It’s a balmy summer afternoon, you’re sitting in the air-conditioned meeting room, you and fellow designers are coming up with the advent calendar that’s going to make you rich this Christmas.
It’s day one, what do you put behind that window? You don’t want to peak to quickly and put the baby Jesus there. His time will come. You want to hint at the good times ahead but at the same time you don’t want to get the kids too excited. Put a present there and the little brats are going to be screaming for the next 24 days.
This is where careers are made and lost. You glance at your notes, swallow your pride, stand in your designer suit and pitch like you’ve never pitched before.
“What about a mouse in a Christmas hat playing the bugle?”
Join me tomorrow to find out what’s behind door 2. Maybe it’s a transvestite crow performing in a ska combo?
I got my advent calendar the other day and I thought, “what better way to share the build up to Christmas than to post on my blog about the pictures behind each window?”
I got my camera and calendar ready and took a photo of the advent in it’s virginal state.
I popped the door, ate the chocolate and what did I find behind it?
Absolutely nothing! Kinder can’t even be bothered to stick a picture behind the chocolate. Looks like the Kinder surprise was on me. What to do? I decided that I would head into town and buy and old fashioned calendar that only had pictures.
After tramping around town for a while I discovered that it’s very hard to find an advent without chocolates. I’d imagine giving a child a calendar without chocs would be enough to get them a reputation at school that would last until they left. “Oh look it’s no choc Charlie, his mom can’t afford sweets, I heard it’s not his real mom, she died trying to fish a mars bar out of the canal. Eurgh he’s got nits and everything.”
Fortunately I had fail-safe plan. There is a newsagent in town that also does a sideline in religious books, CDs etc. If there’s one thing the God-botherers don’t like it’s kids enjoying Christmas. Not when there’s good remembering about Jesus to be done. My plan was a success, I had a choice of two guaranteed not to have chocolates. One looked very promising, offering not just a picture but also a bible verse behind each window. These would have to be very small bible verses as the windows were very small. However it’s easier for a whole verse of the bible to fit behind a tiny windiw than it is for a rich man to enter the kingdom of Heaven.
The second one only promised pictures but it had one big advantage.
Let’s take a closer look at that top right corner.
Oh yes, the first day of December and already it’s reduced from £1.25 to 10p. This was going to be a good one. I felt bad paying only 10p so I bought a drink at the same time. I would have been about seven the last time I went into a shop and spent only 10p.
I got home and opened it to find it also came with a large envelope just for those relatives that only vaguely remember children so send them crap every year. The sort that buy 10 year-olds brut or book tokens or that illustrated book of bible stories that sits on the bookshelf in case Satan or that auntie visits. I wasn’t sending this calendar anywhere. This advent is for you.
One for sorrow,
two for joy,
three for a girl,
four for a boy,
five for silver,
six for gold,
seven for a secret never to be told,
eight for a wish,
nine for a kiss,
ten for a time of joyous bliss.
That’s how I believe the rhyme about magpies goes. What the rhyme fails to cover is the sight a saw by the side of the motorway on my way home today. What does the sight of ten magpies fighting over the corpse of a recently dead fellow magpie signify? I’m guessing it’s probably not going to be a good omen.
There’s an advert on the telly at the moment for giving blood. It features people with plasters on their arms after giving blood. What I noticed was that all the plasters were the same fleshy coloured ones we all remember from school.
When i say fleshy, it’s fleshy if you happen to be white , well pinky. All the back people on the video were also wearing the same colour of plaster which as you can imagine doesn’t blend anywhere near as well.
Can you get brown plasters or do white supremacists run the plaster companies? I looked on the band-aid website and even the newish clear ones still have a pinky bit where the plaster is. The only other colour I can see is blue.
Even the smurfs get more respect!
Update
Sue from Stickyskin has emailed to say that they sell plasters for the darken skinned cutee. As she was nice enough to send me the link privately ratherthan spam it all over the comments I’ll post it here. Stickyskin.*
* I’ve never used them personally so don’t blame me if they run off with your money to set up a plaster based commune in the Seychelles.**
If you happen to live in Britain and have a head you will of heard of the current storm over Russell Brand’s radio show in which they left answer machine messages for Andrew Sachs of Faulty Towers fame. The message could have and indeed did offend Mr. Sachs. It also managed to offend about 2 other people enough to complain.
Then the media got hold of it and all hell broke loose. By the end of next week I fully expect Brand and Ross to have been expelled from planet Earth. It’s that convoluted that the BBC have published a timeline!
If however you find yourself one of the 6 people left who aren’t sure whether to be outraged or not try this simple test. Just click on their fizzogs and follow the simple flow chart.*
*May not actually be simple enough for Sun readers. Like they’re going to write a letter anyway.
You know how some celebrities and kids wear smartish jackets on top of casual gear. Jeans and a t-shirt with a nice black or brown jacket, that sort of thing.
Do you know the age where if you dress like that you cease to look trendy but in fact look like a tramp.
I’ve crossed that age as I found out when I caught a look at myself reflected in a shop window the other day.
News of this website is slowly spreading to my family members. The reason they don’t know about the site isn’t shame it’s more that it’s very hard to explain to your family that occasionally you cook stupid stuff or write cheap, sweary rubbish. It just doesn’t come up in conversation too often. Mrs Fatuous let slip to my brother and aunt that I had a website then sat back to watch me try and explain. It could have been worse, I used to have a website thats name was very similar to a porn site and not a very nice porn site at that. Mrs Fatuous tried to show her parents my site once with obvious results.
My brother then spent a few minutes suggesting ideas most of which didn’t sound quite right but one suggestion was to do something with white pudding. First I suppose I’d better explain what white pudding is and to do that it also helps to explain black pudding.
