Number 75

Not My Bag

Porn.

It's Friday. I've not enjoyed this last few days. It's been a bit fraught to be honest. Plus, because this latest chest infection's symptoms have been coming in waves, I'm still feeling, at times, like I'm a fraud. Once upon a time the way I've felt at times during this week wouldn't even have had me considering having time off work; but to be fair, when I went to the doctors on Monday, the last thing I expected was to be told I had a chest infection, again. What was even more strange was when I saw the doctor, he just signed me off for a week; no questions asked. He just said, go home, take it easy, let the antibiotics work, don't worry. Obviously when a doctor says don't worry, you treat it just the same as when one says 'this won't hurt'.

My experience of 'this won't hurt' was kind of polarised in 1987 when I had my tonsils out. Doctors saying 'this won't hurt' had always been regarded as one of the great lies of the 20th century (a bit like that old joke about not coming in your mouth...) So when I had my tonsils removed and the surgeon said 'this will hurt a bit' I knew that it wasn't going to hurt a bit at all, it was going to be Spanish Inquisition styled pain. It was. I was also one of the first people whose post-op treatment didn't involve ice cream. I was told to eat toast, gargle with shrapnel and stop whining like a girl.

What this has to do with porn I have no idea, but I'm sure I'll work in a feasible link before too long.

The thing is I can't help but worry, except not about my health (I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that not looking after myself has made my impending dotage an NHS burden), more about the fact this is the 3rd time I've been off for a week since I've been at the new job and every time has been for the same thing (and you would have thought it would have been my back if it was going to be anything). The thing is, I'm pretty ambivalent about it. While the government is bleating about taking more disabled people off of benefits and screwing the poor even more (because that's going to make so much difference to the National Debt), if I lost my job because of my health, I wouldn't feel that bad about it. I mean, it's my fault, but it isn't. You know? 

That said, even if the worst was to happen, the packing up smoking has been eventful. It was a bit boring for the first 7½ weeks, but then the chest infection reared its familiar head again and for the last two days I have been coughing up all that stuff that I really thought I would have coughed up by now. The word 'productive' is apt now; for the last 8 weeks there's been bugger all coughing apart from the dwindling remnants of a smoker's hack and I really thought there would be something to marvel at in the bottom of a handkerchief, so, because there is evidence there's a wee bit of feeling like I'm really here for a reason. The last 36 hours have seen me go through the usual dance of not quite believing that so much shit could possibly be sitting on my chest and/or thinking that there's some kind of phlegm generator next to my lungs, pumping stuff out like a demented snow-making machine.

And then I saw the bin overflowing with tissues; full of sticky stuff...

Hold that thought, I know it's potentially decidedly unpleasant, but it's essential because I'm going off in a different direction...

As my constant reader is aware, I have been flirting with Tumblr and mucking about with my blog(s). Since joining Tumblr I have been pretty amazed at the diversity of stuff that exists on there. It is eye-opening even for someone who thinks he's seen everything the Internet can offer; but I forget that person existed in 1999, not 2012. When I was Comics International's Internet go-get guy, I spent a lot of time on it, in the name of research and figured I was experienced. I might have been, but that was over a decade ago and things really have advanced and they've done it with me taking whatever I use for granted.

One area of the Internet that has never appealed to me is porn. Honestly. I had my flirtations with porn magazines when I was a teenager, but by the time the Internet came along I had pretty much done everything I'd ever wanted, was married with all the benefits and being quite a right-on person I found porn a bit degrading, even if the person indulging in it was a willing participant and believed she was doing her own bit for her own interpretation of women's liberation.

I proudly tell people that they can go through my house with a fine tooth comb and the closest thing they would find to porn is the Wicked Weasel swimsuit website bookmark on my PC. They would find no magazines, comics, videos, DVDs, books or images of any kind that could be construed as erotic let alone pornographic. I'm proud of that fact and I don't feel like a Victorian one bit. Except, that isn't strictly true, not as of October 2012 and in a Pete Townsend kind of way I've sort of only made things worse...

Tumblr, remember I mentioned it? Well, I've subscribed to about 6 pages that don't belong to friends of mine and some of these have rather rude images on them from time to time and these would, ahem, pop up in my Tumblr dashboard and I'd be like 'what?' Seriously; despite a wonderful appreciation of the naked female body, sometimes having a beaver shot staring at you is a little off putting. 

Now, the wife has shown a strangely odd interest in the Dogcalypse blog I started, which basically shows pics of every dog I've ever owned (and a few more), therefore, because she's promoting it, she wants to see it. I'm not going to go into huge detail, but essentially she walks into the office asks about what dog pic I've put up and I go to Tumblr, to my dashboard and what is staring us both in the face? A woman, with no clothes on, in a provocative pose. There is a bin full of tissues...

Obviously, if I were a teenager I'd have died of embarrassment by now; but I'm not and I would have been prepared to dissect one of the offending tissues, in front of the wife, to prove that is doesn't contain a teaspoon of my sterilised jizzum, but a far more nauseous and noxious substance. However, this peaked my interest. I haven't been to a porn site in years, possibly as many as 20. I have, occasionally, been redirected to a porn site because I've clicked on the wrong link, but I haven't actually gone in search of any. Until the other day...

On Tumblr, there are so many pages that are choc-a-block full of porn that you wonder what on earth a porn site can get in this odd Internet world of free against pay. If you go to any of the porn sites where you have to pay you get a dazzling (or possibly vajazzling) array of porn, most of which features dodgy looking women, like the Wank Woman from over the road; men with unfeasibly large schlongs or some dodgy bint who probably gives £2 blow jobs behind Pizza Hut on a Saturday night. If you want to see a man with a big willy banging some ugly bint like he's grinding some meat for sausages, then porn sites are right up your street - there is absolutely nothing aesthetically pleasing about any of the three I allowed Google to take me to. There is nothing on these sites that would interest me, not even a casual nod, let alone an erection. However, go to 100,000 blogs which all have erotic or pretty much honest to God porn and you'll see things that will positively make your hair curl (or stand on end, depending on exactly where you want this to go...)

It's like The Times charges subscribers to read their pages, but all of the people that do could get any of the news from anywhere else. There are even a few websites that reproduce The Times paid for content for free, if you want to look hard enough. It makes me wonder how porn sites actually make any money, especially as nothing they offer is 'worse' than stuff you can find for free. But, the old prude in me can't understand why even the most frustrated of wannabe wankers would want to fork over money for anything these sites offer. The logical alternatives would be: get a girlfriend/boyfriend, find some of these unbelievably rude blogs or download porn from a torrent site for free - two are more obtainable than the other, but the outcome (ahem) will be the same... 

Other stuff at the weekend!

Number 73

Health Matters

At about 8.30 last night, I felt like a fraud. The wife had suggested earlier in the evening that we - the two of us - could go along to the Vic quiz and I said that as much as I know she enjoys her quizzing, I didn't think it was a sensible idea considering I was off work with a chest infection. But the thing was I was actually thinking/wondering if I actually had a chest infection...

The thing is, I knew I had this COPD test on Monday and it seemed a bit of a coincidence that I should start feeling a bit crappy a few hours before it was due to happen. The thought had crossed my mind that it might be psychosomatic and I was just terrified of being diagnosed with the same thing that ultimately killed my mother. So my body made me feel ill to put off the test. It seemed plausible; I have an ancient history of making myself ill in stressful situations (I had School Phobia when I was 11, gave my mum all kinds of grief).

Instead of going out, we settled down to watch the dog programme from Monday night and within half an hour I was thinking that perhaps all of the above was a load of bollocks. "What's up?" Asked the wife.
"You know the last time I had a chest infection, I said a few times that it wasn't like infections I've had before, that it comes in waves. One minute I feel like a fraud, the next I feel like death in a fridge?" She nodded. "That's how I feel at the moment." By 10.30 I was feeling human again and I was sitting in the office thinking that it would be nice for my body to either be ill for a bit - so that I know - or just fuck off and let me get on with my life.

I was in bed by 11.15 (something of a rarity for me) and I appeared to have a really good night's sleep; waking briefly at 6am when the wife got up. It wasn't until I got up about 8.15 that I realised something was wrong. I might have caught this chest infection early and almost by accident, but it hasn't made it any less... grotty. I said yesterday that I felt lousy (not lice ridden) and like I said, felt a bit like a fraud when I didn't feel lousy later in the evening. I don't feel like a fraud at 9.30 this morning.

I have a chest full of junk. I have a splitting headache, sore throat and actually feel ill enough to be off of work. I don't know why, but that oddly makes me feel better...

Warped Nostalgia (ish)

My spare time has been taken up by the fantasy of George RR Martin since the beginning of the summer. Having watched the first two series on TV, I decided to read the books, so I bought them with money I had been given for my 50th and have been working my way through them slowly.

Obviously the first two seasons pretty much reflect the first two books (although the second book is in many ways completely different from the second season of the TV show; mainly because huge swathes of it have either been ignored or have been extrapolated on) and as Sky 1 has been re-showing the first series, I figured I'd record them and watch them when an opportunity arises. Such as now.

Blummin' eck. It's amazing how you (or me in this case) can either forget or have a slightly different memory of something, even if it was less than two years ago that I watched it. The first episode was pretty much how I remembered it, except it was also completely different. The opening scene didn't have the same impact as it had this time around, because I've now read 4½ books and know full well what the threat from beyond the Wall is. It was also the vastness of the story and the interesting thing for me is going to be comparing series one with two, which is still relatively fresh in my mind. The first season absolutely bristles with money; the special effects are impressive (apart from the dead bodies which looked a bit wrong, a bit false) and the entire series feels BIG. The first two episodes alone feel as though they had a feature film's budget spent on them, whereas my memory of season 2 was much more... restrained. Like the money pot was now a precious thing that needed to be guarded. I'm going to be wrong and the second season is going to look just as impressive, but my memory is telling me that isn't the case.

Go Team Go

Another bit of warped memory has come from my decision (at the end of the last blog) to play 25 CDs I haven't played for more than five years. I began with Thunder, Lightning, Strike by The Go! Team, mainly because it caught my eye while scanning the racks and also because it gave me the chance to listen to it twice...

I have two versions of this album. I have the one I downloaded from the Internet and I have the one I bought because I was so impressed with the downloaded version. They're both roughly the same length - around the 35 minute mark - but the earlier version I downloaded sounds different; it sound clearer, fresher, like it hadn't been produced to death. Someone suggested that I possibly had downloaded a poor quality version, but some tracks actually sound different; some don't even sound like the corresponding album version. There's also two extra tracks on the downloaded version.

For those of you unfamiliar with The Go! Team, they are not the kind of music you would normally associate me with; yet this album sounds like a bizarre mish-mash of Vince Guaraldi (the guy who did the Charlie Brown music), a 70s TV series soundtrack, Toni Basil's song Mickey, and a kind of indie production, which gives it a completely unique feel.

http://youtu.be/goCdrBd01d8 will give you an idea of what I mean.

Ignorance Isn't Bliss

Fucking Lithuanians... Yes, it's the latest adventures in the Sexually-Explicit Family!

Do you know ignorance pisses me off. Not genuine ignorance, like not knowing who someone or something is, but doing something that actually suggests you're a fucking moron rather than just uneducated. Many years ago, just after Fishwife's first child was born, I watched him stick a bunch of disposable nappies into his brown recycling bin and when I pointed out to him that disposable nappies have a fucking half-life; his piss-poor pathetic excuse was that his black bin was full. So. Fucking. What?

I'm pretty sure Fishwife still puts the wrong things in the wrong places (oo-er), but at least if he does it I don't  have to witness it. Yesterday, however, I saw a similar case of wilful ignorance and this time from the lady I like to think of either the Wank Woman or the Masturbating Matriarch.

As some of you will be aware, yesterday was a bit windy and the Sexually-Explicit family seem to have used their recycling bins for something else and have for the last couple of years used a couple of old black bins to keep any or all of their recycled waste in. Now, this is good up to a point and that point is when it is really windy it is more of a target and subsequently always falls over, rolls around and distributes their recycling shit on everybody else!

The Old Man always used to come out of his house and clear up the mess, because you got the impression from the Lithuanians that once it was on the pavement it was no longer their responsibility. However, the Old Man is dead that means when the bins went walkabout yesterday there wasn't a friendly old geezer to clear up the mess. It was everywhere! There was so much shit in the road that cars were stopping and driving round the mess. The bin men were never going to clean the mess up (why is that?) so unless some kindly neighbours decided to clean up, it was going to make the street look like a fucking landfill site. During this redistribution of junk, the family returned (in their fuck off Mercedes), drove right past their own black bins and completely ignored them, despite them lolling about the street like two monstrous tadpoles out of water.

Eventually Fishwife and his wife went out and cleared away the stuff in the vicinity of our two houses, but left all the rubbish that had found its way onto my front garden for me to clear up a little later. Fishwife even picked up the two bins and took them over the road. He knocked on the door, Sexually-Explicit man came to the door; there was an exchange of words. Fishwife walked back across the road shaking his head; it was the first time I'd seen him look disgruntled at anything.

The Lithuanians then left again and for the next hour what rubbish had found its way onto other peoples yards was now being stirred up again and dancing around the street. A little red Peugeot pulls up out and in it is Wank Woman (so called after giving the street an exhibition in self-stimulation a few years ago from her window). She gets out, spies a plastic yoghurt carton and what looked like a polystyrene container and picks them up. Huzzah! Unfortunately, she walks to the nearest brown garden waste recycling bin and deposits them into it. BOO! It was my brown bin!

I ran downstairs, opened the door and called over to her. Now, this is a woman who can speak English very well. I've heard her. However yesterday her English had suddenly deserted her. "Excuse me, you're not supposed to put plastic in this bin." I said and she stared at me blankly. "You put plastic in this bin," I said, pointing at it.
"No understand." She says, turning away.
"Fucking ignorant bint," I says not too loud, but enough for her to hear it. Her reaction suggested she completely understood that.

As the bin had been emptied, I had to fish out her rubbish and put it in the proper bin. Yes, it probably should have gone into some recycling bins, but I'm not having her shit clutter up my bins and she wasn't about to conform to what is expected of people who live in this country. But this a family that has at least four cars. There are only three adults in the house. Parking sometimes can be a nightmare. It's a good job the Old Man is dead because they've been using his drive...

Edukashun

I was given some work by a teacher the other day. She was an IT teacher - that's Information Technology. The work asked a student to check out some 'web sights'. I almost choked on my complete and utter amazement.

Stuff & Nonsense

• I have been listening to The Go! Team (as mentioned above) and also Nikka Costa who I have a special place in my heart. This is worth checking out - http://youtu.be/E3XZbfzg6DQ because it is a great live version of one of her best songs. Queen of funk rock! I also have Hot Fuss by The Killers and the first Hot Chip album to listen to today. There's a distinctly groove thang going on.
• My dogs are more popular than me on Tumblr.
• We will see just what kind of backbone UEFA has this week when they fine Serbia considerably less for racially abusing black English footballers than they fined Nicklas Bendtner for showing a t-shirt with an advert on or Man Citeh for being 38 seconds late onto the pitch for a game against Porto. UEFA is a joke and we have to do something drastic for these idiots to acknowledge that racism isn't allowable.
• Today's neologism: Blates - means 'blatantly' apparently...