String Them Up!

Perhaps I shouldn't be attempting to write sensible prose, having just seen the footage of the burning Jeep sticking out of the front of a British airport, but I can't help thinking ahead and wishing that my (ex) government would grow some fucking balls and execute the shitbags they caught. Unfortunately this isn't going to happen: not only would politicians in the UK not have enough spine to change the law, they would no longer even be allowed the choice. That's because the UK is a member of the European Union, run by a band of left-wing bureaucrats, pussies and embezzlers.

Just look at the whiny crap written by EU politicians on the subject of the death penalty, when instituting their "Day Against the Death Penalty":

"The death penalty is a violation of the most fundamental of human rights, namely the right to life," said European Commission Vice President Franco Frattini. "Nothing justifies the death penalty, whether it is considered effective in combating crime or not."

Oh really? Call me a radical, but I believe the people in that airport had a right to life too, and the people outside the nightclubs in London, and the 14 year-old boy stabbed to death in the street last week for looking the wrong way at a black gang. I'd happily execute all the perpetrators. Liberals will witter on about how the justice system doesn't decrease crime, but that reminds me of the Dilbert cartoon where Dilbert argues that there's no evidence that longer sentences for career criminals reduces crime levels. Dogbert asks if that means other criminals commit more crimes while they're in prison, to keep the average up? You want to know what's the biggest contributor to crime? It's not locking violent criminals up - it's letting them out again.

Two things make the death penalty clearly right: firstly it is 100% guaranteed to prevent reoffending, so that should help address the concern about putting people in prison not being effective at "rehabilitating" them. Secondly, it is what these people deserve. Justice isn't supposed to be about addressing the needs of the perpetrator; it's about making the punishment fit the crime, preventing them doing it again and sending a fucking strong deterrent signal to other people that maybe it isn't a good idea to kill someone. Plus, as an added bonus, we don't have to pay ridiculous taxes to feed, clothe and provide medical care for these scum so that they can sodomize each other in comfort.

One thing I never understood is why the penalty for murder can be death but the penalty for attempted murder is not. Once you try and kill someone, why should you get a lesser sentence just because you're crap at it? The people who set the nail bombs in London wanted to kill and maim hundreds of people. They tried their very best to make it happen. The fact that they failed does not make them one single bit less guilty, and they should be punished for what they tried to do. People who don't have the guts to face scum like this and deal with them are the reason that crime levels are so high.

I once had a statistics professor who explained why it was a perfectly rational decision for criminals to commit crime. If you multiply the chance of getting caught by the chance of getting charged by the chance of getting convicted by the chance of not getting freed on appeal by the pathetically short sentence you'll get, especially for a "first time" offender (meaning one who's probably been cautioned or let off twenty times already) then why not beat up the old man and steal his wallet? And if he dies? Well, it'll be pleaded down to involuntary manslaughter - you'll be out in a couple of years. Want to kill your husband? Make up some shit about spousal abuse and you'll go from cold-blooded killer to sobbing victim in the blink of an eye. It's almost a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card, provided you're white and middle class.

What Signor Frattini and his fellow EU cocksuckers fail to realize is that not implementing the death penalty costs lives too. A recent study comparing crime in death penalty and non-death penalty states even managed to calculate the number of lives saved by executing killers, in reoffences avoided and other offences deterred. This misguided whiny protection of the worst scum on earth isn't just costing us money - it's causing more people to have to die, just so they can pat themselves on the back about how "morally superior" they are. Wankers.

Once you decide to kill innocent people in cold blood then you just pissed away any "right to life" you may have had, alright? Fuck what the pansies in the European Union say, and fuck worrying about the "rights" of these miserable, evil scumbags. Bring back hanging. And don't dick around with twenty years of government-funded appeals. Pull the lever now while it's fresh in everyone's mind. If you can get over killing an animal to eat it you should not have a hard time killing a violent murderer and making our world a little bit safer, OK?

Here endeth the lesson. More humor next time.


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Man Shopping

After the last post I'm reluctant to continue on a toilet-paper related theme, in case you start to believe I have a fixation, but this was another event in this otherwise quiet week and, anyway, toilet stuff is inherently funny. The Bison household was running short of bog roll this week so Mrs. Bison asked me to pick some up on the way home from the gym. Her instructions were simple: it must be two-ply, and buy the extra long rolls, but not the mega-rolls because you need an extender to get them on the holder. The rest was up to me.

Color was easy - white. I also prefer to stay away from anything that involves cartoon bears crapping behind a tree with expressions of absurd delight on their faces. My other key decision criterion was price. I'm going to stick this stuff up my arse and flush it away, so what's the point in going "high-end"? I've already established, through bitter experience, that there's absolutely no correlation between price and the only meaningful measure of performance: whether your finger goes through or not. In fact the "softer and more absorbent" the product, the more chance you'll be conducting an involuntary self-prostate-exam at some point in the proceedings. Plus, I think it's a man-trait to try and get a good deal on stuff. We look at price per pound, price per sheet and price per pint whereas women tend to buy what they know and get the process done as quickly as possible.

