Dinosaur Ark

I'm not sure I'll get around to seeing Evan Almighty before it goes to DVD but I'm sure it'll be funny. From what I can see it's a lot of animal ark jokes, and you really can't go wrong with those. Just the idea of some poor bloke trying to get two of everything on a boat - it's a visual humor dream. Today, though, I saw something that left me wondering whether to laugh or just stick my head down the toilet. The Creation Museum is opening in Kentucky, and they're there to tell you that Noah had dinosaurs on his ark. Fuck me crossways with bells on!

In case you really don't believe that arseholes like this exist, see the link below:

CLICK HERE FOR LINK TO FUCKWITS

Let me summarize for you - the earth was created in exactly six days and man was part of that, so dinosaurs can't have pre-dated man by millions of years, right? And anyway, the bible says the earth is only six thousand years old, so if we found dinosaur bones (kind of a bummer for the genesis crowd I would imagine - sort of hard to explain) then it must mean that dinosaurs were made on the sixth day too. This means that the only way they could have survived the great flood was for Noah to have had them on his ark.

So let's step back just for a second and contemplate two of every genus and species of animal ever seen in history (apart from the fish - I guess they didn't need rescuing) on a big wooden boat. And I mean every single one - it's not like anything could have evolved later, is it? There's getting on for 5,000 recognized species of mammal alone, and that's not accounting for any sub-species. It also doesn't account for dinosaurs - I've seen Jurassic Park and do you seriously believe that Noah coaxed two T.Rex onto a boat and kept them penned up so they wouldn't eat the goats and zebras? If you do, you're a twat of such mind-buggeringly huge proportions that you should be banned from sharing oxygen with the rest of us! People like this shouldn't be allowed to visit museums, much less build one.

Right now there's some witless cow trying to get Harry Potter banned from school libraries because of all the naughty witchcraft references. The thing is, I figure there's about as much believability in a teenage wizard riding to school on a magical train and learning to turn mice into teacups as there is in a story about a man who builds a wooden boat and collects two of every animal ever, including long-dead Brontosaurus and Dimetrodon, keeping them afloat while the rest of the world drowns.

Don't be fooled by these apparently harmless wallies though - before long they'll be burning us at the stake if we so much as utter the word "evolution". The puritans didn't come to the US all those years ago to promulgate freedom of religion - that's a fairy story. They just wanted the freedom to persecute the shit out of anyone who didn't agree with their version of religion.

Still, I'm all into freedom when it comes to personal religion, so in the interests of cultural diversity here's some other belief systems that we should be teaching in schools. In fact I'm thinking of starting a museum in Kentucky:

The tooth fairy
Little green men probing your anus
E-mails promising penis enlargement
Unicorns and leprechauns
The talking gingerbread man
Efficient government
Monkeys flying out of my butt
The flat earth
Testicles with their own intelligence

Please send all donations to Mr. Bison c/o Arking Mad Home for the Mentally Challenged, Inbredsville, KY. It's all tax deductible, and I promise you a "Get Out Of Hell Free" card.


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison (who, believe it or not, is not an atheist)

Mad Dogs & Englishmen

It's Memorial Day and I woke up with nothing better to do than cut the grass, so Mrs. Bison proposed a visit to the track to run some sprints. I got into the habit of this a couple of years ago - for some reason my workout partner wanted to run some 200m sprints so we used to go on a Sunday after the gym. It turns out I'm surprisingly quick for a big bloke, but only over short distances - anything longer and I'm completely useless. I have a friend who runs marathons and I joined him on a 6km run once; he was very polite about it, but I was undeniably shite.

Anyway, we got to the track at the local high school and there were various sensible people walking around it with water bottles. By this time it was 11:00am and the sun was shining; it was getting hot and decidedly humid. We jogged one lap and then I ran one timed 200m sprint at about 80-90% of full pace. I came in at 29.5 seconds but immediately felt like expelling my breakfast. I poured iced water over my head while the normal people continued to walk around.

The spouse ran a 100m sprint and then walked some laps. I decided that I was going to run one more sprint, balls out, and then go home - it was too fucking hot for running. So the spouse set up on the finish line and I walked round to the 200m start; I chose lane 6 for no particular reason. I used to kick in full pace as I came around the bend but I've started running the first 100m harder so I decided to delay the kick until I was fully on the straight, so that I didn't run out of steam at the end. I started out fast, rounded the bend, kicked hard and gritted my teeth up the straight. I crossed the line at a spouse-timed 26.75 seconds. Best ever!

Unfortunately, when I stopped running the fun started. Beating sun, over-heating body and creeping nausea. I had cold water poured on me and tried drinking some, but I rapidly went downhill. I walked over to the aluminum bleachers alongside the track; there was no shade anywhere except underneath, so I sat down as the nausea came on in waves. Meanwhile a woman had come up to talk to the spouse - she had heard our accents and wanted to know if we were English since she'd lived there for two years. She started asking if we'd found anywhere good for fish & chips. (Oh fuck! Please stop talking about food!) At this point I decided that chunder was imminent so I rolled over onto my hands and knees. The woman was still talking. Spouse had one eye on me, thinking I might actually die, and was trying to cut short the conversation. Meanwhile I'm down there covered in gravel, looking like shit. I was thinking what a great introductory move it would be for me to spew in front of her. Way to make friends! Woman's husband turned up and added to the conversation. For some reason I felt better on my knees and the urge to vomit dissipated somewhat; however I was in head-down, arse-in-the-air pose at this point, and my dignity had taken a short Memorial Day break.

Eventually the nice people left and spouse went to get the car. One iced water, one Rice Krispy Treat and one shower later I feel human again. Plus I ran 26.75! That's not bad for a 230lb, 39 year-old bloke. There's a serious athlete at our gym, same age as me, who ran 27 seconds at a recent event. I know I could take him! Only it had better not be at midday in a hot, humid St.Louis summer, otherwise I'll be demonstrating the long distance chunk-blow too.


