts of Johnshaven. No human beings attended, but he seemed to have a good rapport with the cows who formed his audience. Unfortunately, they failed to adhere to Peter’s strict ‘No Trainers’ rule one too many times, and he stabbed three of them in the face with a spade. Peter then spent three weeks secured to a post, dressed as a scarecrow and drenched in bovine blood, shouting ‘KAISER SOZE!’ before he was shipped off to Thailand by the government. Peter has BPD, which means, by his own rules, if he got himself a floppy hairstyle and auditioned for the X-Factor he’d win it hands-down. There’s some confusion here, though. I’ve only ever seen Peter mention the acronym, so either Peter is bi-polar, or he works for the Boston Police Department.

FOLLOW PETER ON TWITTER: @peterpolishwood

The Fresh Prince of Jihad

Posted on August 21, 2012 by Jamie Andrew

I came up with this odd, rather disturbing version of The Fresh Prince of Bel Air‘s theme tune a good few years ago now, but I was never wholly satisfied with the ending, so I shoved it away in a drawer beneath a mountain of old pants. I’ve unearthed said song, and tweaked it a little, because, quite frankly, I’m a sad, sad little man with no ambition. Never-the-less, it’s finished now. Who would have thought that the tune could have lended itself so well to the theme of Palestinian jihad? Uncle Phil would be livid!

I dedicate this re-worked song to two people. Firstly, to Speggy (aka Craig Evenden), who performed a rough-cut of this song at a drunken party years ago. He did this to see if the words worked with the tune – he also did it because he was pissed and I handed him the piece of paper. Secondly, I dedicate this to the very first Vivienne of Fresh Prince, the one who was dropped from the show for being ‘a bit too African’.

The Fresh Prince of Jihad

Now this is my story all about how,
My life got flipped turned upside down,
And I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there,
I’ll tell you how I became some mince that got mauled in mid-air.

It was Palestinia,
Born and raised.
In the compound, that’s where I spent most of my days.
Killin’, anthraxin’, and eatin’ my mule,
And shootin’ some people outside a’ the school.
When a couple of Jews,
They were up to no good:
Started rolling tanks through my neighbourhood.

I shot one little kyke, and Allah was there,
He said, ‘You’re joining with your aunt and uncle up here in my lair.”

I missiled up a lab and when the flames cleared, the
Science rate was threshed, and I had mice in my ear.
If anything I could say that these Abs were rare,
But I thought, nah, forget it, pre-pare for war-fare!

I got to the guardhouse about seven or eight,
And yelled to the Abbies, ‘No homes! Hell is greater!’
Looked at my kingdom, I was finally dead,
I sat on a bomb, that’s the price of Jihad.

@ Jamie Andrew 2012

(Unless you’re a lawyer, in which case it was Speggy. I can tell you his address and everything.)

The Doctor Wants To See Your Box Filled

Posted on August 15, 2012 by Jamie Andrew

A few years ago, as part of my then-job, I accompanied a guy to an appointment with a consultant at the local hospital. The consultant was your classic, staid, stuffy, be-spectacled, salt-and-pepper-haired, dead-eyed psychopath of a clinician. Which made it all the more strange when he entered ‘BANTER MODE’, like some android clicking a switch in its positronic brain.

‘Yes, and who’s this with you? Marvellous. Where are you living now? Is it nice there? Good. Good. Is that OK with you? Are you happy with that? Yes, and have you had a good day?’

The doc seemed unused to, and uneasy about, chatting like this with people like us. It made me imagine Frasier Crane being trapped in an elevator with the cast of Still Game. The ‘conversation’ was stilted and forced, like small-talk by check-list. There was a good reason for this:

He had a check-list.

This he presented at the end of the consultation, complete with pen and clip-board. One of the questions was – and I paraphrase slightly due to lack of a photographic memory – ‘Did the doctor have a friendly demeanour and seem interested in you as a human being rather than just treating you like a number?’

Poor prick. On top of having to remember thousands of facts about the part of the human body in which he specialises, and trying really hard not to accidentally murder people, some little pen-pushing, number-crunching bureaucrat is forcing him to be jolly and natural with people according to a very strict set of criteria in order to satisfy government friendliness targets. That explains his banter, which I admit was perfectly natural – but ‘natural’ in the same sense that floods, turds and strokes are natural. How much are these surveys costing? And who really cares? I don’t want my doctor to be nice to me. I just want him not to kill me.

