Chest Hair

When I was a kid, at a certain point I reached a critical developmental milestone: I grew hair on my balls. Of course it didn't happen overnight - it's not like I woke up one morning, looked down and discovered a forest of hair. No, it took time, but I was obviously very glad it happened. I mean, who wants to be the only kid in the showers with no hair on his sack? Chest hair took a bit longer; for a while there was only one black one, with another, rather unconvincing one alongside it, but eventually that grew in too. In fact it's still growing, ensuring that when I do finally go bald I'll still have plenty of hair, just not on my head.

It used to be that growing hair was one of the signs of masculinity, but somewhere along the line something terrible happened. Without anyone voting on it, a decree was issued that men had to be shaven, waxed and devoid of body hair in order to be "attractive". Who the fuck decided this? If you pick up any "men's health and fitness" magazine (and I'm not suggesting that you should, unless you are actually gay) you'll find that all the models are completely hairless. They stare out of the pages with their six-pack abs and airbrushed smiles, apparently delighting in the absence of this traditional sign of manhood.

Now I'm not arguing that body hair should just grow unchecked - I've seen the sasquatch guy at the pool too, and there comes a point where a once-over with the clippers would probably be a good idea. But waxing? That's not only cruel and unusual punishment; as far as I'm concerned it's only one step from having your balls cut off in the process of emasculation. Even James Bond is not immune - Sean Connery used to have chest hair but Daniel Craig (otherwise a good Bond) did the hairless chest thing in Casino Royale (I'm giving him the benefit of the doubt that he can grow chest hair). Why? Was this the result of some bullshit focus group where they determined that modern women only want men with waxed chests?

If I wanted to know I suppose I could consult one of those womens' magazine polls where women list the most important characteristics they look for in a man. Maybe it's right up there with "talks about his feelings", "not afraid to cry" and "puts my needs before his" in the bullshit hall of fame. It might have been useful to do a bit of research for this article before I wrote it but being married is somehow seen as incompatible with whipping off my shirt in front of random samples of St.Louis women and asking them "Does this make you horny?". Besides, you'd have to take into account all the other factors like my British accent (guaranteed leg-opener) and teeth (somewhat Austin Powers, not often a turn-on in a country obsessed with dental aesthetics) which might confuse the result.

I know women have told me they like a hairy chest but that doesn't prove anything. As any man with a few years' experience knows, women often say these things while quietly assuring themselves that they can change you later, and mentally picking out china patterns and childrens' names. If you want to know what they really think you'll have to ask their friends. Or dress up like one and hang out with them. But for this last option you're going to have to wax your chest. I mean, I've seen The Crying Game too and I think even he would have picked up on the deal before coming face to face with the sum of all fears if "her" chest had been all stubbly, wouldn't he?

So I'm appealing to men and women everywhere, join with me in insisting that men be men again. Leave the seat up, lose the scented plug-ins, stop obsessing about your abs and grow some fucking chest hair. And if you even think about shaving your balls, think again. James Bond would definitely not approve of that.


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Obey All Instructions...

Yesterday I spent about 24 hours traveling back from Shanghai to St.Louis, via Tokyo, and I got to experience the customary, predictable and ridiculous rituals that airlines make us go through. On the Tokyo-Chicago flight we were told that "Federal regulations" required that you only use the restrooms in your assigned cabin, but it was OK to stand outside while you waited for one to come free. On the Chicago-St.Louis flight (same carrier, by the way) these important regulations guaranteeing our safety no longer existed, but now it was "an offence punishable by detention and lethal injection" or some such shit, to stand by the restroom. They actually use the word "congregate" (please con't congregate in front of the restrooms) which in my book requires more than one person. You can hardly talk about one person "congregating" can you? But this cut no ice with American Airlines' brain-dead flight attendant.

Like so many other aspacts of travel, they clearly haven't thought this through. If you're sitting in coach (where your toilet is typically at the back of the plane) they have to assume that you sit with your head turned backwards, like some Exorcist out-take, while you guess whether the bog is occupied, or wait for someone to emerge; then rush back as fast as you can, because if someone else gets there first you won't be allowed to "congregate" (i.e. wait) by the door and will have to go back to your seat, climb over everyone and then try again five minutes later.

American even made this bullshit announcement about how "we want to make your journey as comfortable as possible - if there's anything we can do, just let us know". What absolute, complete and utter fucking bollocks. Just try asking a flight attendant (AKA bitter, wrinkled harridan) for something out of the ordinary, like the full can of soda, or a blanket, or anything at all apart from the air you breathe and the crappy seat you're sitting in, and see how far you get. The only difference between first and coach class is that in coach they just laugh at you, while in first they either explain why they can't or look at you as if you just took a dump in their handbag.

All this shit about not getting up while the seatbelt sign is on, putting your seat in the upright position before landing and turning off your video forty minutes before arrival, that's all crap too. I've flown other high quality airlines to and from the US, and they actually treat you like you have a brain, and as if they actually want you to enjoy the flight. Guess what? If the plane goes down it's not going to make a monkey fart of difference whether your seat is in the "upright and locked" position because you're going to end up with it sticking through your chest as you roast in a thousand degree inferno. But better make sure you haven't got your ipod on - that's against Federal regulations!

At the end of the day all these petty bullshit rules are there to make the airlines happy, just like all the small print that says they don't have any liability when they lose your luggage, cancel your flight or treat you like shit by making you sit on the tarmac for hours in the heat/cold. Who do you think made all that up? Passengers? That's your government looking after the interests of consumers as only governments can (after all, when was the last time you made a campaign donation the size of an airline's?).

So, since the rules change all the time and are completely meaningless, here are a few new ones I expect to hear soon:

"Passengers are forbidden from using more than four squares of toilet paper per visit; additional paper may be purchased from the flight attendant for $1 per square. Correct change is appreciated."

"Passengers whose name ends in a vowel will not receive the unbelievably nasty tiny bag of snack mix on flights that depart on Mondays and Wednesdays."

"Please refrain from expecting common courtesy from our staff in spite of having spent a six figure sum on travel with us this year. Even though we end every flight by saying "we know you have a choice when it comes to air travel and we really appreciate you choosing American Airlines, a member of the One World Alliance" we don't really mean it. You didn't actually believe that did you? Sorry."

"We reserve the right to lie through our uniformed arses about all aspects of your trip, including departure time, delays, connections, baggage carousel and whether we have any cans of Diet Sierra Mist left."

OK, I know I'm jetlagged and irritable, and therefore not inclined to cut anyone any slack today, but how fucking hard can it be? They've basically removed all the frills from the trip already - all they have to do is pour a small drink in a glass and drop a packet of indescribable cheesy shit on your tray table. If you don't want to "make our journey as enjoyable as possible" don't fucking tell us that you will. And lose the attitude, bitch; if it wasn't for the union they'd have replaced you a decade ago with someone who posessed brains, or personality, kindness or a sense of humor. Or at least some damn good breasts. Now hurry over here with your handbag - I need to take a dump and the seatbelt sign's on.


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

A Night Out In Suzhou

It was Saturday yesterday but we had a meeting with potential business partners in China which involved a 90 minute drive out to the Yangtse River. I’ve figured out that there are better ways to spend a weekend than this, but it’s best to fit as much stuff in as you can while you’re here. Anyway, during the meeting they served us these “moon cakes” which are eaten to celebrate the mid-Autumn festival, when the moon is at its largest. They’re made out of lotus seeds, apparently, and let me tell you that there’s a reason that it’s chocolate and not lotus seeds that we typically associate with “treats” and “celebration”. Half the seeds were still intact, making consumption a bit like chewing ball bearings in putty. I subsequently considered that it might have been this that ripped out my arse later in the day.