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Taking Sven Home

Mrs. Bison read my last two posts and commented acerbically that maybe I should change my tagline from "Mr. Bison - Opinions From Beyond The Herd" to "Mr. Bison - He's Completely Pissed Off With The Herd." Therefore, to reintroduce some humor I'll tell you a short and gratuitously pointless story about Sven's first bout of drunkenness.

He it was who didn't drink for real until he was eighteen, so when we went to the beach party he indulged liberally in everything that came in a bottle, especially all the hard spirits. Eventually he collapsed in a heap and we had to step in and prevent a group of blokes from another part of town using him as a football. Sven remained conscious and talkative - he was always a happy drunk, and you didn't have to pay any attention to what he said. So anyway, Rob, Vic and I decided to take him home. He lived with his mum and two younger siblings over a shop in the high street of this seaside town; our mission was to return him to his bedroom without his mum knowing.

This was easier said than done. Firstly he was stumbling, falling over drunk and incapable of holding himself upright. Secondly his room was at the highest point of the building, up three flights of stairs. The high street was, of course, deserted, so we got his key and opened the front door. There was a very narrow hallway with stairs at the end and we had to navigate Sven past the bikes that rested against the wall. Then we had to somehow manhandle him up the first set of stairs, which wasn't easy because there wasn't enough room to stand beside him - we had to sort of push and pull. Of course we tried to be quiet, but the "Ssshhh" noises and general clumping up the stairs would have sounded plenty noisy to anyone other than three partial drunks helping a total drunk.

It seemed like an age before we got him up all three flights and propelled him through the door of his room to the bed on the far side. Immediately we turned and began our retreat - we were now deep in enemy territory and we had to find our way out before his mum woke up with any enquiries about our role in this affair. After much Ssshh-ing I managed to kick a brass fireguard down a the top flight of stairs. (Who leaves a fireguard on the stairs? I mean, really!) This made a big noise, even to us, and consequently as we were turning to go down the last stairs a door opened and there was Sven's mum in her nightdress. There's something unnaturally scary about someone's mum in her night attire. Fortunately we were already door-side of her so we hurried out with muffled comments about "just bringing home...everything OK...see you...bye!"

Back out on the street we closed the front door and stood in that special silence reserved for deserted shopping streets at night. We looked at each other, but before we could say anything we heard the creak of a window opening three floors up. Out popped a smiling face. The grin broadened, turned into a yawn and Sven cascaded puke down from a great height onto the pavement beside us.

Our work here done, we waved goodnight and headed back to the beach. We were lucky though. Had we been standing four feet to the left I think I might have had to go back in and beat him with the fireguard, nightdress or not.


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Field Day

Mrs. Bison and I are now looking at nearly three months of child-filled summer. The local school district, having fulfilled its duty of educating our child for the pathetically small amount of days that they bother to do it, has unleashed it on us for the next eighty-one days. Not that we're counting, you understand...

The term ended with what they call "Field Day", which is a bit like Sports Day, but without any actual sports, or competition. There were cakes, though, so all the fat-arsed kids wouldn't be forced to endure an afternoon without lard. I remember Sports Day as an actual day of competition, when you found out who was the fastest kid in your year. We used to get little pieces of colored cloth on a safety-pin to show how we did: red for first place, blue for second and yellow for third. Not now though - don't want the little darlings to have to come face-to-face with real life yet.

I wouldn't mind if this was the only dumb thing they did at school but it seems to me that not a single week goes by without them having early dismissal, a day off, cakes for someone's birthday, a school trip somewhere, a class party or some other event that doesn't involve any bloody learning. If you compressed all the actual work they did it would mean closer to two hundred days off for the summer. (Which might be good news for the teachers.)

This isn't a bad school district though. They do at least teach them some basics, like multiplication tables. I heard on the news last night about some concept called "Reform Math", the basic premise of which seems to be that we should teach our kids to get sort of close to the right answer but not worry about them actually getting anything correct. What goat-brained, feeble-minded cockroach shagger thought that one up? I actually watched this female teacher with a vacant expression and a smarmy "we know what's best for you" smile explaining that it was important to prepare our kids for all sorts of jobs that we don't even know about yet. Two things you dumb bitch: firstly, if you don't know what they are, how can you prepare for them. And secondly, technology is making the small things in life matter more, not less. Remember the Hubble Telescope, that phenomenally expensive astronomical instrument rendered myopic by the distinction between metric and imperial measurements? How well do you think that would have worked if the engineers had only worried about getting the measurements "approximately right". The rocket wouldn't have got off the fucking ground. Probably wouldn't have even got it to light.

A whole generation is going to have their learning corrupted by shit like this, and by the insistence that we move at the pace of the slowest, most witless kid in the class. And by breaking for cakes and a class party every other day.

The problem is that you can't argue with these educationalists and their fuck-brained theories, because they don't have to justify them to you and me. They only have to persuade other educationalists, and as anyone who ever peeled back the lid on school politics will testify, no other facet of human life seems to attract so many fuckwits.

So let's take a walk down Reality Lane: high-tech industry is crying out for more H1B visas so they can bring in highly educated employees from, say, India. This is because our colleges are turning out people trained and qualified, at ever-increasing expense, for precisely fuck-all. Media Studies, Politics and History, American Literature - nothing that requires you to be right, only to show up and pay tuition.

So next time you're handing out the cakes at Field Day, listen very carefully. That's the sound of the future passing by. Better run faster to catch up...



Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Pussies

On the subject of immigration, why is it that US politicians are such fucking pussies? The country has suffered an invasion of foreigners that pay no taxes, consume medical, education and housing benefits for themselves and their sprawling families, can't be bothered to learn English, send money out of the country to be spent in someone else's economy and then have the audacity to march and complain that they should be made citizens just because they sneaked over the border. Already we have to pay to educate all their fucking kids. So now we should give them all citizenship, pensions, medicare coverage, welfare and all that crap?