Our local supermarket is very helpful in posting all the prices per square foot for toilet paper on the shelf price marker. Unfortunately it's in such small print that you have to walk up to each one in turn and squint at it to see what it says. So I started out by comparing the ususal suspects, but they were all ribbed, and I've not had much luck with ribbed bog roll in the "strength" department, so I started looking down the end of the aisle. There I found plain white bog roll at a good price per square foot, in long rolls, so I bought twelve rolls (no point coming back for a while if I can avoid it) and checked out.

When I got home the first question I received from my esteemed spouse was: "What did you buy?"
To which I responded "I bought bog roll - that's what you asked me to get, remember?"
"Didn't you get anything else?"
"No - if you wanted me to get something else, why didn't you ask me, then I would have got it!"
This is the fundamental difference between our shopping techniques, and one of the many reasons that we can never shop for food together: I go with a list, buy the list and leave; she goes with a vague idea of meals and buys what it occurs to her to buy when walking around. If it's not on my list the chances are slim to fucking none that I'm going to buy it. Her approach is good for actually getting us interesting food, but impossible to delegate to me.

Later on I received the terrible news: in my excitement to get good white, unribbed, inexpensive bog roll I'd unwittingly strayed from the two-ply product and bought single-ply, the "product of choice" of trailer-dwellers and cheapskates everywhere. No wonder it was a good price on a square-foot basis! Now if anyone comes to call I dread them using the bog and pegging us as cheap bastards based on our toilet paper choice. The good news though is that, cheap as it is, it's fabulous for strength. Fudge fingers are a thing of the past, and no cartoon bears anywhere to be seen!


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Germophobes

By amazing coincidence there were two programs on the radio this week that made reference to the issue of bacteria, and where you encounter them. The first talked about a recent study of where the most bacteria were to be found in daily life. Apparently researchers went around swabbing various public areas and testing for the amount of bacteria on the surfaces. What was top of the list? Public toilets? No. Fast food restaurants? No. Toilets in fast food restaurants? No (although it's hard to believe). In fact the top two sources of bacteria were childrens' play equipment and day care centers.

On the other program the presenters were discussing the inordinate lengths to which they go in order to avoid contact with germs in public restrooms. This included picking up paper towels on the way in and then using them to turn the taps on and off, as well as opening the door on the way out. Presumably these are the same people who decorate the toilet seat with elaborate arse origami prior to sitting down for a shit. What the fuck is wrong with these people? If you need to take a dump in a public restroom the best policy is to get in, get done and get out ASAP. By all means check the seat for piss before you sit down but don't neglect the more important check - that of ensuring the presence of toilet paper in the dispenser. You do not want to be shuffling to the next cubicle with your pants round your ankles, and it is under no circumstances acceptable to start conversing with any cubicle neighbours in a search for paper donations. In establishments with food available for purchase you may want to check under the seat for ketchup packets - this is a great prank unless you happen to be the one who sits down and bursts the sachets, spraying ketchup into your pants.

Once you start obsessing about bacteria you may as well walk around in latex gloves and a gas mask. Already it pisses me off if I get to the bog and find some wanker's left-over seat decoration. People must spend minutes wrapping the paper around and draping it precisely over the seat. Then they won't touch it to flush it away. Here's a little reminder - the last part of the operation involves you shoving your finger up your arse crack with nothing between it and your fudge-hole but a couple of sheets of economy bog roll. After that who cares about the germs on the door handle?

Which brings us back to the first study. Spot the common thread here - places where kids put their hands are, without doubt, the filthiest and most bacterially rich environments. This is either because they spend so much time handling their private parts without washing their hands, or because they are inherently filthy beings with no sense of cleanliness whatsoever. Either way, if you're the kind of person who is so whiny-arsed pussy that you won't sit on a toilet seat without "protection" then you'd better not be touching your kids without washing afterwards. In fact you should probably pick up paper towels first, so you can pat them on the head without contact.

At least men stand a chance - I am reliably informed that women's restrooms are by far worse than men's. This is, I believe, because it is standard operating procedure for women to "hover" over the seat, a manoeuver that would make more sense if their urinary equipment didn't function in much the same way as a lawn sprinkler. Even germophobe men will actually sit on the seat once they've covered it - women, it seems, are quite happy to shit from a great height and hope for the best.

The Chinese, typically, have solved all these problems. There's no worries about the seat because there's no seat. Or, indeed, toilet - just a hole in the floor. No worries about the door handle if there's no door. Relax about touching the taps when you wash your hands - there isn't any water, so don't bother. Hands aren't wet, so no need to touch the towel dispenser. Just be very careful if you intend to take an emergency dump. For the uninitiated it's dreadfully possible, with your pants round your ankles, to crap in your own pocket. Now that will take more than a couple of paper towels to fix...


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

The Big Four-Zero

I just turned forty. Revealing this fact means that anyone reading this who is less than thirty has now mentally filed me under "aged, boring tosser". (To which I am forced to reply "fuck you!") I would have thought that this particular transition would have been more traumatic. After all, once you pass forty you are, to all intents and purposes, dead, right? I think I realised this in advance, when I got to thirty eight, which is why that was such a depressing birthday. But so far I feel great. That is to say, I feel no worse than before.