Black and white pudding aren’t in fact puddings at all. Both are like sausages made of various bits of animal by-product. Black is popular in Britain and Ireland and is probably the dodgier of the two. It’s basically bits of meat, fat and oats mixed with blood that congeals where it is cooked. You buy it in the cooked state and is delicious as part of a fried breakfast. White pudding is mainly found in Ireland and is similar to the black pudding but without the blood. In it’s place is a higher pork content. It’s like a dense sausage and is served as part of a Irish breakfast which is very similar to an English breakfast but with soda bread in place of fried bread and white pudding with the black pudding. This Irish treat must have stuck in my brother’s head from a previous visit to the emerald isle.
What could I do with white pudding? I immediately decided it should include it’s black counterpart. When you think of black and white what do you think of? The crap Michael Jackson song? The Kim Kardashian leaked sex tape? I, of course, thought of classic Wonder and McCartney song “Ebony and Ivory” which is handier than the sex tape for what I was going to do next.
I decided to recreate the fizzogs of Stevie Wonder and Paul McCartney in white and black puddings. This is despite not having sculpted anything since about 20 years ago when I made a face out of clay that exploded in the kiln wiping out nearby art when I was at school.
I had my source image, I had my puddings. I was ready to go.
Firstly I stripped the puddings of their outer garments. I repeat this is not that sex tape.
Originally I intended to do a serious sculpture. It only took 5 minutes to realise that the rough texture of the puddings and my complete lack of skill were going to make this impossible. I decided to settle for a simple cartoon style instead.
This made things a bit more manageable but congealed bit of animal isn’t going to replace clay any day soon. My trusty art scalpel hacked away until I had Paul’s head.
It's very hard to take a steady photo when you've got meat on your hands
Stevie’s afro proved a bit easier.
Much hacking later they were ready. Please note that the bit at the bottom of Stevie’s face is his little beard not some 1950’s casual racism. That would rather go against the ethos of the song.
Ebony and ivory live together in perfect harmony
I shoved the pair into the oven for 15 minutes. I would have fried them but they were a bit too thick and I didn’t fancy eating the raw pork bits. I made a nice red wine gravy to go with them which doesn’t really tie in with the song but it does taste nice.
Side by side on my plate, oh lord why dont we?
Stevie’s beard fell off during cooking and the bottom half of Paul’s head stuck to the baking tray but apart from that all went well and both were very tasty.
Hopefully I’ve done my bit to bring all races that bit closer together through the medium of meat. There was a moment when they sat on the plate when I realised that this sort of crap would have done well in this years Turner Prize. It would have but I ate it. If anyone wants to pay me a million pounds I’ll gladly do it again. Two million and I’ll recreate the Kim Kardashian sex tape in breakfast products.
Great story in The Sun today. Here are some of my favourite bits.
The trainee nurse and a pal plumped for FOURTEEN chicken pieces, SIX bags of fries and large COKES after driving to their local branch.
Plumped, very clever. She’s a trainee nurse, who’s her pal Gillian McKeith?
They spent an hour and a half scoffing the 5,456-calorie feast. Days later regular customer Natalie got the fine in the post for breaking the restaurant car park’s 75-minute limit.
Breaking the seats more like. Regular customer I bet she’s very regular. Her turds come pre-greased.
Natalie — who eats at KFC three times a week — complained to restaurant bosses that she was unaware of signs warning of the time limit in Huddersfield, West Yorks.
She has failed to see the sign despite being there 3 times a week. Is her vision impaired by the rolls of fat that must be hanging off every inch of her body? Or is she effectively blind when the “chicken mist” descends.
“The 75-minute time limit is designed to accommodate our customers who generally eat for about 30 minutes.”
KFC isn’t fine dining. You don’t spend a pleasant evening with good company. You tend to throw grease down your neck quickly before going on to do something else. She had been chucking the Colonel’s greasy wares down her neck for over 75 minutes! I bet her arms where like something off a vet’s program just before they check on Daisy’s unborn calf.
The picture with the article shows a woman who looks exactly like you’d expect. I just couldn’t resist a bit of tampering.
I suppose it was inevitable but it appears that Postman Pat is too sedate for todays ADD riddled school kids. Gone is tootling around a little village delivering post. Now he’s on special delivery and this involves the use of gyrocopters and bullet-time cat rescuing set in the big smoke. There are a few flaws with this.
Couriers don’t get access to gyrocopters or speedy delivery. In reality they tend kick your parcel around a warehouse, decide it’s too heavy to bother delivering so pop round with a “you were out” card and do a runner before you reach the front door so you have to travel to back-end of shitville-on-sea to collect it.
Surely a pumped up Pat would replace Jess the cat with a tiger or at least a pitbull?
He still looks like a nerdy, speccy-eyed, pube-headed twat.
Does this mean his old rural post office has been closed down due to lack of custom or is it now a spar with a post office that opens for 5 seconds on the 3rd Tuesday of the month?
What’s next? Chorlton’s Pimp My Wheelie? Pob carrying a knife as well as spitting everywhere? The playschool house being knocked down and turned into apartments? Tony Hart doing a Banksy?
Personally I’m looking forward to Crystal Tipps, Turning Tricks.
It’s a dangerous world out there. Half the middle east want to wipe you off the planet, the Russians are going back to their old ways and it seems like even your gran is carrying a knife these days.
The Americans spend billions each year on the CIA to keep tabs on dodgy types and potential dodgy types. They have fingers in all sorts of pies, some of the fingers may not even be their own and the pies may not even have real pastry. The Russian SVR does the same only their fingers have gloves on and the pie is vodka pie.
Both groups attempt to outdo each other and keep on top of external trouble-makers but what about us British? The once proud ruler of most of the world and home of Ian Flemming. What do our spies do to keep up this dangerous and secretive profession?