Bear in mind that I'm an immigrant (only I came in the front door, had to go through background checks, a long legal process, TB and HIV checks, and now pay taxes just like anyone else). I happen to believe that immigration is a good thing. The thing is, there are dozens of countries out their with millions of inhabitants who would like to come here and start a new life. Many of them are interesting, well educated, highly skilled, law-abiding people who would bring a diverse mix of new cultural insights to America. So why the fuck do we have to make all our immigrants Mexican? That's the bullshit that's propagated by the so-called "immigration lobby" that's really just a front for hispanics - they want us to believe the debate is about immigration but it's not. The debate is about the rule of law, and the right (and obligation) of any government to secure its borders and decide on some basis of merit who should be allowed to move here and become American.

Why should the major selection criteria for our next generation of immigrants be: 1) Must have disregard for rule of law and proven willingness to break it; 2) Must have no intention of assimilating or speaking English but instead aim to set up an extension of their own country on American soil; 3) Must have no demonstrated educational or vocational skills, but be able to work in low level manual jobs; 4) Must be Mexican. Is this the profile of people this country needs to attract?

The reality is that most Americans (outside of the hysterical hispanic lobby, which is more interested in smoothing the path for more hispanics and strengthening their influence) want secure borders and strict criteria for allowing people in. They aren't "anti-immigration" for the most part - they just want the right immigrants, people like the Irish, Italian, Bosnian, Indian, Russian, Brazilian and Polish who became American, celebrate the 4th of July, fly the Stars and Stripes and watch the Superbowl in February. Sadly, they often daren't even express their opinion in case someone labels them a racist.

Politicians know this and yet they refuse (in many cases) to act on it. Why? Lust for power and no balls. They are more interested in getting votes and holding onto power for another four years. The despicable slimeball in San Francisco who declared his city a "sanctuary" for illegal immigrants and refused to help enforce the law, would in any decent country be dragged off by the government and hanged as a traitor. Everyone knows that a government that wanted to do something about illegal immigrants would immediately and aggressively go after the companies that hire them, fine the shit out of the employers and repatriate all those they found. They would resource the effort and make it a priority. They won't do this because it might make them unpopular, and here's the point - there are already enough immigrants here that see themselves not as American but as Mexican, that politicians pander to them for fear of losing their vote. This is why they are pussies.

So remember - immigration is a great thing, but for fuck's sake let's enforce the law and do it right. Look at your congressman. Do you see whiskers? Saucer of milk? Sounds like a pussy to me.


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Sven's Party

What do you get as a last minute gift for a really good friend's birthday when you're a penniless student? Something he'll really enjoy. A fire extinguisher! Sven was a mate from school days but he was at a polytechnic in Wales while I was at university in Coventry, so when he invited me to his birthday party one March I didn't hold out much hope for getting there. By an amazing coincidence one of my university mates, Graham, was driving down to Wales that weekend, to a place not very far from Sven's town (and equally unpronouncable) to visit his girlfriend, fish-face. (We called her that because she had eyes that appeared to be on the sides of her face; not a pretty girl.)

So I took another mate, Darren, and we drove down in Graham's silver Vauxhall Viva. Only one problem: the heater didn't work, so we froze our arses off for about four or five hours on the way down. Graham dropped us off on a Friday night in Pontypridd, outside a semi-derelict end of terrace house that Sven allegedly shared with normal human beings. The first night was just a dress-rehearsal for the debauched party on Saturday but we did some damage with Brains SA and Red Dragon and slept on the floor. The following morning I scoped out the bathroom - no bog roll. There were apparently two girls living in the house but they had abandoned it this weekend, and there were no signs of feminine influence. There was, however, a copy of the Sun newspaper that made serviceable toilet paper, except for the fact that it turned your arse black. Darren, though, could not bring himself to use it and consequently remained "blocked".

That night at least a hundred odd people, mostly students, descended on the house. We presented Sven with his fire extinguisher, a powder model which we had liberated from a university residence hall, and he was delighted. We all drank to excess and Sven discharged his gift, partly from the balcony at the back of the house (which had, in fact, been condemned, and was at risk of collapsing into the sewer-like river below) but mostly inside the house. Almost everyone had a good time, even the supposedly lesbian girl that I kissed, thus winning a bet. The one exception was a fat bloke who seemed to have some mental problems, resulting in him punching out two large windows. We followed his blood trail the following morning down to the railway station where we later heard that the ambulance had picked him up. Dickhead.

So the next morning we woke up on a carpet that was beyond filthy when we started but which had, through the addition of beer, cigarette ash and fire extinguisher powder, now attained a measure of disgustingness seldom seen outside Mexico City slums and student accommodation. Last night's fish and chips, plus beer, plus everything else, was making its presence known but my arse wasn't ready for the Sun again. I theorised that no girl would live in that house without soft toilet paper and, on forcing the locked door to a room, I was rewarded with a blue roll, almost full. Sometimes it's the simple things in life... Darren was now so backed up that he would have needed dynamite to shift it, and he remained bug-eyed for the rest of the weekend.

Eventually Graham turned up in the Viva and liberated us from the temple of filth. His weekend didn't seem to have gone as well as ours, but I'm afraid we weren't too sympathetic. If you date a girl who looks like a fish, don't expect your mates to listen to you carp about it.


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Age of Consent

A couple of things happened this week that got me thinking about the age at which people are considered old enough to drink and screw. First, Mrs. Bison was carded at the supermarket buying beer. Now you don't have the benefit of seeing said spouse while I write this but let's just say that, attractive as she may be, no-one without a serious eye defect should wonder if she's underage; this begs the question, "how fucking paranoid have we got that we're questioning people of that age buying beer?"

Secondly, there was a story on the radio tonight that I just about missed, concerning a seventeen year-old boy who had been fucking his attractive, twenty-seven year-old female teacher. The general consensus of the radio program staff was that this was every boy's dream, a sentiment with which I am bound to agree. There have been a few of these "underage boy shags older woman" cases recently, mostly, it seems, involving teachers, and the usual outcome is something approaching a slap on the wrist for the teacher (and high-fives all round for the kid). Every time it happens, though, I ask myself (or anyone else stupid enough to listen to me) what would have happened if the genders had been reversed?