Tomorrow I play my first 6-a-side soccer game as a forty year-old, but I couldn't play any worse than last week when I was a jetlagged thirty-something, so that will be OK. The real test will be whether I now attain any measurable degree of maturity. I remember when my dad was forty - he was grown-up, mature and sensible (and had been for about fifteen years, as far as I could tell). I can fake it, of course, for business reasons, but it's hardly my natural state. Or is it? I mean, I don't snort coke, drive a Ferrari, live in a converted loft, shag twenty year-old girls or have amusing tattoos on my penis. I live in a sensible house, have a good job, save money, drive safely and even occasionally play golf. Fuck me! I am a boring old fart!

Now I understand why people have mid-life crises. They wake up one day and realize that they are sensible. They made good choices, sacrificed short-term gratification for long term stability, married a good partner, raised nice kids and started worrying about how their lawn looked. They are dead inside and something suddenly makes them realize it.

I don't feel especially dead inside, but objectively speaking I'm pretty sensible. The trouble is I don't feel the urge to go out and have the typical mid-life crisis. Or at least not yet. That's not to say I don't want to shag twenty year-old girls, mind you. This is a perfectly natural state for any rational heterosexual male, of any age, and one that for some reason certain women find hard to understand. When you get married it's not like you get a switch turned off in your head (or dick) that stops you finding other girls attractive. Wanting to shag other women is a given. The only good options are a) choosing not to, b) not getting caught, or c) not getting married. (I'm sure there are other possibilities, involving wife-swaps, open relationships and orgies, but I think we already established that I'm a sensible forty year-old dull bastard, didn't we?)

I still might buy a second-hand Porsche but I'm not planning to get a motorbike (or "mobile organ donor unit" as my anaesthetist brother refers to them). My one resolution, made when I was six months younger, is to go to the local comedy club on open-mike night and try stand-up. This I fully expect will be so pants-shittingly humbling that I'll probably be more than happy to return to suburbia and tend to my sad fucking lawn, never to re-emerge.

I suppose the worst part about turning forty is that at some point I'll have to get a prostate exam. Being violated like a glove puppet by a portly physician in latex gloves while bent over the end of his table should be enough to make anyone want to turn their life around. I think I'll put that particular delight off for a bit - after all, I'm not that old, am I?


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Close Shave

I'm thinking it may be time to change my razor. Usually I'm not too fussy about doing this regularly but eventually it becomes less a tool to cut facial hair and more a means of pulling it out. Painfully. I always preferred wet shaving to those crappy electric shavers but you have to keep remembering to buy blades, and no matter how many you buy they can never be found when it's time to replace one. I think they go to the same place as all those pens I take from hotels, which I can never find when I need to write down a phone message.

So I buy disposable razors now - not the cheap one-blade ones that are basically only good for severing your own carotid artery, but own-label three-bladed ones with a lubricating strip on top and a rubber strip below that I believe is supposed to pull my skin taught. That is to say, I seem to recall that this was the lie propagated by the TV commercial when this particular innovation came out. Three blades and two additional special strips is already a bit much for a simple razor. I used to use a Schick two-bladed razor but this is now obviously considered Jurassic and when it got so worn that it would no longer hold a blade I couldn't find a new one. (Of course, suddenly I find hundreds of fucking replacement blades for the thing all over the house.)

No, even a three-bladed razor is now backward and a clear sign of arrested development. When Schick introduced the Quattro four-bladed razor it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that it was a pure marketing gimmick. After all, if the first two blades don't get the hair, what are the others going to do? Talk to it and persuade it to jump off your face? Then Gillette came out with the Fusion - five blades plus another one on the back. (Reminds me of the French armored car - has six gears: five are reverse, and one is forward, in case they get attacked from behind.) And now we have wet shave razors with batteries in them so they vibrate!!

This is all obviously complete and utter bollocks. No fucking way do any of these products make any meaningful difference to how well you can shave your face. What they do, however, is make it impossible now to buy a basic razor with two-bladed heads. You walk into Walgreens, CVS or wherever, and all they have is high-tech exotic multi-blade bastards. And here's the point - the replacement blades for these things cost the same as a year's supply of my old blades (that worked perfectly well, thank you very much). So I'm buggered if I'm buying a Gillette Fusion and locking myself in to buying their new blades at stupid prices for the rest of my life (or until they introduce the new, improved, seven-blade razor that will make you a cup of tea and wank you off).

In case you hadn't noticed, it's basically Schick and Gillette, and both of them want you to trade up to their expensive and unnecessary crap. There's no margin in selling you simple products that work - they have to make you believe in the myth of the five-bladed closer shave. Here's a newsflash - if you bought one of these things then you either got tired of fighting the system or you're a twat.

Of course for the ladies out there they have all sorts of excitingly contoured pink razors with funny multi-bladed heads, special grips so you can hold them in the shower and batteries for - well - making them vibrate, I suppose. And let me ask you, does your minge stay trimmed longer? Are your legs any less like wire wool after two days? Bollocks are they! It's all crap, marketed to people whose brains are so addled by junk TV that they don't know any better. The reality is that beauty products for women always change shape over the years until eventually they end up resembling a dildo, so it's only a matter of time until Gillette comes out with a battery-powered Venus razor with a six-inch ribbed handle and a bulbous end, so it doesn't slip out of your hand. When that day comes they'll really be laughing all the way to the bank...