‘Ah, so good to see you. Ha ha ha, charming, charming. So, how’s your sister? Is she? Oh, marvellous, marvellous… by the way, you’ve got AIDS.’

Doctors have a gruelling enough job without having to contend with customer satisfaction surveys. Especially GPs. Imagine how horrible it must be for them to have had to listen to 16,000 old ladies per day wittering on about their sons’ new jobs; the weather; their ancient, battered and leaking prolapsed arseholes; how their daughters-in-law don’t cook properly for their sons; how ungrateful their sisters are; how it ‘wisnae like that’ in their day, and generally droning on and on and on and on and on, with neither pause nor end, because they’ve fuck all else to do on a Tuesday afternoon and all of their friends are dead. And now the old incessant, piss-scented yammerers have been handed check-lists? Jesus, that’s like handing Jason Vorhees a chainsaw seconds after calling him ugly. Heaven help our GPs.

‘I got the feeling that the doctor just wasn’t interested in the work history of my son Johnny, the electrician. He’s in that Gibraltar, you know. But I’m not keen on that wife of his, oh no. Thinks she knows it all. Never listens to what I tell her, well, she’ll learn the hard way, so she will, it’s like I’ve been saying to my friend, Jeannie, she’s the one with the bad foot, she lives doon that road that’s filled with the gays and the junkies. Well, it’s no fur the likes of me to be spreading the gossip and that, but she wiz in that corner shop the other day and she saw that yin and that other yin coming in and buying a…’

ENOUGH! No checklist, OK, NHS? What I want from my doctors is simple. If I’ve cancer, catch it. If I’ve chlamydia, get riddae it. If I’ve a dicky heart, help make it start. OK? I don’t want to be my doctor’s BFF, lol oh doccy you be my bestest pal ever pinky swear you will be lol. Right? So let’s help end this madness.

By taking part in my 87 page ‘Should the NHS conduct customer satisfaction surveys?’ survey.

Cunt of the Week (6 August 2012) by James Walker

Posted on August 7, 2012 by Jamie Andrew

Hello. Before I start properly, let me say this. Unlike what I’ve seen from the other writers of this feature, I feel very uncomfortable using the word ‘cunt’. It’s not a natural thing for me to use that word, and in my head, the fact I’m putting quotes around the word means that I’m not really saying it, and the quotes sort of cancel the word out, which is of course inaccurate, but will help me sleep at night.

But maybe it should be a word that I’m a bit more comfortable with. For that reason, I am picking not one, but two of them. That’s right. I’m going to write about two of the fucks (I am very happy to use ‘fucks’ all day long.)

Now I like Ant & Dec. They’re fine. I’ve not been harmed by them in any way. I do not have a beef with them. My beef is with their smaller counterparts, Little Ant & Dec. If you watched Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway,you’ll probably be aware of Little Ant and Dec. It was a segment of the show where A & D introduced these two kids, who were the child versions of them and they went off and interviewed celebrities and whatnot. They seemed very nice, and quite funny. I enjoyed them up until when the show finished.

‘Then why on earth are they your ‘cunts’ of the week?’ you might be thinking, in italics.

Well what I said at the end there. That’s exactly it. The show finished, and after that, nothing. Little Ant & Dec were no more. I both thought, and hoped, that it was going to last forever. It’s not as if they’d been going since the PJ & Duncan days, but I personally think the parents of Lil’ A & D should’ve had the foresight to get together and conceive a good few years earlier so that such a thing could have happened; I know that I’m going out in a few nights, so have just washed my best top, so looking forward is always a good thing to do. They were on one TV show and that was it.

Three for the price of two.

It’s just a shame that they’re not still around now, doing the same things as Ant & Dec, but a bit smaller, that’s all. It’s almost as if they were just shoved on to Saturday Night Takeaway as part of a recurring segment, and their future as Little Ant & Dec after the show wasn’t even considered. Little Ant & Dec are no longer together, and that’s why they are my ‘cunts’ of the week.