Let's be honest here: if the teacher had been a twenty-seven year-old bloke shagging a seventeen year-old girl there would have been mass outcry, aggressive prosecution, sex offender status and, doubtless, confinement in a state prison for a period of years. This would have likely included forcible sodomy, given the prison status of nonces. So what the fuck happened to sexual equality then? Boys who get it with an older woman are considered lucky - the woman is merely accelerating their learning - whereas girls are victims who coudln't possibly make an informed choice, and the bloke is by definition a sex predator. Complete bollocks, if you ask me.

Remember that the age of consent in the UK is sixteen (or it was when I left - mind you I could own a gun when I left, and look what happened to that). In Sweden it's fifteen. Why is the US so hung up on this issue? Is it some legacy from the country's puritan past, or the influence of those arse-wipers that constitute the "moral majority" (when they're not too busy re-writing science books to say that we were all hand-made by their particular creator six thousand years ago, and forget all that stuff about fossils).

And what about alcohol? I cannot seriously believe that any government could consider a kid old enough to make an informed decision to sign up for the military and die for his country but not old enough to buy a beer. I know thousands of people have pointed this out already, but it's still ridiculous! It wouldn't be so bad if the result was less drunkenness among kids but it isn't. Kids always drink before they're legally old enough, and if the drinking age is eighteen this means they do it at home where parents can make sure they don't kill themselves, and where there are at least some restrictions. It's no good waiting until they're at college, with a credit card, peer pressure and no oversight. I had a mate whose mum wouldn't let him drink until he was eighteen and he promptly went of to college and pissed away all his money because he'd never learned to handle it. So we have no legal beer for kids but hundreds of the little fuckers dying in drink-related auto wrecks...

Anyway, anyone who thinks that boys shagging their teachers is a victimless crime should remember the kid who knocked up Mary Kay Letourneau, who was (and is) twenty-two years older than him. I'm not sure half the blokes that father kids have the maturity to be allowed to make the choice, but some dumb kid certainly doesn't, especially with a slag who'll be fifty when he's still twenty-eight!

When I was six I fancied my teacher, Miss Carter, but it never came to anything. It would never have worked out - she'd be using a walker soon. Just goes to show - kids are all stupid. You'd be safer giving them beer - at least you can sober them up afterwards.



Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Porcelain God

It's Sunday so I was in the gym this morning, working on legs. On the weekend you tend to see the same faces, and the gym isn't very busy. It was a good workout, spoiled a bit by the completely and utterly shite music they were playing. This is a suburban, predominantly white gym - you can play old rock, modern rock or anonymous techno music and they'll all be good to work out to; what you can't play is lightweight ghetto/soul crap (I don't even know how to describe it). It pisses off the clientele, but it's a waste of time talking to the staff - they typically have the IQ, combined, of a hamster. And not an intelligent hamster, either - one of the dense ones that can't quite work out how to make its wheel go round.

Anyway, my buddy and I were about done when we noticed Pam had arrived. She's a forty-ish suburban mum with a good sense of humor who works out hard, but this was a little late for her to be showing up. Turns out she'd been up all night praying to the Porcelain God as result of an ill-advised wine consumption regime the previous evening. As many of us do, she'd sworn "never again" between technicolor yawns, and in the cold light of day now had to figure out what "never again" meant. No alcohol ever? No wine ever? No excessive consumption ever? Of course we've all made that promise at some point. (If you've never had too much to drink you don't have enough life experience to be reading this.) Most of us have promised it more than once, which goes to show what a meaningless vow it is, although at that point when you've got the helicopters, sweating all over, saliva flooding your mouth, and horrific nausea, the point where you now know it's coming, you'll be ready to promise a limb just for it to be over.

The good news is that we don't get much smarter with age. Pam is, I think, about as upright a citizen as you'll find, and if she can spend an evening talking to God on the white telephone then there's really no hope for any of us. She showed up to the gym though, which is always my cardinal rule for people at work - I don't care how fucked-up you get at night, you'd better answer the bell in the morning. And that means showing up ready to go, not shambling in, green visaged and squinting, no use to man nor beast.

Of course puking followed by gym is fine; gym followed by puking can be dodgy. I once worked on my abs, went home and promptly succumbed to one of those 24 hour stomach flu things. When I finally heaved, my stomach muscles cramped up as a result of the exercise and I was in agony and unable to breath in again. I wondered for a few seconds if this was going to be how I died - of course it wasn't, but it added a new dimension to an activity that was, I had thought, already about as un-fun as it could get.

Anyway, I'm going over to a neighbour's place tonight to sit out on the deck with a beer, and I'm taking Boddingtons. It's not beyond the bounds of possibility, as good as that beer tastes on a hot day, that I'll be making a promise of my own later tonight. I think I'm smarter than that, but the evidence of history is probably against me. Just ask Pam...


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Chemistry Lab

There's nothing like leaving winter behind to make you appreciate the long daylight hours of summer. You get up and go to work - it's light. You come home at the end of the day - it's still light. Excellent! Even if you go in early and work late you still get loads of extra daylight. Years ago at university I used to take chemistry courses and we had two days a week of labs; this meant you worked all day in the lab, emerging about 5pm, knackered. During the winter it was dark when you went in and dark when you came out again. For all you knew there hadn't been any fucking daylight.

The only way to get out was to take a lunch break while some reaction or other was bubbling away on your bench. All the experiments were planned in advance and, in theory, we should all have been studying beforehand and planning our work so we could get started as soon as we walked in the door. In reality I'd walk into the lab, pull out my yellow book and take my first look at whatever experimental procedure we had to follow, hoping that somewhere there would be a break that could coincide with lunch. In those days, as now, food was priority number one.

I remember one reaction that involved leaving some purple solution boiling for about two hours with a reflux condenser on top. Nice! Time to get over to the athletic club for pie and chips. University food was essentially an equation of quantity divided by cost, and the athletic club always gave you lots of chips. When I returned, two hours later, I looked at the next step in the process. The solution was now supposed to be some other color. Everyone else's was some other color; mine was still purple. Oh well - maybe they all got it wrong...what's the next step...turn off the heat and remove the zinc catalyst. Oh fuck! I hadn't added the catalyst. The whole two hours had gone by for nothing.

