Archive for April, 2004

best holiday ever

I want to go on holiday. The two places I most want to visit are Tuva, which I passed within a few hundred tantalising miles of on a train a few years back, and North Korea, although I’m put off the latter simply because it’s impossible to travel independently, and the guided tours don’t offer much by way of opportunity to do anything except under the strictest of supervision.

If I had a spare $18,950, however, I’d already have 2006’s trip sorted out. Voyage to Our Hollow Earth features some serious stop-offs along the way, including:

Day 8: Spend day at the North Pole.

Very nice, but if you’re taking an Icebreaker along, it’s feasible. Things then get a little strange.

Days 15-16: Trip to City of Eden to visit Palace of the King of the Inner World

Yes. This is the Inner World located underneath the North Pole, where King David (a direct descendant of David, who was the founder of the ancient nation of Israel in Palestine) sits on the throne. It gets better:

Within Our Hollow Earth at the City of Jehu, expedition members could take an inner earth monorail train to visit the lost Garden of Eden located under America on the highest mountain plateau of the Inner Continent.

All this, and no mention of nazis. It sounds wonderful, and I want to go. I’m only a little disappointed by the slightly skeptical tone of the disclaimer.

GUARANTEES: By joining Our Hollow Earth Expedition, expedition members agree that there are NO GUARANTEES that this expedition will reach Inner earth.

Pity.

pet coffins

The strangest job I ever had was at mail-order warehouse on a grim industrial estate outside Northampton, the kind of place where store catalogues are processed before being sent out to every home in the country. I was in charge of a machine that shrink-wrapped the World Wildlife Fund brochure, and every morning I’d switch on the ‘on’ button at 9am and watch the conveyor belt in front of me for eight hours, keeping an eye out for snarl-ups and jams, poised to leap into action at any moment, ready to hit the ‘stop’ button. Then, at 5pm, I’d switch the machine off. In six weeks, the machine never jammed, and in reality my daily tasks comprised of less than a second of actual work. I sat there and developed as set of skills with the Rubiks Cube that were the envy of the entire school when we returned from the summer break.

This preamble is by way of introduction to a friend of mine’s new company, which performs a stranger, and altogether more worthy role. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Pet Caskets UK, your one-stop-shop for creature coffins on the Interweb. Not only are the caskets ‘biodegradable and environmentally friendly’, but each order comes with a booklet on coping with bereavement. They’re also building a forum to allow ‘like minded souls to come together and discuss their loved ones.’ I know where I’m going when Simon, my albino goldfish, finally sinks to the bottom of the tank.

I have another friend who exports containers of dried pigs ears from Chile to the US, but he doesn’t have a website.

blogjam bukkake book

Amazon’s new search engine is very strange, clearly demonstrating (today, at least) that blogjam is over ten times more popular than bukkake. This is very unlikely indeed.

On the plus side, the book search showed me something about myself I wasn’t aware of; me quoted several times in an academic tome on UK culture, a volume which “brings together a mixture of practitioners and scholars to think about the production of culture in an industrialized context.” Blimey. I had no idea it existed, and don’t remember being interviewed. Nonetheless, I’ve added it to my wishlist, so if anyone wants to save me seventeen quid and help remind me what it was I said and when I said it, please feel free.

wendy mitchell

Blog alert: A while ago I wrote about a long weekend I’d spent in The States, where I was fortunate enough to spend an evening trawling some of Manhattan’s less salubrious dive bars with Wendy Mitchell, author of a fine book on that very subject.

Now she’s started blogging as an extension to the dayjob, and you can keep up with her adventures as she hops from smokey cellar to glistening movie premiere. She’s that kind of girl – in a recent Gothamist interview she name-drops gloriously; Jim Jarmusch, Sophia Copola and Quentin Tarantino in one short paragraph.

So go read her weblog. Her life is more exciting than mine, honest.

Meanwhile, back in London, I played Badminton this evening then watched some football on the TV. See? Doesn’t really compare, does it?

blogjam breedster

I’ve had sex twice within the last few hours, and with a different person each time. The first time was with a Canadian called Natalie, whilst further fornication took place with another of our trans-Atlantic cousins, this time by the name of Mimsybee. I’d like to tell you that each experience was a truly revelatory moment, but apart from a few brief seconds of wild passion, with multiple numbers of spindly legs tending to get in the way of things, I have very little to report. The fact the neither partner actually agreed to partake in this course of action is another matter altogether, but I think I can live with myself.