If it seems like this trip consists mainly of bouts of the trots interrupted by occasional work then that’s probably not far from the truth. Unfortunately I have almost no control over what I eat here, and as I’ve mentioned before, there’s some weird shit on offer. We were entertained for lunch at what appeared to be the only restaurant within thirty miles, and every time a dish would appear on the table my host would spoon some onto my plate in a gesture of hospitality and respect. In the spirit of reciprocating I refrained from pointing out that the latest arrival looked like someone had already eaten it once and that I’d rather pass, thank you. This whole process means that you’re essentially entering the food lottery – you couldn’t name any of the major constituents of most of the dishes on the table and, when some “helpful” git keeps piling unidentifiable shit on your plate it’s hard to politely just leave the stuff you don’t want. Plus, if you leave all the stuff that doesn’t look appetizing you’re going to starve to death in about a week.

So we ended up going out as a group last night and, sure enough, during dinner the lunch blazed a trail through my digestive system, reappearing as arse gravy. The plan was to go out for karaoke afterwards and I half-considered knocking it on the head and returning to the hotel where I had both Immodium and a guaranteed real toilet, but what the hell? Karaoke places have toilets too, right? Wrong. When I went for a piss I noticed that their toilets were of the “hole in the ground” variety, meaning that unless I fancied crop-spraying my own ankles I was out of luck. Oh well, probably not an issue since I’d apparently shat out my entire large intestine and several internal organs in the restaurant earlier.

So we drank and sang (badly) with our delectable rented female companions. The song list is always the same so I did my fabulously talentless versions of All The Small Things (Blink 182) and Centerfold (J.Geils Band) before moving on to torture the shit out of Take On Me, a couple of Blondie songs and numerous old standards that we all sang. Kenny was playing drinking games with his girl and succeeded in getting her completely arseholed in about an hour, after which point she lost the ability to walk without collapsing. She slept on the seat for a while but woke up and, holding her sleek black hair behind her head, puked into a wastepaper bin in the room. Then we finished the whisky and sang some more. All in all, a good night was had.

So today I’m back in Shanghai, in arse-recuperation mode. The plan is to go for spicy Szechuan food tonight but it’s hard to imagine anything more likely to fuck me up. I normally like Chinese food but, as you may have noticed, I’m getting a bit down on the whole thing this time around. Today I just wanted a burger and fries, so that’s what we had when we got to Shanghai. It arrived on my own plate, with ketchup, and no-one spooned any unidentified crap on top of it. Now if the Immodium does its job I should be ready to shit again by about, say, Thursday, which is just fine by me. If they gave “frequent flier” miles for toilets I think I’d be platinum status just from this trip alone. Now there’s a nice thought…


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

The Raw Truth

It was definitely a mistake to go to that little sushi restaurant yesterday. I like sushi a lot and unfortunately that means I tend to take every opportunity to eat it, even in crappy little restaurants in China which have no business dealing in raw fish. This particular place was a Japanese restaurant run by Koreans in China – is it any wonder it was fucked up? So I ended up a few hours later fighting crushing nausea, determined not to throw up while engaged in teleconferences in my hotel room. The glamour of international travel…

Eating sushi is a bit like Russian roulette, except with more chances and (hopefully) a slightly less terminal outcome. You know you could get sick – after all, you can’t even identify half the bizarre stuff on your plate. How are you supposed to know when it tastes “off” when you have no idea what it’s supposed to taste like. “Hmmm. A slice of bicycle tire with snail’s eggs. Is this good?” I have yet to pray to the porcelain god after a sushi session but it’s probably only a matter of time.

I used to eat oysters, which are also like Russian roulette, but with more rounds in the gun. People who I know have got sick on oysters never eat them again, so it must be a whole load of fun. But at least you’ve got the supposed aphrodisiac effect with oysters. I never understood this. I’ve eaten them many times and not once found myself with a higher-than-usual desire to copulate with anything in sight. I usually eat them on business trips and I’m going back to my hotel room alone; never have I been driven to have a wank solely to relieve the overwhelming desire created by oysters.

Are oysters supposed to work on women too? I’m not sure they’re an aphrodisiac but they are sure a good test of whether you’re likely to get a blow-job or not. That fine British comedian Frank Skinner once described eating oysters as like licking phlegm off a tortoise; if your date is prepared to go down on a dozen fleshy things covered in salty liquid it’s odds-on she’ll swallow. Likewise women should order oysters for their date to make sure he’s prepared to “eat at the Y”. They’re practically modeled on a vulva, except more grey. (Sort of “vulva on a dead woman pulled from the water after three days submerged”).

Tonight we have a banquet dinner with customers so the menu will be pre-set and we’ll just have to eat whatever shows up. In the past this has included frog ovaries as the specialty dessert; I have no idea whether frog ovaries have aphrodisiac properties. I know they’re supposed to give you good skin, but it seems an inordinately high price to pay to improve your complexion. Chances are that if your date eats frog ovaries she’ll not only be prepared to swallow, she’ll probably toss your salad too. Having said that, I think kissing would be out of the question unless there had been some intervention with toothpaste first. But for fuck’s sake stay away from the Chinese toothpaste in the hotel room – you’d be better off risking the oysters!


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Water Load Of Bollocks

I’m now back in China for a couple of weeks. It was not a good journey over here – the flight from Chicago to Shanghai was cancelled, allegedly because of a typhoon, necessitating a detour via Tokyo and an extra seven hours of travel time. And was there any evidence of a typhoon when we arrived? Was there fuck! So we drove the two hours to our fabulously dull hotel in Suzhou. You may wonder why I’m sharing this inconsequential information, but one of the things you have to remind yourself when you check in to a shiny Chinese hotel is that it’s a good idea to only drink the bottled water. When your hotel is a disease-ridden pox-hole this comes naturally but the outward opulence of some modern Chinese hotels lulls you into a false sense of security, potentially leading to excessive time on the porcelain.

This is one of the few occasions when I pay any attention to the water I drink. I mention this because I was reading about a Water Bar in New York that offers more than 52 waters, water tastings and catered water packages. Deciding that you want to attend a water tasting is a 100% certified guarantee that you are a colossal dick. I mean a real large, veiny, wobbly dick. This isn’t like wine tasting, where you pretend to enjoy expensive wine just to impress people; at least with wine you get something out of the consumption. With water tasting you just get to piss more often.

I can’t even imagine how you get to the point where going to a water bar is something you could take seriously. Isn’t there a little residual voice inside your head that whispers “you are a dick, you are a dick” all the while you’re there? This place apparently has “water experts” and offers a free gift when you order a water package worth more that $2,000. You know what you need when you buy $2,000 worth of water? A kick in the arse.

When I was a kid any water would do – we’d drink stream water because we couldn’t be bothered to go home when we were thirsty. It was a fascinating water, full of rich flavors, possibly the result of a decomposing sheep somewhere upstream. And it wasn’t a boring clear liquid; it was rich with tiny life-forms, microbes and algae. On a good day you had to chew it. We didn’t care, so long as none of us had just pissed in the stream.