We had ways of dealing with these occasions. Results meant running infra-red and NMR spectra of the compounds we (supposedly) had made, and handing in a small sample, so we could prove we made the right chemical. Spectra were easy - I could get some material from a buddy who had been eating pie and chips with me at the athletic club. And samples could be obtained the same way. If no-one had enough to spare, I had known people to hand in washing powder or chalk - one white substance looks pretty much like any other, so long as the consistency is checked with your mates' samples.

Labs were a pain in the arse, the boredom alleviated only by inadvertently inhaling all the solvents we used that are now banned. We worked with pyrrhidine on the open bench - it smelled quite pleasant but one of the post-graduate demonstrators told us to put it in a fume cupboard as it would make us sterile. "So why didn't the professor tell us to do that?" "Him? He's as queer as a coot - it doesn't matter to him, does it?"

Only one of us had the process sorted out. PK would come in, fully prepared, bang out his work and be gone by mid-afternoon. I'd be up to my armpits in flasks and liquids while he walked past into the daylight. I never knew how he did it, but he was a good bloke. Always handy with some samples when you needed them!


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Clean Car

The trouble with sunshine is that it really makes me realize how dirty the inside of my car is. It's only dust, but I know I ought to clean it a bit. My old mate Rob used to be fanatical about the inside of his cars - he bought little "hot hatchback" cars when they were popular in England, back in about 1990. Peugeot 205 1.9 GTI, that sort of thing. When he got a new one it would be spotless and no-one was allowed to sully the interior with unsuitable cargo. I remember wanting to go and get a takeaway curry one night and he wouldn't allow it in his car because the smell might linger.

Anyway, I was living in a small town about that time and Rob brought a couple of mates over in his new car. Fergie was an old school friend with a big nose who let us watch pornographic videos round his house at lunchtime when we were kids. (He eventually had to "lose" his dad's video rental card in case he ever found out that it listed wall-to-wall softcore porn). The other one (let's call him KC) was a mental chinese kid who liked a drink, but had no tolerance for it. He'd usually turn bright red and throw up. I remember him on all fours on a set of steps alternately puking and complaining that "it's coming out my nose!"

So we had a few beers down the pub (except for Rob) and started adding vodkas. Fergie was out of practice and it soon started to show. We exacerbated the situation by having a foot race back up the high street, for a laugh. By the time we reached my flat he was hanging over a low wall, decorating the car park with his intestinal juices. Rob started to realize that he was going to have to take the drunken fuck home in his new car, and Fergie wasn't going to be done hurling for a while. KC, meanwhile, was rolling a large spliff and seemed to be laboring under the misapprehension that I was going to let him smoke it in my living room.

Fortunately I had a plastic sheet left over from a car service that we could drape over the passenger seat of Rob's new GTI. We installed Fergie, on strict instructions to vomit through the open window if necessary, and retrieved KC, who was standing under a streetlamp on the main road with an unfeasibly large joint in his mouth (think Camberwell Carrot).

A good time was had by almost all, but it just goes to show: greater love hath no man than that he would take his chunk-blowingly drunk mate home in his new GTI. Good one Rob!


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Arachno-Whatever

Someone at work recently got bitten by a brown recluse spider. This isn't a fun event, not something you look forward to. I don't think the bite itself caused any real harm but the antibiotics they gave her fucked her up for a bit. I've seen pictures of the brown recluse, with its little violin pattern, but I bet I couldn't spot a real one if you paid me. People have good reaon to fear the brown recluse (although not as much as, say, the funnel web spider in Australia, which might be lurking under your toilet seat, ready to bite you in the balls). Most people, however, have some fear of regular, harmless spiders as well.

I don't mean that they scream and piss their pants in fear when they see one, I just don't think most people would readily pick up a spider and let it crawl on them. To be more specific, I'm talking about medium sized house and garden spiders here; the really small ones are no problem for most non-pants-pissers, and the great big tarantulas aren't usually an issue in suburban St.Louis. Medium sized spiders tend to require more indirect handling - cup and card for example - than a direct "pick it up by the leg" approach.

Of course the sheer number of bugs here mean that we get the house sprayed periodically which definitely keeps the spider numbers down. In England, by contrast, bugs don't come into the house much because a) there aren't as many, and b) houses are proper brick things and not the overgrown plywood sheds that pass for construction in the Midwest. Many's the evening I've sat watching TV there when a giant brown house spider has scurried across the carpet, its big eyes on stalks. (For some reason bricks don't keep those bastards out.)

So why are people reluctant to pick up spiders? It's not because of the danger - you know that large spider in the web by the back door can't hurt you. Of course this doesn't stop you flailing around spastically when you accidentally walk through the web - it's on you somewhere and you've got to get it off! And it's not a general aversion to creepy-crawlies; some poeple happily pick up woodlice (roly-polys) or other bugs. Perhaps it's the extra legs, some primordial memory that instructs us not to trust anything with that combination of appendages.

I happily pick up small spiders, and will let huge insects and spiders walk on me (giant millipedes are great fun - six inches long!) but I won't pick up those large black, slightly hairy, spindly bastards that you find in the corner of an old outhouse. I remeber going fishing with a mate called Tom - we left really early in the morning and by the time we got to the lake I needed a crap. The single metal portapotty was old and ricketty but OK - until I was comfortably seated. Then Tom banged hard on the wall for a laugh, dislodging about a dozen arachnids that had been resting above my head. Dick.

I've brought up my daughter to like bugs, which means that far from fearing them she's always building them little habitats and bringing them in the house. She never learned the spider size distinction, though. When she was smaller she would regard anything with legs as fair game, pick it up and bring it to me as a special gift. It didn't bother me though - if she had a huge spider I would just direct her to offer it to Mrs. Bison. "You know Mum would like your new friend..."


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Grammar School

When I turned eleven I transferred to the local Grammar School. This was where the brighter kids went, the ancient buildings and idiosyncratic teachers supposedly compensated by superior academic standards. I suppose it wasn't a bad school, although some of the older teachers exuded this air of dust and malevolence that seemed to come direct from the pre-war era. The German teacher, Beaky Edwards, was a case in point and the principal reason I took Latin instead.