I’m referring of course to Breedster, the newest (and sauciest) online social network, which is filled with all kinds of humans pretending to be insects who wander round and, frought with horn, have sex with each other. It’s quite simple. Someone has sex. This produces an egg. The egg turns to pupa. The pupa becomes an adult. The adult has sex, and the cycle continues.

To join in the fun you must be invited by someone who has produced an egg. I have a spare egg. I was thinking of flogging it on eBay (it’s only a matter of time before someone does), but instead I’ll offer it up for grabs here. Any takers?

easter link bonanza

This place used to be a linklog. Go back through the archives, and you’ll see that a large proportion of entries are about other sites, nothing like you self-reverential twaddle that greets the reader today. This old approach has been diluted over time as my vastly inflated blogger-ego has grown, but I still spend one evening a week scouring the web to find items of interest for the b3ta newsletter. Naturally enough, the good folk at b3ta rightly ignore most of my suggestions, which means that I’ve built up a vast collection of unused links. Here are 100 examples:

1: Bible Dog.
2: Techno Hippy.
3: Mouth Disco.
4: Puppy fashion.
5: Jazz spot game.
6: Michael Jackson is innocent.
7: Reflecto-porn roundup.
8: Marshmallow Madness.
9: Insane kitty dance/song.
10: Life is shite.
11: Plague finger puppets.
12: Haptic Cow Simulator Project.
13: Omelette game.
14: Dirty cat/clean cat.
15: Painful but harmless.
16: Cyclone Toupee.
17: Shut the fuck up!
18: New sex position (NSFW).
19: Crotch-free menswear.
20: Underground Animals.
21: Cloning for kids.
22: Musical madness.
23: Virtual knee surgery.
24: Toy Zebra meets history.
25: Draw Your Boss.
26: Korean Child Xylophone Wizardry.
27: Cumshot mugshots.
28: Vodka Kalashnikov.
29: Quest for the Crown.
30: Self-wipe toilet aid.
31: Supermodel Meat.
32: McDonalds Erotica.
33: Voice like a bird.
34: Ludicrous homepage alert.
35: Steroid mentalist.
36: Schizophrenic cat artist.
37: Stupid Creatures.
38: Easy Rider.
39: Meet Henry.
40: Porn masquerading as art (NSFW).
41: Electricity roulette.
42: Chess Boxing.
43: Ping-pong arse Olympics.
44: Deep-fried tarantula.
45: Kitten milkshake.
46: Pies.
47: Vagina Prosthesis.
48: Little Red Riding Squirrel.
49: Pixel Porn.
50: Animal helmet-cam.
51: Toilet memo.
52: Puppet porn
53: Seach engine decoder.
54: One-dimensional Tetris.
55: What time is it?
56: Lobot’s story.
57: Lady wee.
58: Updated utter madness.
59: Extreme gardening.
60: Here come da police.
61: Rate My Fish.
62: Aliens and children.
63: Award-winning web design.
64: Handicapped hunting.
65: Dial an orgasm.
66: Cunt: a cultural history.
67: 800Mhz Teddybear.
68: The worst jobs in science.
69: Bloodthirsty kitten chaos.
70: Wrath.
71: Hot zit action
72: Weird animal portraits.
73: All-time Fat Top 10.
74: Satanic kitten project.
75: Bouncy Bouncy.
76: Web Mentalist
77: Kitten magic.
78: Smoking accessory.
79: Fake breathing cat.
80: Moose costume.
81: Aaaagh! My ears!
82: Cat Town: a soap opera.
83: Masturbation aid.
84: Roll your own dildo (NSFW).
85: Awwww. Puppies.
86: Old-skool computing.
87: She said no.
88: She said yes.
89: Thought-screen hat.
90: DIY circumcision.
91: Cheap foreskin replacement
92: Meat art (scroll down).
93: Goodbye Grendel.
94: Foul-mouthed lady.
95: Interactive flash weirdness.
96: Gimme five.
97: PC rear-view mirror.
98: Lots of blood.
99: Nose-bleed stabbing song.
100: Homopants.

Happy Easter.