Anyway, I thought that the idea of water was that it didn’t taste of anything. Its ingredient list is supposed to be very simple – water. If you want it to taste of something else then there’s no shortage of thinks you can add, from Kool-Aid to whisky. If you ever find yourself, however, standing in a bar swilling around some fancy water, bear in mind that its hard-to-place flavor was probably obtained by straining through a Bulgarian wrestler’s jockstrap. So now you can taste dick while you act like one!


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Not Going To Disneyworld

One of the rites of passage for families with small children in the US is the visit to Disneyworld. I know this because other parents tell me this, along with exhortations like “You have to go there at least once – the kids love it!” As you may have figured out by now I’m not a big believer in peer pressure and my typical response is “Fuck off. I’m not going – it’s expensive, tiring and shit.”

Yes, I’ve heard people respond that I won’t know what it’s like unless I’ve been there, but that’s a completely specious argument. I won’t know what it’s like to put my dick in a meat grinder unless I try that either, but I have enough of an idea that I’ve crossed it off my list of things to do when I’m bored. Disney is shit for lots of reasons. I hate the squeaky-clean artificial niceness of it all, thinly veneering a voracious money-grabbing machine designed to fleece you of as much cash as they can get off you. I hate queues at any time and the idea of queuing for days, surrounded by armies of fat spoiled children and fatter dumb parents fills me with fucking dread. I hate Orlando airport and their complete disregard for your time as they force you to stand in interminable, badly organized lines for security. And I just don’t get the attraction of staring at some spotty teenager dressed up as a giant mouse. Fuck’s sake – it’s pathetic!

Disney is like the Emperor’s New Clothes – everyone colludes in telling each other that it’s wonderful, and if you point out that, in fact, it’s a completely ridiculous waste of time and money, people look at you like you just uttered heresy. It’s like boring married people always going on about how good it is while secretly envying their single friends, but desperate to persuade themselves that they haven’t just wasted thirty years of their lives.

I was watching an episode of America’s Funniest Videos a few weeks ago, along with my daughter (since she, too, enjoys videos of involuntary testicular trauma involving skateboarders) but it became apparent that this episode was just an extended and very dull advertisement for Disney. They wittered on endlessly about how wonderful it was down there – well I’m sure if you’re getting paid to stand around while dumbasses in costumes wave at the camera it’s just peachy, but it pissed me off so to the point where I just turned it off.

The secret of Disneyworld is making people unhappy – the whole myth depends on persuading large portions of the population that they would really be missing out of they didn’t go. The key to this is getting to your kids – after all, no parent in their right mind would ever consider going if they didn’t feel like they needed to do it for their kids. So Disney targets kids and instills in them the “want” to go, and the feeling that they are “deprived” if they haven’t been. It then works on the parents with guilt – how could you withhold from your children of the experience of a lifetime? But it’s all bollocks. They just want your money.

The American Girl doll catalogue is exactly the same kind of guilt-marketing. You should buy the overpriced doll, Then buy all the others with their individual historical significance. Then buy all the outfits. Then buy the books about the dolls, because heaven forbid that kids should actually make up their own stories. And finally, when you think you’ve bought all the crap that you can afford, fly to Chicago and visit the American Girl store. This crap comes through the mail and when it arrives it is designed to convert a perfectly happy kid into one who now is unhappy because they don’t have all this stuff. Personally I’d wipe my arse on it if only they printed it on less shiny paper.

So I’m not going to Disneyland this year, or ever, not even if you paid me. I’d sooner take my chances with the meat grinder…


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Buy Bison Stuff

It's here! People have not been clamoring for it; the world has not been awaiting it; no-one's life will be even infinitessimally improved by it but it's here anyway.

The Mr Bison Shop

Now you can buy T-shirts and other stuff with the fabulous Mr.Bison graphic. Just think about it: not only might you be the first person in your neighborhood to own one, you will also almost certainly be the last. Now that's what I call exclusive!

Let's be clear - I don't expect a massive rush of orders, and I'm not going to make money from this. You might ask "Why did you bother doing it then?" and I would reply "Because I can, OK?" (Maybe this gives you some idea how bored it is possible to get in St.Louis.)

You know when you go to one of the big stores at the mall and you see a T-shirt with something funny on it? For a moment you think about buying it (after all, you can't have too many T-shirts) but then you realize that about a million other mall shoppers will be buying the same thing and your choice of shirt is about as personal as a spam e-mail penis enlargement offer. And that's the beauty of the web these days. In the past, if I wanted to sell shirts I'd have to have some made, which would cost me money (and let's face it, how much money would you put into Mr.Bison T-shirts?). Besides, how could I possibly know how much of each item to order? Until people buy the shit I don't know what they'll like do I?

Plus you have all the hassle of getting paid, arranging shipping, and the not-insignificant problem of people being disinclined to send hard-earned money to strangers. Now I can set up a shop without spending anything, offer products with zero up-front cost, set pricing (if I wanted to try and make money) and not worry at all about shipping, collections or all that crap. Merchandise is made to order. And as a consumer, provided I trust the large company behind the software (in this case Spreadshirt) I don't have to decide whether I think Mr.Bison will send me the shirt or not.

In short, everyone wins, and no-one has any excuse for being seen in the gym wearing the same T-shirt that someone else bought at Macys. I tried this out and the shirt arrived no problem (it was a good quality shirt too) so I've ordered some more. The Spreadshirt site can be a bit slow but it's very well set-up and easy to use. You'll notice when you click on the link (Mr Bison Shop) that you're in the Spreadshirt site even though you'll still see the Mr.Bison site graphics. Isn't technology wonderful?

Go on - buy a fucking shirt. You know you want to!


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Web Future

I was driving home last weekend and happened to be listening to NPR on the radio. Let me stress that this is not something I do often - I listen in hope of hearing something good, like the two blokes who do car repair, but it always seems to be Lake Fucking Wobegone. Not this time, though - there was some woman being interviewed about her belief that "Web Technology Is Leaving The Porn Industry Behind".

Basically she was saying that web users in a "Web 2.0 world" (which is some utter bollocks term invented by the kind of spaz who lives on their computer) expect interactivity in their web content; they want blogs, comment and the ability to influence content. In her opinion the teens growing up today will, when they reach eighteen, expect more and will therefore be dissatisfied with the basic offerings that the porn industry provides. She sees a future in which people create their own content and bypass the industry.

I almost drove off the road in sheer amazement at how little this dumb cow actually understands porn. Firstly, the idea of teenagers turning eighteen and then deciding to make their first foray into porn is clearly fantasy. Secondly, people who are finding porn on the web for the first time are unlikely to moan about the "lack of interactivity". Do you seriously think they are going to turn off the porn and go back to MySpace simply because it's not interactive enough? They are more likely to develop a squint and a wrist injury from excessive "appreciation" of the vast cornucopia of nakedness and perversion. Thirdly, people have for years been creating their own content - the advent of the webcam saw to that. Did people use these things to have face to face conversations with family members in another city? No, they used them to broadcast images of their genitals to strangers for fun. And finally porn content is already available interactive (if that's what floats your boat) - their are webcasts where consumers can interact with performers. It's all out there, as anyone with spare time, broadband access and very good virus protection can discover.