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Bastard Animals

Suburban St.Louis isn't exactly the wilderness, so I'm constantly amazed by the sheer number of animal species trying to get into my house, eat my house, eat me and/or crap all over everything. Don't get me wrong - it's not like I'm in Australia and have to fight off three venomous snakes, two poisonous spiders and a marsupial before breakfast, so excuse me if I sound like a pussy to any antipodeans out there. It's just the sheer volume of the intrusions that's getting old.

While woodpeckers and termites eat your house, the deer will eat everything outside your house. Your garden is just an extended deer buffet. "Deer resistant" plants simply mean that the deer don't eat them first but save them for dessert. And to add insult to injury they run out in front of your car in the evening with their white arses flashing, just daring you to run them down and send your car to the shop for expensive repairs.

If you sit outside and try to enjoy your plants in the few days before they get eaten you'd better do it in the evening so that the St.Louis summer heat and humidity doesn't kill you. Unfortunately that's when the mosquitoes come out and feast on your blood. I have a bat that lives under the deck and passes the time converting mosquitoes into a neat pile of bat shit. Unfortunately it might also carry rabies, so it's kind of a death-sentence-in-waiting in my garden. Every so often you get a plague of some other plant-eating bastard pest. We had bagworms a few years ago which meant millions of caterpillars in silken bags hanging in the trees and eating all the leaves, before falling all over the deck and drive where they'd get walked into the house on your shoes. Nearly killed my trees - the only consolation was that if you stepped on them their entire insides would shoot out of their arse in a very satisfactory green spurt.

Bagworms won't eat your grass, however, so instead I have moles to take care of fucking up my lawn. I have hunted them with a pitchfork and speared one, pulling its twitching carcass from the earth. This can make you feel guilty for a bit, but then another one moves in and continues turning your lawn into dust, so the sympathy tends to run short quickly. Then when I'm cutting the crap lawn I have to worry about a cloud of yellowjackets rising up from a hole in the ground and proceeding to sting me all over. Running into the house while performing a spastic dance to swat away all the insects while clawing off clothes to expose the ones stinging you from the inside really does wonders for your man-image.

Squirrels eat all the bird food that you put out to bribe the birds not to eat your house. Then they shit on your deck, dig up your plant pots and try to burrow into your walls. I once had a flying squirrel, a noctural bastard that invades your attic, usually in families of eight or more. The advice from the experts was not to try and trap it, because I wouldn't be able to, but to call in an exterminator. I caught mine in a rat trap baited with peanut butter before it moved its family in, but it had already deposited enough shit in one corner to fertilize a golf course. It was, however, satisfying to carry its corpse to the trash can knowing that I would no longer be woken up at three in the morning by its scratching and running around.

Of course there are numerous bugs, mostly dead by the time I see them, but as the next periodic spraying by the pest controller gets closer there tend to be more live ones. Giant orange centipedes were the latest bathroom delight. We also had a couple of lizards - how the fuck do they get in the house? Obviously the bugs are a real draw, and I had half a mind to leave the lizards so they'd keep the bugs down but one more shriek from Mrs. Bison as a blue/green lizard crawled from the vent by her chair was enough to peruade me to evict them. She occasionally screams at other animals, but the best by far was a black and yellow salamander that crawled on her hand while she was planting daffodil bulbs. I thought she'd been stabbed!

Outside there are countless rabbits and chipmunks, as well as a raccoon that visits in the evening and climbs up to steal the bird food. These things are mostly harmless though. The coyote that came up into the garden a few weeks ago wasn't - it looked ready to carry off a small child. Bastard mangy thing with yellow eyes, much bigger than I'd thought.

My favorite animal though is the venomous copperhead that took up residence last year in a patch of compost in my yard. It has everything I look for in a pet - it looks good, needs no care and maintenance and it won't destroy my house. Just have to remember not to step on it...


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Phone Companies Are Shit

That you didn’t read this earlier in the week is attributable to the fact that my DSL service is provided by a company which is to customer service what dog excrement is to nutrition. In fact the service had crapped out the day before we called in the problem, but it’s sometimes hard to differentiate between the usual patchy and shite service and a complete failure, so we didn’t contact them until Sunday.

It goes without saying that when you call the customer service number the last thing you’re going to receive is customer service. In fact what you get is an automated response and an interminably long list of voice prompts, to which you have to repeatedly respond “Yes” or “No”. Sometimes the system misunderstands you and goes off at a complete tangent. "I think you requested a dead badger. If this is correct, please say yes." You didn't request a dead badger so you try saying no, then the voice responds "Sorry, I didn't understand your response. Do you want a dead badger?" So you end up shouting "Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck you! Fucking fucks! Fuck, shit, fuck, bollocks!" and putting the phone down.

You persevere and eventually get a person on the line. Guess where they’re from? That’s right, India. At this point you have to go through a hundred questions designed to rule out all the things that could be your fault. You want to short-cut this by saying “Look, fuckwit, the service worked Friday and didn’t work Saturday. I didn’t change anything so it must be you fuckers. Why don’t you stop wasting my time and figure out how you fucked up my service?” Unfortunately this isn’t in the call center script, so you have to go through the motions.

