Friday Fun

Fact of the Day: Dick Cheney has no pulse

From the Wikipedia entry on Dick Cheney:

In early July 2010, Cheney was outfitted with a left-ventricular assist device (LVAD) at Inova Fairfax Heart and Vascular Institute to compensate for worsening congestive heart failure. The device pumps blood continuously through his body. He was released from Inova on August 9, 2010, and will have to decide whether to seek a full heart transplant. This pump is centrifugal and as a result he is alive without a pulse.

Insert joke about him being the living dead and/or a heartless bastard here.

Sparky's Magic Piano Remixed and Re-imagined.

Simultaneously hilarious and deeply bad taste:



Well, it is a Saturday.

Those who know me will have clocked that I'm not the tidiest of people. In fact, scruffy would probably be the best way to describe my appearance most days. I've never, for example, been big on doing those things that others do daily - like spending time combing my hair. But if I was running for public office - even for a District Councillor role in a very sleepy part of the country - I'd probably make a bit of an effort. Unlike this chap running on behalf of UKIP:

With the best will in the world, he looks pretty mental.

While I struggle to write something coherent about student protests, I'll leave my beloved readers with this - the ever awesome attempt to sell perhaps the worst idea for a film ever. Enjoy.

A Special Treat For All Readers

I make no apology for posting this. It is your choice whether or not you listen to it, and your responsibility to deal with consequences if you do:

Skeletor's Tribute to Brown

Skeletor has entered the Labour leadership race, and has paid tribute to Gordon Brown:

"As a seven-foot pile of bright blue muscles and a fleshless face, I also know what it's like to be regarded as a bit weird.

"But I do know that unlike Gordon I can connect with ordinary working class people, because - if you really think about it - they're pure evil too."

Actually, I think Skeletor would be a good Labour leadership candidate. He's much more charismatic than both of the Milibands and Andy Burham put together, and he's far less evil that Ed Balls. Plus, more people have heard of him than of Diane Abbott...

How to cope with rejection

A comedy classic from the makers of Black Books. A great example of ranting that contains one of my favourite insults - "piss midget".

Mongoloid - Devo

Wonderfully politically incorrect and surprisingly catchy. Enjoy!

Getting to the True Meaning of Easter

Happy Good Friday

Lizzie and Sarah

There seems to be some sort of (possibly manufactured) controversy around the timing of the macabre BBC comedy Lizzie and Sarah (you can see it on the BBC iPlayer here for the next week or so). Apparently, showing it at 11:45pm was effectively burying it. Well, yes, and no.

Few people are going to up and ready to watch an extremely dark comedy at that time of night. But then again, this isn't the sort of thing that sits well with an earlier broadcast time. It takes Nighty Night - itself an incredibly vicious and nasty comedy - and ramps it up all the way to eleven. It contains murder, jokes about war crimes and teenagers being run down, and also an extremely fat person having sex. And it is difficult to imagine a comedy that involves a shot of a man (pun intended) with a massive bullet hole in his head being broadcast in the same slot as, say, Last of the Summer Wine. Maybe the BBC did bury it; maybe they couldn't think about when else to broadcast this exceptionally dark piece of television.

Then again, the audience for this sort of thing (and I count myself as among the target recipients of this brand of nasty humour) may not watch it on TV anyway. Personally, I watched it on the computer on iPlayer. Just as I watch entire seasons of TV on the computer, rather than on their original broadcast date on TV. Examples include Misfits, The Inbetweeners and the most recent series of Peepshow. In fact, the only thing I make an effort to watch on TV on its original transmission is (of course) Doctor Who. Everything else can be caught at my leisure online.

I think the way in which a lot of people (and the sort of people who would be willing to watch something as horrible as Lizzie and Sarah) has changed, and the internet plays just as large a part (if not a larger part) than the idiot box in the corner of the room. In fact, part of me believes that the BBC is very aware of this, and the broadcast time of Lizzie and Sarah was decided upon in the knowledge that the likely viewers could catch it online even if they weren't about to watch its original transmission. In fact, I could even believe that the BBC has helped stir up this controversy in the hope that a difficult to broadcast programme goes viral. Certainly, Lizzie and Sarah has got attention that it would not otherwise have got had it been broadcast at 9pm on BBC Three...