It's true that the Web revolutionized porn, but in a good way. In the past porn meant dirty magazines and videos. Soft-core magazines could be bought in regular stores but videos meant mail order or specialty adult stores. Anything that was sold had to be mass produced and shipped to stores (expensive) or advertized in magazines (expensive), which meant that it was generally mainstream stuff that ended up on the shelves, at least in the high street, because you needed a lot of consumers to justify the expense. Let's say you had a particular kink - maybe you got turned on by ducks during sex. You were a duck fetishist. Where could you go to find duck-on-girl porn? There might be thousands of people like you but no-one was going to make porn for you because you were all hidden in remote seedy bedrooms throughout the world and it would be impossible to overcome the costs involved in advertising and distribution to a small audience.

Now fast-forward to today: duck fetishists can set up communities and post content. What's more the porn industry can now cost-effectively promote to these people (you don't have to pay to reach people - just put stuff out there and people use the web to search it and come to you). The content is electronic, which means no distribution costs. The cost of production was always low - just pay some low grade porn actors to pose with a duck and you're away. Plus, with the distribution cost barriers removed it is now much easier for people to get into the business, which means boutique porn operators spring up to serve niche markets that would not have got a look-in in the past. All over the world there are adherents of specialty fetishes are grabbing their dicks in a celebration of market forces.

So I would have to say that the porn industry is not just alive and well but positively thriving in the new web world. Still, if I wanted to know about the state of play in the world of porn I would hardly look to NPR for the answer.

And finally, just in case some of you are wondering, no I am not a duck fetishist. I don't even know if that exists, although I'm half-tempted to Google it and see. I couldn't imagine deriving satisfaction from a duck other than by roasting it and serving it with a nice black cheery sauce and some roasted potatoes. Anything else would be quackers.


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

On The F Scale

This has been a hard week. In the past I would have based this purely on subjective things like how tired I felt, or looked, or how long I worked. But everyone knows that stress is the real determinant of whether you had a hard week or not and I am now able to measure my stress on the F-scale.

I have been known to swear at work occasionally. I have also been known to swear a lot, but when everything is going well it's limited to what I would call recreational swearing, such as the good natured reference to a colleague as a bullshitter, or a competitor as a massive fuckwit. However when people start pissing in my metaphorical sandbox I tend to get more colorful in my choice of words and it gets harder to exercise the kind of restraint that is required to prevent involuntary emission of the F word.

For example, the other morning we sat in a meeting where someone was suggesting we explore certain investment options that were completely unviable, and when I pointed this out they questioned how I could say that without doing some lengthy analysis. I was forced to reply, in a somewhat more strident voice than usual, "Because it costs X million dollars and there is no fucking money available! End of story!" Moderate stress was thus incurred in dealing with one fuckwit and one instance of fuckbrained stupidity. That was a "One F" meeting. Tuesday morning kicked off with a Four F meeting; you know it's going to be a long day when you've hit the 4F level before 8am.

It's been pointed out before by other people that Fuck is an incredibly versatile word and it would be hard to imagine conveying the same depth of feeling without access to it, or its close cousins, Motherfucker, Fuckwit, Fuckbrain, Fuckstain, Fuckface, Fucker and Fucking. After all I didn't want to say "There's no money available" I wanted to say "There's no fucking money available". This neatly conveys not only the point that there's no money available but also the clear implication that only a weasel-brained, donkey-fellating halfwit would not have realized this. All that extra meaning in four letters - it's a fucking miracle.

Likewise, sometimes to state that someone is talking rubbish doesn't do justice to the level of their ineptitude; they are actually talking complete bollocks. Should you ever find yourself trapped in a room full of fucking idiots talking complete bollocks you are likely to hit the higher end of the F scale yourself, unless you practice extreme restraint. This, however, I do not recommend.

I am more than ever convinced that swearing is an essential part of a healthy lifestyle. It allows you to let off steam, release stress and retain a well-adjusted personality. Just look at the facts. Edward Bison: swears like a bastard; fine upstanding member of society. Dennis Rader: President of the Congregation Council of the Lutheran Church, model citizen, probably never swore; murdered ten people as the BTK killer. What more conclusive proof do you need than that?

And if you want more analysis, you're out of luck. Didn't you hear? There's no fucking money available.


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Apples

When I was about eight years old our family moved into a new house. It was bigger than our old one, but had been empty for a year and therefore had more dead flies per square foot than anywhere I have seen before or since. It did, however, have two apple trees in the garden. One provided apples you could eat, while the other produced "cooking apples" - too sour to eat from the tree but great in pies and stuff. The first year we borrowed an apple picker (a long stick with a bag on the end) and collected as many as we could. Lots fell on the ground where the dog, which was very stupid, treated each apple as an entirely unfamiliar object to be chewed and appeared surprised every time to find that it didn't like the taste.

(This, by the way, was a Dalmatian, a dog posessed of no great intelligence but an enormous amount of enthusiasm and cunning when it came to acquiring illicit food. This meant that it's voracious appetite was often satiated by stupid things, like dung, lard or, inevbitably, its own vomit.)

We very soon discovered that you could only eat so many apples, and so many apple pies. My mum explored new and bizarre ways to use our free apple bounty, including making apple jelly, which was an odd-tasting substitute for jam obtained by straining mashed apples and sugar through old net curtains. And such apples as we couldn't use were individually wrapped in newspaper and stored in boxes in a cold room in the house where they decayed at various rates and made the whole house smell, not surprisingly, of apples.

I have to say that my family explored many uses for apples, but later in life I was to discover that there were, in fact, more than even we had considered; some that I'm sure would never have occurred to most people. For instance it would not have seemed desirable, nor indeed possible, to stuff a whole apple up my own arse but I am assured that there are people out there for whom this is an enjoyable recreation. One of the features of having a brother in the medical field is that you get to hear those stories about people who showed up at the emergency room with some piece of fruit or other inanimate object jammed up their tradesman's entrance.

I'm not going to say that I understand the bloke with the apple up his arse - I don't - but it seems positively well-adjusted when compared with the light bulb. How bored do you have to be for your eye to start wandering round the room looking for things to stuff up there? I mean, I've seen some pretty dull television too, but not even two hours of The View, which would have most sane people searching for Dr.Kevorkian's home number, would incite me to grab a household object and drop my pants.

And I'm no expert on human anatomy but it seems a pretty well established fact that your arse will spring shut the moment you let it (hence the schoolboy joke - "Why are turds pointed at one end? So your arse doesn't shut with a clang.) Just what do these people think will happen when the apple is all the way in?

While we're on the subject, you remember that joke about the two men captured by tribesmen and told to choose death or Mau Mau? They choose Mau Mau, so the chief sends them off into the wilderness to collect ten nuts. The first one comes back with ten walnuts and the chief tells him to pull down his pants and bend over while they stuff the all nuts up his arse; this is Mau Mau - if he is successful he can go free. Well they push them in one by one while the bloke grabs his ankles and they're all the way up to nine when he suddenly bursts out laughing and all the nuts fly out of his arse. The chief tells him he now must die but asks him why he laughed when he was so close. The man replies "Because I just saw my mate come back and he's brought coconuts."

Anyway, it's time for dessert and I'm having a banana. The conventional way.

If you enjoyed this post there's probably something wrong with you, but for people like you there is now brand new Bison Bits, for shorter versions of the kind of crap that you find in this journal. Enjoy! And don't walk near the fruitbowl while naked; no-one believes that excuse anymore...


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Stick Your Gutter...

One of the many joys of the recent rain in St.Louis is that it makes the gutter over my garage overflow. This is on account of it a) being fitted by a certified twat who didn't make sure it angled correctly, and b) being full of tree bark, leaves, dead birds and other assorted shit that shouldn't be in a gutter. Yes we did fit gutter guards but they are basically almost useless - I don't know how a small branch can squeeze through the mesh but apparently it's not that difficult. Mature, house-proud suburbanites would have done something about this by now but we've only been in the house ten years so it's a bit soon for us to try anything radical like fixing the fucking thing.

Anyway, I was out there holding a ladder so Mrs.Bison could pull a dead walrus out of the downspout on Sunday. Once I left to go to the gym some sales guy for a gutter company (let's call them Gutter Moron) walked up and offered a free quote to Mrs.Bison for his "wonderful" product. Fair enough. So today he showed up while I was at work to persuade Mrs.Bison to purchase new gutter guards (for the entire house) that are guaranteed not to clog. The first sign should have been the salesman's name - it was something stupid like Bud Clunge - and she should have thrown him out simply for that.

But she sat through his presentation, all about how his product was the best thing since oxygen while every product made by anyone else in the world would make your hair turn green and give you cancer of the ringpiece, or something like that. He had the contract filled out and everything, and she eventually asked "How much then?" Turns out that he could immediately give a 33% discount because there had been a coupon in the paper a few weeks ago, meaning the price was only $5,100. Now I don't know about you but for $5,100 I would expect a gutter to do a bit more than just not clog up. I would expect it to make me a cup of tea, whiten my teeth and enlarge my penis, at a minimum. Mrs.Bison obviously thought so too because the look she gave Mr.Clunge clearly communicated an absence of buying signals. She told him there was no way she was making a decision to buy gutters right there.

So now Mr.Clunge starts the whole charade of calling his boss and "persuading" him to allow a bigger discount. This gets another $600 off. Still no reaction from Mrs.B, who repeats that she's not buying his gutters. Back on the phone with the boss again (or the speaking clock or dial-a-wank or whoever it is that shit salesmen actually call when they are pretending to be working over the boss for a discount). Another $300 discount but still no purchase from Mrs.Bison. You see - I like this woman for a reason: I can go out and know that she's not going to be taken for a ride by any dumb fuck salesman. When Mr.Clunge asked for only a 50% deposit she laughed and told him that no way was she writing him a two grand check for gutter guards!

What amazes me is that anyone is such a colossal wanker that they would try and sell using such a half-arsed bullshit process. If he'd told her about the product, given a quote and then left, we would at least have considered them. Such an approach would have given extra credibility to the company - after all, if you've got a good product you don't need to cut the price three times in five minutes. But now he's fucked it up permanently and there's no way he's making a sale.

If it had been me I'd have simply told him to stick his gutters up his arse and fuck off, but Mrs.Bison is a nicer human being. On the other hand she could have saved him a lot of time if she'd simply pointed out that we couldn't use his product because it wasn't designed to stop a walrus getting in your downspout. And without that it's no use to us...


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Love Me, Love My Pussy

I was in the gym this morning and one of the women in there was trying to set up my buddy Pete with a friend of hers. This friend came highly recommended - personality, looks, her own house, intelligent and successful - but Pete has been at the dating game in St.Louis long enough to have become sceptical, bordering on cynical, about women in this age group.

St.Louis is supposed to be a crap city for dating - I don't have much experience because I imported my spouse when I came, but people I know have all said the same thing. Pete is smart, funny, employed, no baggage and in very good physical shape so he should be fishing in the "better" end of the St.Louis dating pond. He also looks about ten years younger than he is, which is handy because it gives him options in the "younger, smoother and less wrinkly" demographic. I don't get to hear a lot about his dating, in spite of the fact that we spend four hours lifting weights together every weekend, because we're blokes and therefore we don't share that kind of crap. Sitcoms where male friends talk about their dating problems and update each other on relationships are complete shit, and are obviously written by women (who want to believe men act like that) or sensitive new-age types (who are busy pretending that they act like that, so they can shag new-age women).

So back to the dating pond. Pete has clearly spent a lot of time with his rod in the water, if you know what I mean, and can pretty much see trouble coming. All the women in his pond are divorced (except maybe for a few who poisoned their husbands) and it's fair to say that many have "issues". So he's developed a few rules that he can apply at the outset to save wasting everyone's time. When he was getting the third degree on why he should date this woman's friend one of his first questions was "Does her life revolve around her pets?"

Most divorced women come with kids and he's therefore already condemned to have to sit through school plays, high school sports and concerts above and beyond the already-daunting quota you have to endure with your own kids. It must be like a Groundhog Day of school events - every new relationship clicks over and, guess what, we have to go and watch little Johnny's first football game. Again. Poor bastard, but it goes with the territory if he wants to ever get laid in the future. But he draws the line at cats and dogs.

Now let me say that I have nothing against pets - I'm very happy to meet other peoples', although the whole litter tray thing means I will never own a cat. But Pete is allergic, which is one problem. The other is that there's this whole group of women out there who will sleep with their pets, and whose whole life revolves around their perceived needs and wants. When you're ordering your life to accommodate some woman's cat's timetable then you know you should have just stayed at home and had a wank.

Why do women find this whole pet thing so endearing? They sleep with the dog, even though the last thing it did before coming to bed was to sniff another dog's arsehole and lick its own balls. It's your bed, for fuck's sake! Is it too much to ask that it be animal-free?

Apparently it is, because in St.Louis all divorced women seem to have cats. Pete therefore is faced with a dilemma: if he goes with a cat woman he's guaranteed that the relationship will end when he finally can't put up with her shit anymore, but if he holds off he's going to end up with balls like coconuts, which can't be good. My advice was to get some Claritin and get in there, but what the fuck do I know about the dating pond? I haven't been fishing for so long I think I've forgotten where I put my rod.


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

IT Happens

I really only have myself to blame - I should have known better. Every time I've let our IT department loose on any aspect of my computer setup they've fucked it up. Usually just before I had to depart on a long trip, with a desperate need to stay in touch through e-mail. Of course I often didn't realise they'd fucked it up until I tried to use it and nothing worked right, so I have adopted two simple rules to minimize high blood pressure resulting from IT-related stress:

1. Never under any circumstances let them touch the laptop within 1 week of departure on any trip, unless it is so fucked up already that it is unusable.

2. In all other circumstances assume they will fuck it up, and therefore don't plan anything that requires use of the laptop for half a day.

So yesterday morning it's 8:30 and I've already had three things piss me off, meaning that I should probably be approached only with care. Here comes this IT guy to deal with the problem of my laptop heating up while the battery rapidly drains when I close the lid. Great feature of you find yourself in the wilderness with an urgent need to make one piece of toast, but otherwise a pain in the arse. Here he comes with a spare laptop, to change out the hard drive; I'm up to my neck in financial plans so I ask "How long?" "Five minutes." "You mean absoultely guaranteed five minues? Because I can't be without this right now." "No problem, guaranteed. Probably only two minutes." Spot the mistake - a clear violation of rule 2 above, by someone who should have known better, but in my defence how can you fuck up taking out two screws and replacing a hard drive that just slides out?