And finally, some people might be thinking ‘oh, well Little Ant & Dec actually aren’t that little anymore and are very possibly taller than the actual, properly aged Ant & Dec, and would no doubt have different interests and generally wouldn’t want to be known as a smaller version of other men for the rest of their lives. So it wouldn’t really work now, anyway’. I have decided to ignore those people entirely.

The enigmatic James Walker, who wishes to remain faceless for security reasons. Either that, or he’s incredibly fucking ugly.

THIS WEEK’S GUEST WRITER James Walker is a guy who is not very good at writing in third person and I, being him, can attest to that. Both he and I have done a bit of stand-up before as the same man and he has not won any awards (and neither have I.) I live in a flat together with him and they, and we have two hands between us. She has decided that this bio bit has already gone on a bit too long, and he and me and them would have to agree.

ALL OF US ARE ON TWITTER HERE: @jameswalkerguy.

Beauty Pageant: Scotland Style

Posted on August 3, 2012 by Jamie Andrew

The Miss Falkirk beauty pageant was held at the Inchyra Grange hotel last night. Usually when we hear the words Miss Falkirk they’re included in the sentence: ‘Geez, there’s an asteroid heading for Scotland. I hope it doesn’t miss Falkirk.’

Beauty pageants like Miss Falkirk can trace their ancestry back to America, beginning with a modelling event hosted by huckster and showman P.T Barnum in 1854 (the man who coined the phrase, ‘There’s a sucker born every minute.’) and culminating in the all-singing-all-dancing Miss America contests.

But we Scots embrace American culture somewhat awkwardly; whenever we attempt to emulate the glitz and glamour of their big show-stopping events it inevitably feels like the act of trying to squeeze an angry, shit-covered rhino into a tiny Gucci prom dress.

Anyway, I was at the inaugural Miss Falkirk last year, during which there was a wonderful culture-collision moment. When America met Falkirk.

It happened at the end of the night. The evening’s host, Steve Courtney, from local radio station Central FM, was about to announce the winners. There were many people to thank, and much excitement and anticipation to be wrung from the moment, which Steve was clearly relishing. Or maybe he was stalling for time until everything was ready. Whatever: he got his talk on.

‘Ladies and gents, it’s been a wonderful evening, I’m sure you’ll agree. But there can be only one winner, and I can tell you’re all eagerly awaiting the announcement. And so, without any further ado, it falls to me to tell you that the winner… the Queen who will be crowned…. of this…. the first Miss Falkirk… and what a contest it’s been, folks, they’ve all been great. Haven’t they all been great?’

Miss Falkirk 2012 finalists

The audience – which comprised the contestants’ immaculately dressed and coiffured mums, grannies and little sisters, and a large helping of cognitively-challenged, heavily drunk, knuckle-scraping car-park brawlers – was growing restless. Seats could be heard shuffling over the hard-wood floors; the odd nervous cough. Children were fiddling and fidgeting with their hands. The girls on stage were frozen like the last ten seconds of a Police Squad episode.

‘It truly has been a great one, ladies and gents, a competition and a night right up there with the best this town, and country, has to offer. So without any ado, no further ado at all… I’m just about to announce…. the winner…. the winner of Miss Falkirk 2011…. held here… in this lovely venue… and so the winner is… wait for it folks… here it comes… of this year’s competition…’

And then, in the silence of one of Steve Courtney’s lingering pauses, amidst a quiet crowd of hundreds, it came: the Falkirk-ification of this most American of nights.

‘…yes, it’s time. The winner… of Miss Falkirk… in the year of our Lord two thousand and ele…’

‘GET ON WITH IT, YOU CUNT!’

Followed by shocked silence. Which in turn was followed by one solitary burst of laughter: from my mouth. Not one single other person was laughing, or even smiling. Welcome to Falkirk, folks. It’s beautiful and terrible.

Good old Steve just stammered a little and moved on, completely ignoring the ‘cunt’, which was very professional of him. Especially considering that he probably wanted to pluck the little bastard out of the crowd and hurl him through the nearest wall.

Falkirk: sometimes I love you.

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

And finally…

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

Science Vs Religion

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this:

Want to share this with your wee friends? Get clicking.

Like this: