Never compliment a woman, you fool!

“I like those shoes on you. You’re right about wearing colour rather than black,” I said.

With these simple word’s my tongue dug a hole for the rest of my body and pogoed me in.

I had said them in all good faith and to a long-time friend of mine who, and this is (as far as I’m concerned) the nub of my reasoned explanation against the imagined offence I was about to cause, had recently told me she was sick of wearing so much black and longed to be brave enough to experiment with colours.

She had some coloured heels on (1).

She looked lovely (2).

I told her.

A sullen silence followed.

“So you don’t think I look nice in black?”

“What?”

“You don’t think it suits me or you don’t think I can carry it?”

“Eh? No. I mean yes, you can. I meant your shoes…”

“I’ve worn these before,” the venom of accusation dripping from her lips. And eyes. I remember the eyes. Narrow and hard like being stared at by Clint Eastwood after he found out you have just clubbed his wife unconscious with his pet dog.

“I know, but they are, er, nice, you know and you were saying you wanted more colour…”

“So you don’t think I look nice the rest of the time?”

“Of course!”

“But you’re saying I need colour?”

“No, no I’m not saying that. Look, I was just saying you looked nice. The shoes are nice. The colour. You wanted more colour. It’s nice. I’m sorry.”

This was three weeks ago. I am still getting grief about it.

Women of the world. Take a fucking compliment when offered. Christ knows this world is shit enough without them and who knows when you’ll get another one.

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(1) Leopard print. High. Sexy.

(2) She did – tight black pants – fantastic arse.

By Spods For Spods

At work they have just migrated all our servers. I type that as I know what it means. I guess it means they have moved all our files and data and stuff to another rack-mounted box, but it could just as easily mean that all the servers have sprouted wings and flown of to Africa for the Winter. Mostly likely to Nigeria where they can be mined for data and bank details until they are forced to shit our money through their power sockets right into the clammy hands of every scammer in the land.

I am cursed with this lack of knowledge because of our ICT department. They are, almost without exception, they biggest collection of Aspbergers goons on the face of God’s Holy Earth. Goons, techies, spods, geeks and techno-fuckwads of the highest order.

Have they explained why they are migrating servers? No. Instead they sent out an email telling us it is part of a rolling plan to put the whole organisation on the same server footing, whatever this means. They also said that after the migration (1) we would be able to move file more securely. More securely? Do they mean that we have been moving things in an insecure manner before? And how will this move from one box to another afford us this extra level of security? Fuck knows. The email from IT didn’t say. Either they don’t know or, more likely, don’t think we’d understand. So why fucking tell us? They may have well said that the server migration would allow all users to speak to the dead soul of the last unicorn. Or that once it is done each user will be able to fax their hand to the moon in the USB slot. Or that… oh fuck it, look the point is that information with no context or explanation is just noise.

Another wonderful thing that our highly paid and resourced ICT shower of shite have done is leave the whole organising of folder structures up to us. Why? When I’ve had website hosts tell me they are moving servers, they have never asked me to provide them with a directory listing showing how I wanted it organised on the new site. They just transferred what was already there to the new server. Done and dusted with only a couple of hours downtime. Not our dolts, oh no. They want us to make sure every single one of our hundreds of thousands of filenames are under 128 characters but have provided no list or method of identifying which ones exceed that limit. Result? Hundreds of man hours spent pouring through MS Explorer renaming Word docs and Excel sheets. Why? No one knows.

Total fucking insanity. And all because a group of socially inadequate Star Wars fans are so wrapped up in being the cleverest little spod in the team that not one of the giant anal warts has thought to ask how much of this is either necessary for or achievable by the ordinary plebs who have to put up with this crap.

We should rebel. We should rise as one to light the emergency torches and break out the pitch forks so we can march upon the fourth floor. We should round up the Buffy droolers and make them tell us why they are doing this and why we have to do half the fucking work for them. And for each poor answer we receive we should run one of the Hobbit botherers through and toss him out of the window to cries of “Can you fly, Bobby?”. Pretty soon we will have answers. And less IT spods. It’s a win win idea. Pass me a lighter.

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(1) What a great day is the Glorious 26th when across the land furious office workers armed with airzookers and rubber-band gattling guns from the team joker’s cubicle lean out of office windows across the land and bring down the majestic servers as they migrate south for no good reason whatsoever.

Haw He Haw He Haw

My history is shaky, I’ll admit that. But even I thought that Elizabeth was a tad modern in its approach to dealing with foreigners (or Johnny Foreigner as the film would have loved to have called them). When I say modern I mean 20 years out of date and the wrong end of a slap from the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

Take the machiavellian Spanish ambassador (played by James Frain) who in this film was made to look like the tanned and greasy love child of Willem Dafoe and The Crazy Frog. His face couldn’t have said “untrustworthy foreigner” more if it had been Hitler’s. The King (Spanish, not Elvis) didn’t get much of a look in this film (they make it up to him in “Elizabeth 2: The Armada Smasheth!”) but when he is seen or alluded to he is outed as gay (1). And so the whole Spanish nation were reduced down to sneaky bug-eyed weirdos and moustachioed chuff avoiders.