So he does that and puts the laptop back on the docking station (so I can use the big keyboard and monitor on my desk). Nothing on the monitor. The new laptop (with my old hard drive in it) is working when you open the lid, but he can't make anything come on the monitor. He starts fucking around with the monitor, even though it was working perfectly before and therefore the chances of this being the source of the problem are effectively zero. Right there I tell him to just put it back the way it was and come back later, with a different laptop. He opens up the laptop again and now has two laptops and two hard drives on my desk; he reassembles two, but it seems to me that he's giving me the new laptop (that doesn't work) with it's own hard drive (that doesn't have ANY of my shit on it). I point this out. "No, I think this is right." He puts it on the docking station and, sure enough, nothing happens. At this point I remind him that I think he's got them mixed up but no, he runs off to get a new docking station. Back he comes and starts plugging wires in; I tell him to fire up the laptop because I want to see if it brings up my login. Eventually he does this and, sure enough, it doesn't.

At this point, in any civilized society, he would feel compelled to pull out a sharpened wireless card and ritually disembowel himself by my desk for being such a complete twat. Instead he puts my laptop back together and puts it on the new docking station. It doesn't work. Do you want to know why? Because the new docking station he brought over is fucked up and the "On" button is temperamental. After a few pushes it starts up and I'm back in business. He starts to walk off but I instruct him to leave my old docking station (because it works).

Now one part of me feels good that I exhibited the patience with this guy not to tell him what a complete fucking dickhead he was, while another part of me wonders whether I shouldn't have just strangled him with a LAN cable, thus putting an end to his incompetence. Unfortunately I have enough experience with "deskside support" to know that there's a legion of useless wankers out there waiting to step into his shoes, so why waste a perfectly good LAN cable. Especially when I can't trust our IT department to get me a new one that works...


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Fish & Chips

I've lived in a couple of UK seaside towns and they used to be great places for a kid - all sun, sand, amusements and junk food, where you could have a good day out for a few pennies. Nowadays UK seaside towns have become the favored dwelling place of dole scroungers, homeless Eastern Europeans and charity shops. I still hope one day to go back for a few hours for the one and only purpose of eating traditional British seaside fish and chips, one of the best meals in the world.

In this one town there used to be an old cobbled street that you could walk down which ended at the harbor where they landed the fresh fish catch. Right at the bottom of this street was a tiny restaurant which served me one of the best fish and chips I ever had. The whole walk down the street was a treat as a kid. There was a joke shop on the right where you could spend hours perusing fake dog turds, itching powder and joke chewing gum packets which snapped on the fingers of friends when you offered it to them. They also sold nudie playing cards and I invested in two sets of these as a kid. (The first was very small and cost 15p, or 25c, so I upgraded when I could afford it.)

Further down on the left was the rock shop where they made the hard sticks of rock with the name of the town running through them. This they did by starting with a cylinder of sticky candy more than a foot in diameter and then hand-rolling it down to the inch-thick, generally pink, tooth-breaking candy. I'm not sure Americans know what this stuff is but it used to be the most widely accepted way over there to lose teeth as a child. There were other little shops as well, selling seaside tat, souvenirs and those mugs made to look like faces. As a kid I didn't have the cash to buy fish and chips so the walk terminated at the donut van which parked at the bottom of the street and which sold bags of hot sugared donuts which my mother would never have allowed me to eat between meals, had she known.

The fish and chip shop, however, was a temple of pleasure, a monument to the simple joy of things done right. I could not recreate the flavor if I tried, but below are the principle components of a good fish and chip meal at a seaside restaurant:

1. The fish should ideally be huss. This is hard to find now but years ago it was the cheaper stuff that was bought for the kids. It has wonderful soft flesh and just one thick bone running down the middle so no risk of choking (unless you are a complete fuckwit). It must be battered and deep-fried.

2. Chips should be thickly cut from real potatoes and deep fried in unhealthy oil.

3. Mushy peas should accompany the fish and chips. Lurid artificial green color is considered a definite bonus.

4. Bread and butter should sit alongside on a side plate. The bread should be square, cheap and white, and butter should be thickly applied.

5. A pot of scalding hot tea made with real tea leaves should also be sitting on the table. Tizer or Irn-Bru would be acceptable soda for kids; coke only as a last resort but not diet coke, OK? This is a festival of indulgence and calories should not be skimped.

6. Condiments should be tomato ketchup and vinegar. The ketchup should not be in a Heinz bottle; it should be in a gaudy red plastic container shaped like a tomato with a green top, from which you squeeze the ketchup over your chips.

7. Nothing should be left on your plate. You should push back from the table like one of those six hundred pound fat fuckers who's waiting for the wall of his house to be removed so he can be forklifted into an ambulance.

8. Dessert should never be ordered. Acceptable substitutes include a visit to the rock shop, a short walk to the donut van or a Mr.Whippy ice cream with a chocolate flake in it.

I have a suspicion that there is nowhere left that is capable of serving fish and chips the way it should be done. Take-out fish from a high-street chip shop is good but it's not the same thing. If I ever make it back to that town I expect that the old cobbled high street will be full of estate agents, employment agencies or cheap jewellers. Not only may it not be possible to get good fish and chips but I'm buggered if I know where I can find new nudie playing cards. You can hardly make out the nipples on my old set...


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Bombs Away

There's a motorway junction somewhere in the UK with a small bomb under it. I suspect this because I put it there many years ago. These were more innocent times, when mention of bombs was a cause for interest among small boys, not a reason to avoid Pakistanis with backpacks on buses. Let me explain...

I had this friend called Nigel who led the kind of charmed life that only single children surrounded by lots of space and largely inattentive parents can hope to achieve. He was the envy of us all because he had his own shed in his parents' huge garden; this was reason enough to admire him - learning that he had shagged a girl called Alison in it was just the icing on the cake. (I still vividly remember him explaining the term "pink meat" to me at a family bonfire party and pointing out how "some dirty sods like to lick it".) He must have been about twelve or thirteen.

Nigel had also acquired one or two other interesting things along the way, among them an unexploded aircraft bomb. It was about ten inches long, rusty and the front had been pushed in, but he explained that it hadn't exploded because of these pins in the side that should have been pulled out. Apparently he had had another one and had taken it along to the local aerodrome where they had detonated it. Either he was a lying bastard or the military had a much more relaxed attitude to small boys with live ordnance in the seventies. (I prefer to believe the latter, otherwise I would be forced to confront the possibility that he never shagged Alison at all, which would be a terrible shame.) Anyway, his terminally-relaxed parents had finally decided that he ought to get rid of it so he offered it to me.

I remember proudly bearing it down the hill from his house and presenting it to my mum by the side of a building site, where they had almost finished filling in a pond which was to be covered with a large motorway roundabout. Credit to mum - she didn't scream, panic or call the bomb squad; she just told me that I wasn't going to bring it home and to get rid of it. Fair enough - keeping it was always a long shot anyway - so Nigel and I took it over to what was left of the pond where they were pumping out water and threw it in. There, as far as I know, it resides to this day.

There's something sad about a world in which small boys can't give each other live unexploded bombs as gifts, or live vicariously through their shed-fornicating brethren. I'm not how many more times I saw Nigel before I moved away, but it can't have been more than a few. Nevertheless he had a profound impact on my life. From that time on I was in no doubt that if you were ever lucky enough to encounter pink meat you should definitely consider licking it.