The Devil and the Pope

Sometimes you don't need to satirise the Catholic Church; it just does it for itself:

"The Devil resides in the Vatican and you can see the consequences," said Father Amorth, 85, who has been the Holy See's chief exorcist for 25 years.

Doesn't the Pope live in the Vatican as well? If the Devil resides there as well, does that make them roomies? Or something more?!? I think we should be told....

"I am convinced that the Nazis were all possessed. All you have to do is think about what Hitler and Stalin did."

Err, Stalin wasn't a Nazi. Small point, but worth highlighting. And the Nazi's weren't possessed by anything than a heady brew of undeserved power mixed with deeply held prejudice. To dismiss them as possessed by evil is rather to miss the point about the banality of evil; the willing killers of authoritarian and totalitarian regimes are not necessarily evil - although their actions certainly are - but are rather normal humans given permission to become inhuman by the state. That's why we need to have constant vigilance against the tendencies of government to drift towards authoritarianism. And also why we need to combat any such drift (with something a little more realistic than exorcism).

Plus, wasn't the Pope once in the Hitler Youth? Does that mean he was possessed as well? Perhaps that's why the Devil feels so at home in the Vatican.

"(The Devil) can remain hidden, or speak in different languages, or even appear to be sympathetic. At times he makes fun of me. But I'm a man who is happy in his work."

The Devil makes fun of you, eh? Can't think why...

Family Guy v. Palin

Even as someone who despises Sarah Palin, I have to say that this joke does seem particularly harsh:

The episode of the animation featured Chris - the Griffin family's son - bringing home a girlfriend with Down's syndrome.

When quizzed by his parents about her family, she said that her mother used to be Alaskan governor.

Don't get me wrong, I also find it funny - but that has more to do with my own dark sense of humour than any genuine humour in the joke. However, I can also see why the terribly named Bristol Palin might say this:

Bristol Palin went on to say in the posting: "If the writers of a particularly pathetic cartoon show thought they were being clever in mocking my brother and my family yesterday, they failed.

"All they proved is that they're heartless jerks."

So what to do? What should be done about this unusually crass joke from Family Guy?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Because this is a perfect example of freedom of speech working. A TV show makes a tasteless crack about a controversial politician; member of said politician's family turns around and tells TV show to go fuck itself. That is how it should work in a society populated by adults - people can say whatever then want, even if it is offensive, and anyone who disagrees with what has been said can protest in the strongest possible terms.

In a nutshell, that's what free speech is all about.

Harsh satire, but ultimately fair:

NOEL Edmonds' wife was being questioned by police last night over why she has failed to smother him in his sleep.

Liz Edmonds admitted during a radio interview that despite the viewing public's prolonged suffering, she has always resisted the temptation to crush 300 aspirin and mix them into his Cheerios.

I, of course, would have substituted Jamie Oliver for Noel Edmonds, but there we go...

Year of Twats

Remember that (in)famous Cameron "Year of Change" poster?

Well, you can Tuckerise it.*

*Unsurprisingly, this does involve the odd profanity.

You'd have to be pretty harsh to find this funny:

The floor of a Weight Watchers clinic in Sweden collapsed beneath a group of 20 members of the weight loss programme who were gathered for a meeting.

I, for one, am crying tears of evil laughter.

No surprises here then; a radio station apologising for Rage Against The Machine swearing:

"We had spoken to the band repeatedly beforehand and they had agreed not to swear."

Uh-huh. And the refrain of their song bidding to be Christmas No. 1? "Fuck you, I won't do what you tell me." Imagine them not... well, doing what you tell them to. Crazy, eh?

Hunger: A Film Review

A bit of advice: never, ever try to watch the film Hunger. It manages to take a genuinely historical - and controversial - event and turn it into an unwatchable, pretentious undergraduate film project. Apparently the run time is just ninety minutes. This is, of course, palpable nonsense. Just the first 30 minutes seems to last for between seven and twelve years.

Truly, this film is shit (pun intended).

Frickin' awesome:

Drinking alcohol every day cuts the risk of heart disease in men by more than a third, a major study suggests.

And:

For those drinking little - less than a shot of vodka a day for instance - the risk was reduced by 35%. And for those who drank anything from three shots to more than 11 shots each day, the risk worked out an average of 50% less.

I'd write more, but I'm off to get hammered.