Once they’ve realized that there’s a fault on the line (no rocket science here – the phone line sounds like its connected through that dead badger) they put a message into some other useless dickweed who has to call you back. When they call, they inform you that no-one can come out today (it’s Sunday) so they make an appointment for tomorrow. At this point I irritated Mrs,. Bison, who had been dealing with them, by pointing out that we pay the bastards for seven days of service a week, so they could get their fat lazy arses out here today and fix it, thank you very much. (Of course they tell you they can’t come out today – it saves on overtime; they’ll only do it if you complain!) Unfortunately she’d already put the phone down. No problem, right? Just call them back. After all, the number shows up in the call log. But when you call it you get a “not available” message. Surprise, surprise – the wankers won’t let you call them, even though they’re a fucking phone company. If you want to get in touch with them again you have to plough back through all the voice prompts and the bloke in India. And the dead badger.

I thought I’d leave a blunt message via their website (on a different computer – no service, remember?) but behind the innocuously titled “Contact Us” is not a simple form to allow you to contact them. Oh no! You get another five hundred fucking boxes to fill in, with everything from your address and phone number to inside leg measurement and shoe size. I just wanted to let them know what useless tossers they are, but they don’t make it very easy to tell them, I suspect because they already know.

Phone companies are all shit. If they ever mess up the charges on your account (what am I talking about? It’s not “if” it’s “when”) you can spend a month trying to explain the problem, to someone that they obviously hired specifically because of their perfect combination of stupidity and laziness. Even if you can get them to understand the screw-up, and even if they say they’ll fix it, they won’t; when you look at your next bill you’ll either find no change, or that they fucked it up twice just to piss you off.

Mobile phone companies are especially shit. When you get a plan that comes with a phone and the phone doesn’t work, you’d think that you’d go back to the store and tell the spotty retard behind the counter “this phone doesn’t work” and he’d give you another. Fine so far, but then you see a charge on your next bill for the privilege of using the store to return their broken phone. Now you have to practically go to the CEO to get the charge removed. And again, they say they’ll remove it but then don’t. I suspect this is standard practice at phone companies – don’t actually issue the credit as 80% of people won’t check, so that way the phone company can keep the money.

I find it especially galling that my limited enjoyment of crap television is perpetually interrupted by commercials for mobile phone companies touting their amazing service and telling you how wonderful life would be with them. If they were forced to use truth in advertising the resulting pitch would look much more like:

Switch to us. We’ll treat you like meaningless shit because we don’t care. Our service will suck but there’s not much you can do about it. Once you’ve signed the contract we have you by the balls – don’t even think about complaining. Behind the smiley face commercials, we all hate you, so why don’t you just go fuck a dead badger?

I hope that one day you’ll be able to read this, which means I’ll finally have been able to post it…



Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Ambien Danger

I don't think of myself as a pharmaceutical industry "frequent flyer", but when I travel I like to have a couple of essentials with me. One of these is Excedrin, for bad headaches and sore throats. The other is Immodium, for sudden and uncontrolled anal activity. (Actually, in each case I buy the unbranded version, as only a moron would pay the extra for the brand-name). No sensible traveler would be without these; I once ran out of Immodium in Belgium and the useless staff at this allegedly upmarket hotel explained that "Non!" they did not have any, and "Non!" the local pharmacy didn't open for another two hours, by which time I would be on a train with my arse cheeks clenched. You'd think that in a country where they serve the kind of shite food that makes your arse turn inside out they would be constitutionally required to provide relief, but this is Europe, where the customer always wrong and service an unknown concept.

Other than that the only thing I use is Ambien. For those of you not familiar, it's a mild prescription sleeping tablet which will get you to sleep in about 30 minutes and supposedly assure you of about 6-8 hours. Actually it never gets me more than about 3 hours, but it will get me to sleep. One of the lesser-known side-effects of Ambien is that you can find yourself engaging in activities while asleep that you cannot remember afterwards. I am here to tell you that the danger is real. I don't mean that I drove a car while asleep (although this is supposedly possible); the situation was more frightening than that.

I only take the stuff occasionally as it's habit forming and you can quickly go from taking a tablet to get to sleep, to not being able to sleep unless you take a tablet. From there it's only about two steps to cooking meth and forging scripts for oxycontin, as far as I can tell. Having got back from China, however, I was about 12 hours out of synch, so I took a tablet last night. This morning I went off to work as usual. Fast forward through the day (it wasn't that interesting) and I'm back home; the spouse was now awake. She informed me that as I was falling asleep last night I did the following:

Informed her that I find some Asian girls VERY, VERY attractive.
Began singing "I Like Chinese" by Monty Python.
Suddenly fell asleep and started snoring.
Woke up and asked for a drink.
Refused to sit up to drink it.
Drank it and fell asleep again.

This may not sound like a particularly dangerous incident, but think about it. I'd been in China, in the karaoke bars, surrounded by young, attractive Chinese girls. What if I'd shagged one? The bedtime might have gone something like:

Took Ambien and went to bed.
Informed spouse that I find Chinese girls very attractive.
Especially the one I shagged after the karaoke.
Whose breasts were larger than I had expected.
And very firm.
Asked for a drink of water.
Got handed a glass of water with my dick in it.

Shouldn't there be a warning on the side of these things? Men and (presumably) women everywhere are popping this innocuous pill, thinking only of a good night's sleep, and risking a full-out disclosure of any recent indiscretions. What's worse, they won't even know what they said. A good improvisor can probably explain away 95% of all incriminating evidence but it's got to be hard to retract an unconscious confession, complete with details.

The good news is that my behavior is, of course, saint-like and so there was not much I could say to fuck myself. But I've been known to take this stuff on a plane so that I can grab a few hours sleep. If its effect is to make you speak the truth, what might I say? What have I already said (but no-one told me)? Given a certain propensity for thinking the worst about people around me, I suspect the following are possibilities:

To Flight Attendant:
Why are you all so fucking old?
How about not banging my knee with the trolley again you witless bitch?
Forget the lifejacket demo - if this thing goes down, we're all dead anyway.

To Neighboring Pasenger:
That's my armrest - fuck off.
Why didn't they make you buy two seats, you fat wanker?
If you snore I'm going to slap you, OK?

There are times when honesty isn't the best policy, and it's always better to have the choice. So if you travel a lot and are tempted to take Ambien you might want to consider a change. Or at least consider not shagging strangers on your business trip. If you wake up with your dick in a glass don't say I didn't warn you...


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Expensive Shit

Last week I had a meal in Shanghai with a company with whom we may do business. They were paying but we ordered the food, and the other company’s head guy wanted us to order the shark’s fin soup. This is not because shark’s fin soup tastes good – it doesn’t. It’s like thick hair in gravy. The point was that he wanted to show us respect by ordering something expensive, and this is a key point when doing business in China. It doesn’t matter whether the food tastes good or not – often in a formal business dinner the food is symbolic.

This is a revelation that suddenly makes sense of the cuisine over here. You ask yourself why anyone would choose to eat frog ovaries, duck tongues or dog penises, and why anyone would drink the gall bladder juice of a snake. The answer is that these foods are exotic and therefore expensive; everyone knows this, including your guest, so ordering them sends a signal that you value the guest and respect them. (Actually, I’m not sure dog penis is considered a compliment – you might want to check this before presenting your honored guest with a Labrador dick).

This may seem stupid – eating crap that doesn’t taste good just to show respect – but it’s nowhere near as stupid as what wealthy people do with art. The modern art world is often about buying stuff that looks crap just to show how wealthy you are. I was looking at some pictures in a hotel meeting room here that had been made by splattering paint over a large canvas. They were indistinguishable from anything done by Jackson Pollock, a five-year-old, or a man with a paint brush in the midst of an epileptic seizure. The only reason people pay a fortune for modern art shit is that it enables them to signal to other, similar wankers how sophisticated and wealthy they are. Take the signature off the picture and they wouldn’t be interested. Give them a perfect copy and they wouldn’t want it – it’s not about how it looks, only the ability to show off to other tossers.

Wine is the same way. I know of a blind tasting where the participants selected the cheapest wine as their favorite; however, when the truth was revealed, everyone went back to drinking the expensive stuff because it didn’t matter about the taste, it was just important to show that you were sophisticated enough to tell the “good” stuff from what the common person might like. I think this is what is known in the trade as “being a twat”.

This brings me to watches. I just got back from a visit to a Chinese market that specializes in fake branded merchandise. If I had a dollar for every time I was asked if I wanted to buy a watch I could have bough a real Rolex, and probably a real BMW in which to drive it to the hotel. Why would anyone buy a fake Rolex? The main purpose of having a Rolex seems to be to show that you are wealthy and classy; the only signal sent by a fake Rolex is that you are cheap and tacky. Besides, the fucking thing’s probably going to break in a month. You can buy an excellent watch for $50 that will look good, run perfectly and last for years. And you don’t have to bargain with a wrinkled man in a market to get it. Whether it’s food, art, wine or watches, what they buy is, for many people, more driven by the image they are trying to create than what will actually bring them pleasure.

Now that’s off my chest I’m going to dinner. I fully intend to eat the normal body parts of animals tonight; there’s no-one going that I have to impress. I’m having the twelve-year-old scotch though. I’m not having anyone think I’m the kind of low-rent meths-drinker who can’t tell the difference…


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Piss Massage

One of the things you notice in China is that there are a lot of people, and they all need to earn a living. One of the ways they do this is to find extra things to do for you that maybe you hadn’t expected, but which are somewhat useful (or at least pleasant). We played golf yesterday at a course in Suzhou and had a cart equipped with two caddies (both attractive females, both very knowledgable when it comes to guiding useless golf novices around their beautiful course). They did everything from polishing my balls to handing me drinks. You couldn’t do this back home – the cost would be prohibitive – but here it’s just part of life. Or at least it’s part of life if you have money. Out on the roads, newly minted Chinese millionaires are driven in their Mercedes S600’s around an assault course of bicycles, mopeds, pedestrians, trucks and part-finished roads. The traffic here is unbelievable: everything weaves in and out in an absurd ballet of near-destruction. Priority at any intersection goes to whoever has the most balls, and people on tiny motorcycles apparently have huge dangly ones because they ride like they’re immortal.

Of course they aren’t; we saw one squashed by a truck last night and this is apparently a regular occurrence. But, as I said, in China there are a lot of people, so you tend not to miss one or two, unless you happen to be relying on them for a meal tomorrow. I wouldn’t say that life is valued less here, but it’s certainly valued differently. It’s like someone kicked over a giant anthill and everyone’s running around building the new one. Not every ant’s going to have a good life but none of them are resting on their thorax, waiting for something to happen. There are millions of shit jobs here. We had frog ovaries on a papaya again last week (I can’t believe I got served this twice in a lifetime!!) and it occurred to me that some poor bastard has to get all the ovaries out of the frogs. I imagined the scene out the back of the restaurant where some sweaty Chinese guy was sitting surrounded by twitching frog carcasses, a large bullfrog in one hand and a spoon in the other. Of course, you could argue that it’s at least better than having to eat the fucking stuff.