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Wednesday Afternoons

In the UK your time at school between the ages of 16 and 18 is known as the "sixth form" and this is when you sit A-level exams in order to earn a place at university. (Unless you were a thick twat and left at the age of 16, which is perfectly permissible.) This part of the school experience is a bit strange because you don't have to be there, so the teachers are torn between treating you with a little more respect and acting like the same miserable, bitter, tossbags that they've been for the last five years. I moved to a new school for the sixth form, close to the sea and all the way over the other side of the country from my previous residence. Most of the week was taken up with lessons but on Wednesday afternoon there was free time. In theory you were supposed to devote this to General Studies, which was taught by a diminutive prick with a Hitler complex and no sense of humor. This, we decided, was an utter waste of a perfectly good afternoon.

By this time I had discovered something much more important than General Studies - alcohol. We weren't old enough to be (legally) served in pubs but a couple would turn a blind eye, and there were also off-licenses where you could buy bottles to take away, so long as you didn't look like an obvious skinny kid, talk in a whiny voice like your balls hadn't dropped or stutter like a nervous spaz. So we drank in the evenings. I came home and pretended not to have been drinking and my parents, for their part, pretended not to notice that I had. I figured that if I could walk across the living room carpet and sit down in a chair without knocking the TV over, tripping on the coffee table or vomiting then I was in good shape. I think my parents' attitude to drink was pretty healthy. My dad once told me that what I did was up to me and it didn't reflect on them. The fact that I grew up into a productive member of society and not a piss-soaked tramp begging for coins in a shopping center car park might make them a little more relaxed now about their decisions in this regard, but who knows?

There must have been a point where I knew that they knew that I drank, but where I didn't yet trust the reaction that I would have got had I showed up at the house with, say, a bottle of scotch. I remember going drinking with Des and Melvin (both nicknames, in case you start to think all my mates were twats). Melvin was visiting from Bristol; Des and I had little cash but Melv was flush so he offered to sub us for the booze. So Des bought Merrydown cider (suggested slogan "Pisshead's Choice") and vodka. Turns out that Melv didn't like cider or vodka, but apart from that everything was OK. So Des and I ended up drinking the cider and about half the vodka before making our way home. We stashed the other half of the vodka down the back of a beach-hut on the seafront, making bloody sure in our inebriated state that we remembered which one, since there were hundreds of the fuckers.

The next Wednesday Des and I left school and walked to the seafront where we retrieved our vodka and spent a pleasant afternoon in contemplation of the importance of a broad curriculum in secondary education. So successful was this sortie that when the vodka was gone we replaced it with a fresh bottle so we could continue our studies.

I'm not claiming that I learned to drink responsibly during this period. I didn't - I learned to drink irresponsibly and try to cover it up. But I learned to drink while at home, with some serious restrictions in place, not least of which was financial. I didn't have the money to drink to excess on a regular basis, and I still had to be able to function when I got home. My parents weren't going to look the other way if I started puking in my cornflakes, messing up at school or keeping a bottle of meths under my pillow. Besides, an interest in booze is educational. A girl in my class lived on an apple farm and we learned that you could take weak apple wine and, by freezing it, cause ice to form, leaving more concentrated spirits behind. Actually the stuff tasted pretty crap, but it's the stimulating effect on young minds that's important.

We learned a lot of other important lessons under the tutelage of Smirnoff and Merrydown. For instance, the simple pleasure of urinating up the side of a transit van on the way from pub to chip shop. Or that the pain caused by your face impacting the road while running from the police (Des) is only temporarily dulled by alcohol. I also learned that Ripley, who was a fat twat when sober, was not improved any by drink, and the sight of him climbing over a railway crossing gate when a train was coming gave me hope that I would never again have to see him lie on his back with his shirt off and proclaim "I'm a whale, I'm a whale" in an attempt to attract girls. Yes, those were glorious days, and I can't think of anything the school could have taught me in General Studies that would been more useful in preparing me for life ahead. You really can't beat community-based educational programs.


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Second Life

As all pasty-faced sad wankers who never leave their bedrooms know, the new "big thing" on the net is supposed to be Second Life. In this virtual world you create your own body (called an Avatar) and then proceed to customize and clothe it in order to exude the image you really want. A bit like like living in LA, I suppose. Then you can spend your waking hours wandering around this clunky graphical world, visiting stores and interacting with other Avatars by typing messages to each other. You can fly, rather than just walk, or you can teleport yourself to particular coordinates.

The big pitch for Second Life is that you "have to be there". Major retailers have set up stores in Second Life where you can see stuff that you can buy and use in First Life (i.e. real life, where flying requires wings or an airline ticket). You can also buy stuff for Second Life but, and here's the really salient point, what do you need in order to live life as a disembodied pixelated shape? You don't eat, so no need to buy food. You could "buy" a plot for a house, or build your own graphical representation of a house, but since you don't need shelter why bother? No need for washing machines, or couches to sit on when you're tired. So you buy new hair, or better graphical tits, and then wander around looking for people to show them off to.

Of course you could fill your virtual house with virtual artefacts but this is another point on which I take issue with Second Life: if this is supposed to be all about creating a different reality, unbounded by the restrictions of our regular world, why the fuck do people respond by behaving exactly as they do here? Why collect shit and pay for a "house" to store it when you can exist as a floating hobo without need for food, water, sleep, warmth or anything else? In fact Second Life is another one of these "Emperor's New Clothes" phenomena where if you point out the stupidity of it, you are instantly dismissed as a "non-believer" who "just doesn't grasp the significance". Bollocks. If I want to live in a "virtual world" I'd be better off inhabiting one of the many video games that are available - in those you typically have to worry about keeping yourself alive and pursuing some goal, rather than just wandering in what is basically an amazingly crap chat-room, inhabited by exactly the kind of twats whose absence would greatly enhance First Life.

And what's with all these companies opening stores there? How stupid are they? Did some spotty git in their IT department really persuade them that the hundreds of thousands of dollars expense to establish a "store" in this wanker-world was a good investment? Let's see, what you really want is a quick easy way for people to be able to access your company, see its products, choose some, pay for them and have them shipped to their home. I think this already exists. It's called the Internet, and you don't have to fly around in some pixelated angular world, in permanent fear of it crashing around you, in order to check out the latest flat screen TV.

I know that by my opinions I render myself a member of that demographic group known as "antique dinosaur" because I refuse to embrace all the most cutting edge trends. The thing is, many cutting edge trends turn out to be absolute bollocks; we only remember the winners, like the Web, ipods, Amazon.com and Google. Of course, there is the possibility that if you can fool enough people the thing will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, and you will have to have a presence there in order to reach consumers. But for any major retailers contemplating such an investment I'd offer the following advice:

Just consider the characteristics of the people you are likely to reach in Second Life. They are largely going to be slightly sad people, attepting to shake off the reality of their mundane regular life by reinventing themselves. They are in many instances desperately vain, self-absorbed borderline mental cases with a flimsy grasp of reality. They would rather clunk around for hours interacting with imaginary people than have a Real Life. And they haven't worked out that if you really want to visit The Gap, or Sears, you can just type the name into Google and see everything they have in rapid-fire, well-organized menus. Or you could go to the Actual Store, and maybe meet a Real Person, with Real Breasts, who you might just be able to persuade to have Actual Sex with you.