For metalwork, woodwork and art, however, we had to travel by bus to a separate school building some miles away, called Grace Hill, where the facilities for these subjects existed. If the main school was a bit old fashioned this one was positively antediluvian. It was like the school that time forgot - they had teachers that had been overlooked for retirement (or committal to a secure institution) and who roamed the place like it was their lair. The art teacher, in particular, was a white-haired freak show, rather like the Quaker Oats guy would look after a smoking meth and feasting on a corpse. They used to make us line up in silence and walk up the stairs without stepping on the white bits at the side. When I transferred to a school in Bristol just after the riots I used to look back and wonder just what planet these fuckers lived on. Since I had no talent in any of these subjects whatsoever there was little to look forward to on Grace Hill day.

Nowadays, however, the whole thing seems so innocent. We all wore uniforms and behaved reasonably well (occasional fights excepted) and we learned stuff. No-one worried about our self-esteem. So here's a few things I'd like to bring back from my grammar school days:

Staff vs Boys Rugby
Nothing compares to the sight of fifteen thin teenage boys getting ground into the mud by two hundred and fifty pound geography teachers for sheer entertainment value. It's not as if we even played rugby the rest of the year; I think it was just a perk for the teachers to kick shit out of some kids for a laugh.

School Ties
Supposed to make us look smart, they just emphasised our scruffiness as we wore them with all different combinations of length, knot, dirt, etc. They also came in handy for strangling people during a fight.

The Cane
Bad behavior without consequences doesn't take much in the way of balls. Fucking about with the cane as a potential punishment takes some spine though. Reintroduce this for the added frisson of excitement when you're wondering if you're going to get caught.

Chalk
Real learning comes from a blackboard and chalk. If nothing else you can watch the dust swirl around on a summer's day. When you have those blackboards that roll over you can draw something obscene on the board during break and hide it so the teacher turns it over in class.

Prefects
Psychopaths with superiority complexes, these older kids would teach you that life isn't fair but that if you waited long enough you too could become a psychopath.

Still, this was a grammar school, not a private school, so at least we all went home at the end of the day unscathed. I hear the lessons learned at English private school were more "life-changing" in nature. It must be hard to remember how to decline a verb in Latin with someone putting vaseline in your back passage...



Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Reproduce This

It's that time in the office - multiple female members of staff are having babies and the men in the office are periodically called upon to act like they give a shit about it. Occasionally a man will go home and the wife will ask "did so-and-so have her baby yet?" If the answer is yes, you'll be asked what sex it is, how big, what they called it, etc. etc. News flash - we don't know because we don't fucking care.

Babies are arse-numbingly dull. Even your own. Other people's are worse. Most people who've had them already have the good sense to treat any further additions as minor domestic activity, hardly worthy of conversation, but first-time parents are frequently the most ball-achingly depressing, self-centered, single-focus, dull as fuck people you will have the misfortune to encounter.

Here's a few things to bear in mind if you're about to have a baby, just to minimize the desire of people around you to kick you down the stairs. Guys - if you ever utter the words "we're pregnant" you are a worthless, dickless excuse for a man and a disgrace to the species. Don't do it. Not ever. You can bet that any man who said this has been spending his weekends at Babies R Us or some such temple to baby-centric wank, with his balls in a jar in his wife's quilted diaper bag. Fuck me! I shouldn't have to spell that one out for you.

Make sure you married a woman with a brain. One that can tell the difference between the necessary accessories that you can't easily avoid having to buy (car seat, crib, diapers) and the gigantic parade of pastel-colored plastic shit that some people feel compelled to waste their money on. No brain? Too late now - you're fucked. Bit of a shame you conspired to perpetuate her DNA really.

Baby showers are for wankers. They're just another excuse for easily-led people to buy unnecessary crap for people who don't need it, all wrapped up with Hallmark cards and stupid wrapping paper. If you want to make someone happy, buy them whisky for when the baby comes. Trust me - they'll need a drink.

Babies are ugly unappealing things. Pretty much the only exception is your own, and that's only because nature fixes it for you to think it looks wonderful, just so you'll bother to take care of it. Don't bring in fifty pictures of your baby to show people, and don't send them as e-mail attachments to people in the office. They don't care, and they're typically too polite to say anything (such as "fucking hell - did your wife get screwed by a pig?")

It's your baby - enjoy it, and leave the rest of us out of it. Oh, and one more piece of advice for the first time father: when you're in the delivery room, don't look in the bucket.



Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

One Handed Reading

The internet has brought many wonderful benefits to mankind. You can order books and music from a vast catalogue withouut leaving your home. You can comparison shop cars and buy one without ever having to go to the dealership. And I've heard that you can, should you so choose, browse in an almost limitless selection of pornography. In the old days, as a teenager you only had magazines, and the economics of printing, promotion and distribution meant that the ones in your local store tended to be fairly mainstream in content. Sure, they ranged from the sophisticated and tasteful Penthouse to the "can you see my ovaries?" Hustler, with occasional forays into the exotic with "Asian Babes", but it was all variations on a theme of naked. Nowadays you can have fat chicks, young chicks, MILFS, anal, big boobs, shaven, hairy, spanking, and a whole lot more disturbing stuff that makes you wonder about the kind of people you share the planet with.

I suppose that stuff was always out there somewhere but it is all suddenly a mouse click away. That's good news for anyone with a computer who's looking to spend an evening in the company of Mrs. Palm and her five lovely daughters, but I can't help thinking we've lost a rite of passage for boys: getting hold of your first spank mag.

I still remember the first time I found a discarded magazine - I was with a friend and it was lying there on a hillside. Mayfair, with all the pictures gone. You might think that would take away all the fun, but trust me, I got plenty of learning from the stories and letters. I had no idea some of that stuff went on! I had to wait a little longer for the real deal - a girl at school brought in several copies of her dad's magazines that she'd found on the wardrobe. These were not your garden variety store-bought porn but something more exotic in small-format by mail order. I was struck by the complexity of the opposing team's equipment - did it come with a manual?