The French didn’t fare much better – Mary of Guise (played by Fanny Ardant, a name so suggestive as to require googling to make sure it wasn’t stolen from a Carry On film) was a Helena Boneham-Carter look-a-like with wild hair and a casual streak that extended as much to random cruelty as it did to sex (2). The Ambassador was played by the football (and fan) kicker himself, Eric Cantona, a man so French that he even makes Gérard Depardieu look like an incomer. Unfortunately he was so wooden as to have been all but useless except for huffing, shrugging and puffing out his chest – all well known Franco traits. But the absolute star of the French camp just has to be Vincent Cassel as the Duc d’Anjou who is played throughout in a camp so high that you’d be forgiven for thinking you were watching this in a series of tents atop mighty Everest itself.

He started off prancing about with a pipe after a ‘hilarious’ gag in which he pretended not to be him but to be one of his entourage (3) and rapidly moved to sexual harassment. When I say rapidly I mean within 30 seconds and when I say sexual harassment I mean shouting filthy things to the Queen and grabbing her arse (5) in front of everyone. It was like watching a history lesson as imagined by Paul ‘Rapey’ Danan (6). He spent the rest of the film being a hysteric (and hysterical) sex fiend who would have dressed up as a Nazi and fucked a dead pig three ways to Thursday given half a chance.

All in all the film, whilst looking good and being an enjoyable insight into what made young Elizabeth the Quen we know now, really came over as a “let’s laugh at Johnny Foreigner” fest of mind numbing proportions. The only way it could have got worse was for Richard “God I’m a detestable cunt” Littlejohn and Jim “And I’m not much better” Davidson to have written it. Actually, I bet that would be great fun. I think they should team up to write all of our history for huge blockbuster films – it will be like having an Empire again but without all the hassle of actually having one.

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(1) Not entirely unreasonable as his missus was Kathy Burke.

(2) Her undoing – how very British.

(3) Worthy of Ben Elton (3), I think you’ll agree.

(4) I just depressed myself typing his name. Christ.

(5) Or tits, I can’t remember.

(6) This in no way implies he has raped anyone. Just that his actions in Celebrity Love Island made you think he could. Possible on camera. With a smile.

Smirking Ikea Ballsack

If the Peugeot 207 twatman is the single smuggest stain on our planet, then the kooky (by which I mean annoying) Ikea man is the most punchable. By far. Mile. Miles and miles. Really fucking far. Punching all the way. A relentless marching drumbeat of bone-and-tooth-splintering punches delivered with machine-like regularity to his spiky blond haired fat face and Joker-lite grin.

You must have seen the advert. He’s sat atop a pile of Ikea furniture (I think that collective noun should be ‘dump’) and reading the new catalogue. He starts in shadow and disappointingly the light fail to stay off opting instead to illuminate the dump of flat-pack tat and his own cretinous face. He starts to waffle on about how good this large pile of MFD and glue would look in your one bedroom flat thereby immediately getting my back up on two levels – 1) I don’t have a one-bedroom flat, I have a semi-detached house with three bedrooms; and 2) What is he trying to imply about people who have one-bedroom flats? Are they to be pitied as the parish poor or held as exemplars of some concept he knows but won’t tell anyone? What about the shoppers who make their way (1) to IKEA stores? Can they only buy things if they have a one-bedroom flat? Are people with a bedroom and a boxroom turned away whilst people like me are run off the property by burly loggers throwing inedible Swedish sweets at our cars? What would they do if the Queen turned up? Behead off live on the Ikea website and ask you to guess its weight?

So, with my teeth well and truly set on edge, I grip the settee arm and prepare for a full blown rage-fest to pour out of my mouth. He and the advert do not disappoint. The porky pixie hops down (avoiding tripping, rolling down the dump and writhing in loud agony at the bottom with three compound fractures, a burst lung and an impalement – it’s fucking Health and Safety gone mad I tell you) and with a smirk that could start a fight in a Methodist temperance meeting asks us to guess how much the mound of veneer and leatherette behind him costs.

Who cares? Who the fuck cares? Really? Do you? Does anyone you know? I think the idea is that someone could win it. Yes, get the right amount and some ‘lucky’ (2) sod can win the lot. Quite what someone with a one-bedroom flat would do with a container lorry load of second-hand mis-matched furniture and other assorted shite is never explained by the blond cock. I assume they’d have to pile it up like he did and sit on the top until they sold enough of it off on ebay to see their own carpet again.

So well done Ikea, you yet again fill our homes not only with your flat-packed meh-ness, but also with another shit advert in what is a shameful litany of shit adverts. You absolute clits.

Should you wish to see the grinning scrotum sat atop his throne of dubious wonders, you can find it on here somewhere.

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(1) Dawn of the Dead springs to mind.

(2) Lucky as in saved from being dragged into a car only to discover the ‘rescuers’ are a bunch of hungry cannibals. With hard-ons.

The Strangers might be the shittest film I’ve ever seen…

…and I’ve seen Reign of Fire!

Really. Dumb does not cover it. Calling this film dumb is like calling John Merrick “not much of a looker” or Richard Littlejohn “a wanker” – they just don’t do their subjects justice (1).

This film was so dumb that I felt my IQ rise as I watched it.

This film was so dumb that Scary Movie came in, watched 10 minutes and left sighing about the ruin of modern cinema.

This film was so totally and completely dumb that I wanted time to run backwards, at the risk of losing my IQ rise, just so I could ensure I had never had the very real shame of watching it staining my soul.

And after dumb it was shit. Really shit. It was a movie where logic was not only torn out, line by line, nerve connection by nerve connection, but also then dressed up as Rasputin so it could be poisoned, shot, beaten and finally drowned. The ‘talent’ (some bloke I’ve never heard of who could be anyone of a gaggle of Hollywood leading men and Liv Tyler who simpered her lines through the film like she had been told her character was made of nothing but flowers and bunny burps) were moved around the set simply to allow the director to place them in one scary (cough) situation after another with fuck all regard to the obviously old fashioned and over-used concepts of plot and narrative (logic, as discussed, already having been done away with presumably before the writer set crayon to paper).

Take the following as some examples of this films total and all-encompassing shitness, although it’s by no means a full list as my mind has wiped bits of it from my memory – in some cases as I saw them:

a) Why did the women (Liv Tyler) never put any shoes on? Despite the fact she got changed at the start when things started to get scary. What kind of idiot decides “Ooo, there appears to be a potential rapist and/or murderer outside my house. I will get out of this dress and into some jeans but you know what? I’ll not bother with footwear – after all, it’s not like I’ll have to run for my life, is it?”

b) You know when your mobile battery dies and you can’t use your phone so you have to plug it in to charge it, right? Does that mean you then can not use that phone? No? No? Thought so – mine works just fine with main power too. What an absolute pity that hers seemed to be a special phone that did not. After all, it would have saved a lot of heartache (mine in particular) had she been able to call the cops and end the film 25 mins in.

c) When they baddies rammed their car, why did they not 1) run the fucker stood in front of them over, and/ or b) keep going – who cares about your car’s rims at that point.

d) When the friend arrived (in what has to be the longest and most obvious set up of a “he’s going to get shot accidentally” scene I have had the misfortune of watching) why didn’t the daft cunt ring the cops when a brick was lobbed through his car window, let alone when he got out (you read that right – HE GOT OUT) to investigate and found the ruined car and broken-into house. The twat deserved a 12-bore to the face.

e) After shooting said idiot in the mush, why did they feel the need to run – quite obviously the hidey hole worked, just on the wrong target. Find another place and wait it out.

f) After the strangely-non-working-because-it-is-charging-phone, this next fuck up ranks as the film biggest. Having offed his mate, the man decided to try “an old radio in the barn”. Like we all would at this point. Cos radios are just like phones and dead easy to use. And with the convenience of it being outside where the baddies are I’m only surprised he didn’t try it first. The absolute cunt. Actually, I shouldn’t be too hard on him – after all he was just doing what the idiot writer/director told him too. I bet there was a piece of his mind screaming “This is stupid!” too. Anyhoo, he’s committed to the idea now. Fully signed up and raring to go. But what of his lovely and unarmed girlfriend? She wants to come with him because he has the only gun. He says no saying she’ll be safe in the house. The house that the mask wearing psychos have been walking through since they started their attack. This idiot thinks that leaving her in an open and indefensible house will make her safer than if she grabs some knives and goes with him to the barn where at least she can keep an eye out for the killer while he plays at being Rubber Duck. Jesus H Presley.

It was at this point, dear reader (3) that I gave up on the film altogether. I couldn’t care less what happened to these two just as long as it was soon so I could go home. He was caught on his way to the barn, she hurt her leg looking for him, she hid in the most obvious place in the house (after ‘under the bed’) and was found, both of them were tied to a chair and slowly & repeatedly stabbed in a scene that was less shocking than it wanted to be and far more nauseating than it had any right in being. Oh, and she might have survived and the killers may well try and strike again. Who fucking cares. The only crime of the whole film is that the writer/director is free to do another.

Actually there was another crime. The opening of the film shows a relationship on the rocks and at a crisis point. This part of the film was interesting and beautifully shot and acted. If the writer/director had had the balls to make a film about these two people and this relationship then I have a feeling I would have loved it. As it was, he just went in for 90 mins of torture porn and is the lesser man for it.

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(1) In Littlejohn’s case the only justice I can think of that would fit would for him to be drugged up by crooked foreigners a la Popeye Doyle in The French Connection and then to be sold around rough Turkish gay dungeons where he can spend the rest of his days repeatedly having his miserable little ring stretched by just the kind of racial stereotype he most fears/desires (2)

(2) You know he just protests a little too much in his column, doesn’t he.

(3) As far as I can tell, no one is reading this bar me. Fuck the lot of you then.