And this is the one area in which Second Life mirrors the Web; when it comes right down to it, it all seems to be about sex. You might stumble into a virtual room and see two Avatars naked, having it off on the floor. What does anyone get out of this? As I've pointed out before, if you want porn (and far be it from me to suggest that you shouldn't) there is tons of it out there with, get this, real naked people, in all shapes and sizes, doing things that vary from the mildly erotic to the hair-straighteningly disturbing. When you get your jollies watching two very poor graphical representations of people naked and stuck together it's time to revisit your priorities. Forget Second Life. Instead, try to Get A Fucking Life.

In the meantime, I suppose we should thank Second Life for keeping these weirdos occupied in their bedrooms where they can't bother the rest of us. Nice job guys, keep it up!


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Bombay

Well I survived my visit to India without ever having to use one of those unbelievable hole-in-the-ground, wipe-your-arse-with-your-hand toilets. Actually, had a rogue curry descended to explode out of my anus on the 1-2 hour journey to the office I would have been "shit out of luck". There are no toilets on the streets of Bombay, except in as much as the whole place is a toilet. Nor were there any trees you could shit behind. The whole place was a succession of hovel-like constructions lining the streets, with thousands of people everywhere, some of them washing in the gutter. You could theoretically have shit in the road - I'm sure no-one would have taken exception - but death would almost certainly have been swift, at the hands (or wheels) of the battered vehicles that choke the roads, veering left and right and sounding their horns continuously.

(Out of town you might have been tempted to wander into a field but cobras are there to keep you in line. The image of one of those hooded bastards rearing up to attack your scrotum would be too much to overcome save in the most dire of emergencies.)

There was one sign, at a major manufacturing plant, that really brought home the difference between India and the US. It was above the main elevator in the foyer of the main office. It was a fire notice - you know, one of those "In Case Of Fire..." things that usually directs you to an alarm, or an exit, or an emergency phone number. This one, though, was different. It read, word for word, including punctuation:

"In Case of Fire, Shout Fire! Fire!! Fire!!!"

Well fuck me! Really? That one never occurred to me. They might as well have put up a sign saying "In case of fire, run around screaming and piss in your pants" for all the good it would do. Things are definitely different over there. One of the places we might have gone to visit, on the Sunday after our arrival, was the Towers of Silence. This is where the local Parsi community lay out their dead on the tops of towers so they can be eaten by vultures. Unfortunately, what with all the pollution, urbanization and all that, vultures are not as common as they used to be. The Towers of Silence are therefore not a place you'd want to be on a hot day, so we passed.

The exception to the general architectural benightedness of the place was, of course, all the stuff the Brits built before leaving. Say what you like about the Empire but they could build a fucking nice museum/hotel/church/university. Judging by the state of the building that houses the Indian atomic energy program I'm surprised that they can make a cup of tea, let alone a reactor. Fucking miracle if they don't blow themselves sky high, if you ask me...

Anyway, the food in India was absolutely outstanding - spicy meat and vegetable dishes complemented by wonderful breads and rice, and the ubiquitous Kingfisher beer. No beef though - the cow is a sacred animal, revered by the local populace. You can see them in the streets and even the battered taxis avoid hitting them. Of course this might be less a matter of reverence and more to do with the ferocious pointed horns that they sport, which would open up an Indian taxi like a sardine can and kebab the occupants in a second. I think the meat was goat, which should be safe enough, but in a country where pre-natal scans are routinely used to sex-select for boys, the humble goat is the nearest thing to a wife that some of these poor bastards is ever going to get. Something I considered when I saw a man in the back of a three-wheeled vehicle clutching a goat - maybe this wasn't a farmer with a new purchase. It was a date. Still, he looked happy enough. After all, it could have been worse. He could have ended up with an ugly one...


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison

Going To India

The journey to India wasn’t exactly eventful. We flew through Chicago to London Heathrow and from there to Bombay. Yes, I know it’s supposed to be called Mumbai now, but the Indians there still call it Bombay so if it’s good enough for them why fuck about with it? The first leg of the flight was delayed for air traffic control in Chicago and it looked like we might get close on the connection. Then they brought the departure forward by fifteen minutes; the novices in the departure lounge thought this was a good sign but we know better, don’t we children? The only reason they bring forward boarding is to get the plane loaded and away from the gate so that they can use it for some other flight. Then they park you out on the tarmac somewhere and let you sit there. Sure enough, as soon as we started taxiing out, the pilot came on and said we’d have to wait for departure, until the storm came through. The phrase “lying sack of shit” came to mind. So I passed the time in conversation with the woman seated next to me who, both my colleague and I couldn’t help noticing, had wonderful red stripy thong underwear.

In London I went for a shower while my colleague went for food. The British Airways shower suite has wonderful multiple-nozzle showers – one drench overhead and one set of nozzles aimed approximately at ball-sack height. So I showered with the overhead and then turned the knob to “multiple mode” for that full crevice-cleaning effect. Bad move. The act of turning the knob also adjusted the temperature and I ended up with a double jet of scalding water straight to the testicles. One may be forgiven for thinking that I should be kept away from showers for my own good…

The London-Bombay flight was unremarkable; I did wake up at one point with something hard in my pants but it turned out to be my cell-phone, which I had neglected to remove from my pocket. Then we were in Bombay and, let me tell you, it’s different. The first thing I noticed, after we got in the car, was an inordinate number of wild dogs in the streets, along with people sleeping in the street. We were staying in the Taj Mahal Palace, which is a classy old-style hotel, but the hour-long drive takes you through some absolute squalor. It was clear that India isn’t China, or at least that Bombay isn’t Shanghai. There’s supposed to be about 18 million people in Bombay, and some 3 million come in on the train every day. The Indian culture is, I would say, more conservative than the Chinese; there are no porn channels on hotel TV and no karaoke bars. However we did get approached by a pimp when we were entering the hotel, who offered to arrange girls for us. The price was $300 for two hours which would be both an unreasonable amount of money and a ridiculous amount of time. Still, that was just his opening offer; I’m sure he’d have negotiated.

The next morning I was awakened by the sound of pigeons. Outside my fifth floor window the previously deserted street had been transformed into a teeming mass of people. And pigeons. Some genius had tipped out a barrel of seed for these flying vermin and they were frantically converting it into grey shit with which they were decorating the outside of the hotel. Breakfast was a leisurely affair out on a covered terrace. It did, however, highlight a very real phenomenon in India, the constant misunderstanding and failure to grasp basic requests. Don’t get me wrong, the service was excellent; it’s just that things didn’t quite turn up as ordered. I wanted eggs, bacon and sausage, but the thick English sausages, not thin ones. With mushrooms, and four pieces of toast. My colleague wanted eggs, bacon and sausage. I got eggs and sausage, he got eggs and bacon. There were three pieces of toast. The sausages were thin, which got me thinking that if this was the Indian idea of a thick sausage it’s not surprising the women looked kind of miserable. Still, we got it all sorted eventually.

We decided to get a massage to start the day off. Unfortunately only male masseurs were available and I applied my strict “only one knob in the massage room” policy and went for the weight room instead. In retrospect I am convinced it was a wise decision. Later in the trip I was being “frisked” at an airport security checkpoint in Delhi when the security guy asked me how old I was. I told him and he replied that I was “very muscular and handsome”. These are not words you welcome in this position, believe me. Maybe it’s the large male/female imbalance in India but it seems that there is more interest in your “thick English sausage” than is healthy. I’m just glad I hadn’t left my cell phone in my pocket. Who knows what he might have thought?


Copyright 2007 Edward Bison