Another place you see the ants at work is in karaoke bars, where the girls will sit with customers, drink with them and, in many cases, fuck them for money. These girls often don’t come from Shanghai – many are from poorer areas, mostly up North, and this is a great way to get a financial start in life, if you don’t mind getting shagged unimaginatively by drunken businessmen. We ended up in such a bar last night, but Kenny had brought real friends so no girls were required. Almost all the group was Chinese. Six bottles of scotch were dispatched, I sang Blink 182’s “All The Small Things” badly and one of our group punched out another guy in the corridor for some reason or another. At one point I went for a piss, and Kenny tipped the restroom attendant to give me a shoulder massage while I stood at the urinal. Now this is not something you expect, and might have been cause for interruption of flow, had it not been for the effects of the scotch. It seems that this is a “normal” thing (but here’s a tip – if you get one of these, a reach-around isn’t) and just another way for an enterprising person to make a living. Still, it’s pretty disturbing. The first time it happened to my friend Tom it caught him so much by surprise that he flinched and pissed on the shoes of the person at the urinal next to him. Fortunately this guy was drunk, holding onto the wall, and didn’t notice.

I had a lunch with a potential Chinese partner yesterday where we had, amongst other things, sweet and sour dog (which was excellent) and boiled pig feet (which were absolutely vile, like trying to eat linoleum and bone). Some people might balk at dog meat, but it’s all relative. This was the restaurant’s specialty so it would have been rude not to try it. If this is the worst thing I have to do in my job I’m one fucking lucky bastard. I woke up this morning with a high degree of confidence that my job will not involve massaging some bloke while he has a piss, de-ovary-ing a frog or playing chicken with trucks on a tiny scooter. Sounds like a pretty good life to me…!


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Massage

I’m still in China, and yesterday was another long day of meetings, followed by a formal dinner. This was a typical Chinese event, with course after course brought to the table, but the restaurant was in a huge shopping mall in Shanghai. The mall was impressive – at least seven floors filled with shiny new stores, many of them Western brands, and what seemed like a whole floor of restaurants (no Chick-Fil-A in a food court over here!) Just based on the first impression you’d swear that China had overtaken the States in mall luxury. However, when it came time to take a piss, you realized that the bog was not in the restaurant; it was barely in the mall. You had to walk around the mall and follow a small sign through two fire doors – it seemed like you were walking out to a boiler room – checking as you left that you could get back in again. The toilet was basic, and should you have needed a crap you’d have been in trouble – no paper. I don’t mean the rolls had run out, I mean no paper fixtures of any kind in the stalls. What do they do? Wait for it to dry and pick it off?

I’m digressing: the point is that after a hard day we decided to go for a full-body massage at some place in Shanghai that also doubled as a driving range. This was a proper massage place (no funny business, and no “happy endings”) with both male and female masseurs. We all decided on female (including the female member of our group). Even knowing that there’s no sex involved, I’m sure I couldn’t relax with some Chinese guy rubbing my arse. I was also pleased to note that my masseuse was pretty – again, no real reason other than it made her easier to look at for two hours. Yes, I did say two hours! I could not believe that it would take that long.

The massage started with her squeezing my head in various places, including pushing so hard on my temples that it hurt like a bastard and I thought she was about to burst through to my brain. There was stomach rubbing, leg bending, finger pulling, arm squeezing and ankle twisting; then I turned over and she did things to my back, including (I believe) walking on it. It was hard to tell with my face pushed into the massage table. This girl had steel fingers and could inflict serious pain at any moment she chose. Nevertheless the process was enjoyable and, amazingly, two hours went by in no time. We all headed back to the hotel some time after midnight, more than ready for sleep.

Back at the hotel we walked across the foyer to the elevators. Two Chinese girls in jeans happened to be walking that way at the same time so we got in the elevator together. We pushed the buttons for floors 20, 21 and 22 – they didn’t push any buttons. What a coincidence – they were on our floors! At 20 one of my colleagues got off and one of the girls followed him. On 21 a couple of us got off, along with the second girl. As I walked towards my room she walked up behind me and said “massage?” I declined. I mean, I know she was a prostitute, but even if I was inclined to purchase the services of strange whores it wouldn’t have worked. Firstly her friend who got off on floor 20 was the pretty one. And secondly, what if she actually did have some massage experience? With strength like that in her fingers, if I’d decided to chance a “happy ending” she could have pulled it right off. Try explaining that when you get home!


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Animal Blow Jobs

I don’t know quite how the subject came up but I was sitting in a bar with a colleague yesterday and it occurred to me to wonder why it is that animals don’t engage in oral sex. The bar was (and presumably still is) in Shanghai, so I suppose I could blame it on jet lag – after all, I’d been here less than twenty-four hours.

My basic issue was that animals already engage in some pretty disgusting behavior, so it’s obviously not down to squeamishness on their part. Dogs, for instance, will happily bury their noses in each others’ arses, eat dung and shag your leg, so why do you never see one dog lying on its back while another sucks it off? Of course dogs aren’t human and perhaps they’re just too selfish to bother, or not smart enough to consider the benefits of reciprocity. I suppose the closest animal relatives we have are the apes, so if we were to see any oral sex in the animal kingdom maybe we should expect to see it there. Consider the chimpanzee – it will go to great lengths to entertain you at the zoo with a display of masturbation and faeces throwing, so let’s not put any reluctance down to modesty. Nevertheless I don’t recall ever seeing them in a sixty-nine and, heaven knows, if I had a choice between swinging on the tire again or getting head, then the Pirelli’s not getting a look in.

It actually amazes me that there’s not more masturbation in the zoo (I mean among the animals, not the visitors – trust me, if you get the urge to do that, it’s time for some expensive therapy). I don’t blame the hoofed mammals; lack of opposable thumbs must be a bummer when it comes to self-abuse. But the primates must be bored shitless in there, and the absence of beer, TV, sports, conversation or even work leaves a lot of down time to fill. What else do you do? I mean, how excited can you get about grooming your cousin again?

I did once see a spectacled bear sucking itself off at St.Louis zoo. It sat on a rock in the front part of its enclosure, put its head in its groin and moved it up and down while numerous parents stood, rooted to the spot, hoping their kids didn’t ask. The bear paused and lifted its head, its thin pink dick standing out of its fur in the sunshine, and then resumed sucking. Parents looked sideways at each other, not daring to laugh, not sure whether they were the only ones who’d noticed; then a loud noise from the polar bear enclosure startled the self-fellator and he loped away.

Last night we sat in the bar on the thirty-third floor of the Garden Hotel in Shanghai and drank 15 year-old Glenmorangie (none of my favorites was on the menu). It was cheaper to buy a bottle, and the bar will keep any left-overs for you, for up to four months; as it was we didn’t require this service. When I returned to my room and phoned home, I shared with Mrs. Bison my animal oral sex observation. It took her about two seconds, and then she pointed out that maybe the reason animals don’t have oral sex with each other is because they can do it to themselves. Oh yes – never thought of that. It’s simple really. Maybe the real question is why humans can’t do this. Personally I believe it’s natural selection: any early humans who could manage that trick probably never left the cave, and their genes died out. It’s a powerful thing, evolution and although it’s a shame that humans lost this interesting skill, I’m very glad we didn’t end up with faeces-throwing either.


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Nude Wedding Photos

The first of us to get married was Karl and we gave him a hard time for it, partly because he’d gone over to the dark side but mostly because we found his fiancée somewhat annoying. Nevertheless we showed up at his wedding, ate the obligatory cake and behaved about as well as could have been expected. A couple of weeks later we were in the pub when Karl confided in us that he’d taken some “candid” photos of his new bride on their wedding night. He’d sent them off to be developed (no digital cameras in those days) and had received a letter back from the developer explaining that they couldn’t send that kind of material back to him. Karl showed us the letter but was laughing because he’d ordered a duplicate set of prints and they’d apparently only removed the amateur porn from one set.

We thought no more about this – it wasn’t as though he was offering us a look, and we weren’t exactly queuing up, given the somewhat “industrial” quality of said new bride. About a week later Vic and I called on Karl at his house. It was 2:00pm but it still took us five minutes to wake him; he answered the door in his boxers, invited us in and left us in the living room while he got more presentable. His new spouse was out somewhere, but for all the homely touches in the room, she might as well not have existed. The place looked like there had been al all-night party, followed by a police raid and then three months of neglect. We sat down rather carefully on a sofa; most of the surfaces in the room had discarded clothes on them, and Karl’s cat had been known to shit surreptitiously in the house, the residue sometimes remaining undiscovered for days.

After a minute I realized that on the sofa next to me was a batch of photos in the paper folder from the developer. Driven by base curiosity (and the sound of Karl showering) I opened the folder and flicked through them. Here was a shot of the hotel room; an artistic pose of the bride’s dress on the bed; a blurred photo of the bouquet; a fully erect penis – fucking hell! For the next shot the photographer had pulled back to reveal the owner of the penis – Karl, nude, grinning and still very much erect. We replaced the photographs and, when Karl emerged, managed to convey an attitude of “blokes who have not just viewed disturbing photos of their mate’s dick taken by his wife”. Clearly there had been a reciprocal set of photographs taken by Mrs. Karl, with his woody in the starring role, instead of her hairy hamburger.

The incident would have ended there were it not for some good-natured banter in the Black Horse pub some months later. We were all there, including wife/girlfriends, and Karl was about to reveal to the group some event that I felt he had better shut up about. The only way I could see to stop him was to assert loudly “At least I don’t leave pictures of my erect penis around the house!” Karl blanched as he realized what I meant, and then insisted that the apparent lack of length was due to “foreshortening as a result of the camera angle”. The best reaction, though, was from his new wife, who we later discovered had assumed that we must also have seen the similar pictures of her twat.

It just goes to show – you never know when your domestic porn efforts are going to come back and haunt you. Best steer clear; after all, with the internet now a veritable cornucopia of filth, all categorized to suit your personal taste, who needs amateur muff shots lying around the house?

Copyright 2007 Edward Bison