Buying porn, however, was a different matter. All British newsagent's shops had porn on the top shelf so availability wasn't the issue. Motive wasn't a problem either - the only males who don't like looking at naked women are either blind or gay. But walking into a high street shop in the middle of the day, pulling down a copy of "Big Jugs" and walking to the counter is an act of considerable bravery for an average teenage boy. This is the rite of passage that is denied boys of today: the moment when desire for naked pictures overcomes fear and shame, and coins are exchanged in public for glossily printed one-handed reading material.

Now I know all of you reading this have masturbated (don't worry, your secret's safe with me) but it's not something you disclose to anyone. (Unless you play the biscuit game, in which case you have much, much bigger problems.) So the whole porn industry is something that we pretend doesn't exist, and certainly don't admit to having participated in. ("Porn? No, I never bought it, but I know people who did. I was having full sexual intercourse from the age of ten so I never needed it. Etc. Etc.") Nevertheless, spare a thought for a whole generation of middle class boys growing up not knowing the thrill of acquiring that first magazine.

Now they just have to know how to keep the viruses off dad's computer. And always remember to delete history; he's going to look at you a bit different over the breakfast table once he discovers your fetish for 300lb latina women with double ended dildos...


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Hotel Somewhere

Having just got back from Belgium, and fresh from a trip to Detroit, it’s clear that there are differences between the hotel experience here and over there. With all the time zone changes and late nights, sometimes it’s not easy to remember where you are, so here’s the top ten ways to know you’re not in the States anymore:

1. You can understand the staff. Hotel staff in Belgium speak perfect English, which makes a change after some of the guttural mumbling from staff in your average hotel here. Plus, as an added bonus, hearing English spoken by an attractive young Belgian woman with that accent opens up a whole world of spontaneous wanton-hotel-sex fantasies. “Oh! Meester Bison! It is so beeg!” etc.etc.
   
2. Eggs and bacon looks like shit. The cooked breakfast on the buffet is a sad concession to Americans and best avoided – they don’t know how to do it and their heart isn’t in it, so you get half-cooked little sausages like discarded pizzles from a sub-standard pet crematorium. There’s a sea of cold meats and cheeses though, so dig into that.
   
3. The room service menu is full of long words but short on burgers. Sometimes you just want a quick meal and fiddly little food covered in creamy sauces, with little vegetables alongside, doesn’t hit the spot. And don’t get me started about the two hour trip to the hotel restaurant!
   
4. No air conditioning. Summer comes over there about once every seven years but when it does you’ll be laid out on your bed like a big “freedom fry” wondering why A/C is an optional extra in a hotel room in the twenty-first century.
   
5. No fitness facilities. I know all hotel gyms have a tendency to be shit but asking an average hotel what facilities they have elicits a look from the staff that makes you wonder if they misunderstood and thought you asked for in-room hand relief. Is there a gym nearby? “Non monsieur, you must be – ‘ow you say – fucking joking.” The bastards are all so thin from eating tiny meals that they obviously don’t feel the need…
   
6. Strange TV. I once stayed in Leiden, in the Netherlands, and on arriving in my room I idly flicked through the TV channels. Suddenly I was confronted with a full-color, hard-core, anal penetration scene, complete with loud moaning. This was the middle of the afternoon! Well, Toto, I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore...
   
7. Go down for breakfast and all the women are dressed funny. This is a surefire way to know you’re not in the States. All sorts of odd shit that is obviously fashionable over there but which to the untrained philistine like me gives the impression of an aged prostitute clothed at a garage sale in the dark by a blind man with a sense of humor.
   
8. Coffee with balls. No watery piss over there – the coffee will course through your veins and deliver you to consciousness in seconds. Just as well because when the alarm went off your body still thought it was midnight and you felt like someone stamped on your heart and pissed in your eye sockets.
   
9. Cote D’Or chocolate in the mini-bar. You want to settle down to your regular late-night mini-bar dinner of Snickers and Scotch but instead you find praline, dark chocolate and some other stuff, always Cote-D’Or. Some things stay the same though – the price is still fucking ridiculous, so you’ll feel right at home when you check out.
   
10. The moment of silence just after you check out when you mentally convert your bill to good old US dollars an realize that for what you just paid you might have expected a room, view, A/C, assisted shower, massage (with happy ending), box of chocolates and a slightly bigger thank-you when you paid up!
    

Happy travels...



Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Dog Days

I just watched a neighbour walking a boxer dog down the road and it reminded me of the one Mrs. Bison had when I started seeing her years ago. Actually it didn't remind a whole lot of her dog - this one was normal size and well-behaved; hers was steroidally huge and exuberant, undisciplined and inclined to cause terminal embarrassment in public.

We used to drive to her parents' place in the piece of shit car that I owned, and our arrival was clearly a great source of excitement for Ozzy. When pleased to see you he would jump up and slobber on you, raking your exposed flesh with his huge claws. He was a wondefully friendly dog, very strong but not especially bright. We used to take him out in the field after dinner and run him until he was tired enough for us to catch him. Often we'd have a stick for him to fetch; unfortunately he didn't know when the game ended, so if you threw the stick away he'd go after it, no matter where it landed. One time we threw it in the middle of a dense, prickly gorse bush so we could end the game and go home; he burrowed in and, a few minutes later, emerged with the stick (plus many bits of gorse). Another time it went over a barbed wire fence and he jumped that too, leaving brown fur from his testicles on the wire but mercifully escaping injury. Unfortunately the ground on the other side was two feet lower and he couldn't jump back, so we had to carry him over a gate.

He reserved his special talents for other people, however. We stopped once to pass cheery greetings with a fellow dog walker, only to notice out of the corner of our eyes that Ozzy had lifted his leg and was urinating copiously on this man's small dog. He did this once on a pushchair, which was slightly worse...

Ozzy was a virgin, inexperienced with lady dogs, but that didn't prevent him from putting his big red dog's cock to use on an unexpecting visitor. Christian was the teenage son of a family friend who was in town for the day. He loved wrestling with the dog, but was naive as to what Ozzy was getting out of the encounter. I still remember three of us watching in stunned silence as Ozzy mounted him while he was on hands and knees and humped him vigorously in the dining room while he laughed in unawareness. Mother-in-law eventually noticed and rushed in to shoo him off with a tea-towel. (Shoo him off means get him to dismount - it's not a perverse English means of bringing a dog to climax.)

The worst crime of which Ozzy was accused was one of which he was entirely innocent. One Christmas night we lay in bed listening to him snore loudly in his box in the kitchen. Eventually I had to go downstairs and wake him up to stop him snoring. By the time I got back into bed he'd started again. Deep, long, drawn-out grunts, impossible to ignore. The second time I went down I shook him, and he looked up at me with innocent eyes. Nevertheless he was snoring again within a couple of minutes. Mrs. Bison looked at me and pointed out that I was a useless bastard who couldn't even stop a dog snoring, and she would have to do it herself. She went downstairs and roughed up the dog, only to realize on coming back up that it was, in fact, her father who was snoring.

We apologized to the dog but he never held a grudge. The next day he ate paper hats from Christmas crackers. We took him to the beach and he ran around drinking salt water from rock pools, precipitating cascading diarrhea. Until you've seen a large boxer dog excreting colored paper hats you haven't lived. It was like one of those magicians pulling hankies from his sleeve, only better. I'll bet the neighbour's boxer never did that.



Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Good Grief

I just got back to St.Louis to find that I'd missed the big news: apparently a Cardinals pitcher killed himself driving drunk into a flatbed tow truck while talking on his cell phone. The fact that a sportsman drives drunk is not exactly news - we already had Leonard Little kill a woman while driving drunk here, and he got away with a slap on the wrist. I'm willing to bet, however, that all the coverage I missed talked about the sad loss and the impact on the team. I don't think any of the local news channels would have the balls to suggest that if you drive at twice the legal limit and don't pay attention to the road then you're a prick. You killed yourself? Well, tough shit.

You see this kind of thing pretty regularly with teenage driving deaths. A lot happen at night, mostly involving excess speed and often drunkenness as well. When they get reported on the local news the tone is always one of sadness as they state that grief counselors will be at whatever school they attended, to help other students deal with their loss. There was one just the other day - high school quarterback killed in single car accident, drink and speed involved; the school was holding a moment of silence for him. (Note to high school: moments of silence are appropriate for alumni killed in action, not moron kids who drink, drive and wreck).

Maybe I'm in the minority, but I can't help thinking that this is partly the reason we have all these deaths. Teenagers are stupid; I know I was and I'm pretty sure you were too. When someone drives drunk at night and kills themself the appropriate reaction might be to remind other students that this is what happens, and not to try that shit themselves. Instead we get grief counselors to divert their thoughts from any real lesson about consequences. Everyone leaves flowers at the roadside and no-one points out that dickheads like them kill innocent people every day, often without serious consequence to themselves.

And by the way, how big a loss is it for them really? Aren't we raising an entire generation of grief junkies, pansies who collapse at every sign of mortality? If you lose your mum or brother you experience real grief. Maybe if you lose a really close friend. But some kid you talked to occasionally? Thinking it's sad that somneone dies is not the same as being incapable of getting up in the morning and going to school! These are the same candy-arsed little twats whose self-esteem has been protected their whole lives. Better not tell them off for driving drunk - might damage their self esteem...

Anyway, back to our drunken sports stars: I don't subscribe to the idea that sportsmen have to be role models for the rest of society. I just want them to be locked up like any other fucker if they drive drunk. If you don't want to be held to a higher standard that's fine; just don't ask us to let you risk killing people with impunity just because you can hit a fucking ball over a wall.

This didn't turn out to be a funny post did it? Next time I'll go back to flatulence and testicles, promise...



Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Appliance of Ignorance

You know how it goes - the temperature rises to the point that you can't sleep at night, even with the fan on, so you give up and turn on the air conditioner. This is excitement time - will it work or not? This year I was not hopeful as our air conditioner is frankly an ancient piece of crap and probably wasn't improved by the frozen trees that fell on it during the winter. Sure enough, although air came out of the vents it wasn't cold air, which is kind of the point of air conditioning. I duly went out to inspect the beast with a flashlight. This is a necessary but utterly pointless part of the home maintenance ritual - I looked for obvious signs of trauma (wires hanging off, and the like) but since my knowledge of domestic heating and cooling can be summarized in three words (absolutely fuck all) I was not about to start dismembering the bastard. I did notice a lot of big spiders living in it and it occurred to me that they might have eaten some important part of its insides.

So it was time to call in the experts. This is always an adventure - you might as well wear a t-shirt with the words "I know nothing about {insert nature of problem} - please come into my house and attempt to fuck me in the arse financially" on it. I am a big believer in information - if you don't want the guy you call out to lubricate and attempt to penetrate you, it helps to know what the problem is ahead of time. This means ploughing through numerous internet sites looking for similar problems. Sometimes this works, but you don't get very far with a list of symptoms like "doesn't go cold" so you need to call out someone in whom you have some confidence.

I used to like recommendations from other people but after a while you realize that lots of other people are dickheads, and the person they called "cheap and quick" would better be described as "incompetent and stupid". The other approach is to hire someone with a big name and advertising budget, on the assumption that they have a reputation to protect; in reality they have lots of overheads to meet, which means they basically have to screw you to survive.

Cars are probably the worst area for getting screwed. I used to be able to lift the hood and work on my engine - all you had to do was buy the manual and a few tools. It helped that my first car was a worthless pile of shit, and therefore the downside of not getting it back together again was pretty small. Nowadays they just plug it into a computer and give you a big fat quote to replace some obscure device that you've never heard of. [The worst part with cars is that the things that go wrong are the result of features that no sane person would require. If you need sensors to back up your car you shouldn't even be driving. What happened to learning how to judge a space and park in it, smegma-brain?]

Anyway, the air conditioner is back on - the problem was trivial and fixed for nothing. However the guy who looked at it did confirm my initial diagnosis of "ancient piece of crap" and it will probably die in a year or so. Then I just have to decide "repair or replace?" When we asked for the quote for a new one, the salesman reached for the lubricant, so I'll be putting that off as long as I can...



Copyright 2007 Edward Bison