Here Kitty Kitty

Some people like cats and some people don't. Personally I have nothing against them - it's not like I'm allergic or anything, and I don't run away when they come to see me (although their habit of jumping on your lap and turning around with their tail in the air to show you their pink sphincter is at best unsettling). I wouldn't ever choose to have one though. I'm not sure anyone actually chooses to have a cat - I've never met anyone who went out and bought one. They just seem to show up at the houses of soft-natured people and move in. This is what happened to my colleague Andy - one day four kittens showed up at his house in France and before he could say "no fucking way" his kids had adopted them and his wife started to feed them. Andy doesn't like cats. He wouldn't go out of his way to hurt one but he always wished they'd just fuck off and die.

Well, now he's down to one. The first one just disappeared, maybe inside a passing fox. The second, however, was a more traumatic experience for the family. His wife was always on at him to check under the car before driving off, just in case kitty was asleep under the wheels, and on this particular day he duly did so. However on engaging first gear and driving forward he felt a bump; on stepping out, sure enough, there was a cat behind the back wheel, flat in the middle but still wriggling at both ends. His wife was appalled and wanted it taken to the vet but it was clearly beyond the reach of earthly healing so Andy said he'd dispatch it and put it out of its misery. His wife went indoors so Andy grabbed a plastic bag and put the cat in it. Picture the scene as his wife walked back outside just as he was banging the cat in the bag against the wall. This did not earn him any pet care points.

Fast forward six months, to last week. Of the two remaining cats one had taken to sleeping in the garage, up in the area where the automatic garage door workings were located. (Don't ask me why - Andy had no idea either. Perhaps it was just a very stupid cat.) His instructions were to check before opening the garage door, although it's not clear to me how you would check with the door closed. On this particular Monday Andy was in a rush and he jumped in his car and headed for the office. En route he received a distressed call from home where tearful children were contemplating the small puddle of blood collecting under the cat trapped in the door mechanism, no longer in any fit state to wave its arse in anyone's face.

Andy is now, ironically, in the dog house. He conducted a mock-funeral for the cat and buried it, although this touching gesture was somewhat spoiled by the fourth (and final) cat proceeding to try and dig up its erstwhile sibling. You'd think it would be keeping a low profile instead - with Andy's track record its days are clearly numbered.

Andy shared his cat story with our team tonight; perhaps confession is good for the soul. Tomorrow I have a presentation to make to the group, announcing an organizational change. I'm starting with a new slide - on it is a picture of a dead feline by the side of a road. The caption: "The Cat Is Out Of The Bag". The Wednesday bad taste award is mine for sure...



Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Hello Belgium

Airline travel always brings out the worst in me. My otherwise sunny disposition is magically transformed into a misery-laden embodiment of impatience, loathing and hate by the ridiculous process of getting on a plane and going somewhere else. I was wakened this morning from a perfectly good sleep by my crappy alarm clock, reinforced by knowledge that I had to go to the airport and catch a plane to Brussels. (Not direct to Brussels, of course, but connecting through Chicago; direct flights only happen to other people, most notably people departing from a city other than St.Louis.)

At 10:45am the driver arrived to pick me up. I couldn’t help noticing that his vehicle looked like someone exploded a can of soda in the back. Plus the speedometer read zero for the whole trip. I wondered if it was broken or if he just disconnected it to keep the odometer reading low.

Half an hour later I began the process of engagement with the harridan at the American Airlines check-in desk. In spite of the services of the expensive business travel agent that my company employs, coupled with my high status on the airline, they fucked up my reservation again and now wanted $200 more from me to put it right. Arguing with airline personnel is like juggling dog shit – it’s utterly pointless. In fact you’d probably get more sense out of the dog shit. Still, after only thirty minutes wasted it was finally time to go through security. I joined a line filled with cretins who had never heard about taking off their shoes or putting liquids in little plastic baggies. Have you ever noticed how fat TSA screeners are? Yes I have my boarding pass out for your inspection you corpulent, thick fuck…

At 12:10pm boarding commenced for the first leg of my journey, to Chicago. I decided to pass the time reading the entertaining in-flight magazine. By 12:12pm I had now read all the entertaining parts of the in-flight magazine, including the Mensa quiz section, which of course I could not be bothered to complete. And we were still at the gate. Mensa intelligence levels don’t mean anything when you’re trying to get an airline employee with the IQ of a wasp, and a personality to match, to check the status of your upgrade.

Ninety minutes later we arrived in Chicago. Outside the land was covered in snow and all the fields were wearing a beautiful winter covering. Inside the heating was turned up too high and the concourse was littered with idiots dragging roller bags. I resisted the temptation to shoulder-charge the third person to suddenly stop walking in front of me so that they could gaze around with a vacant expression. It was close though. The two hours to my next flight were passed in a haze of over-priced airport pizza and wireless internet. I still had no news of my upgrade – apparently business class had checked in full so I boarded the flight and took my seat. Exit row aisle, no-one next to me. It really doesn’t get much better than that, which is overwhelmingly sad. Just prior to take-off a cheerful flight attendant came and gave me my upgraded seat. Two people missed the flight. Someone’s loss is my gain.

Up in business class I should have been sleeping but I decided to watch a movie and eat the in-flight meal. This is because I am pathologically incapable of turning down free food. (By the way, the movie “3:10 To Yuma” is absolute fucking shite.) Eventually I reclined the seat to its near-flat position and attempted to sleep. Unfortunately “near-flat” is not the same thing as “flat” and the seat sloped downwards so that I slid down it while I lay there. After an hour or two of sliding and rolling over I managed to get my underwear so comprehensively rolled up around my bollocks that I was forced to reach in and manually readjust mid-flight. I thought the flight attendant might offer to help – this was business class, after all. Still, at least she was friendly. In fact all of them were friendly, a first for me on international flights on American, perhaps a result of all the regular international flight attendants being booked on their annual refresher course with Satan. I celebrated by eating all the left over business class luxury chocolate assortment in the galley while waiting for the toilet to become vacant.

Eventually we arrived in Brussels, where it was still dark. Before landing we were served an omelette that appeared to have several servings of male DNA inside and a cup of tea that tasted as though it had been used as bathwater by a family of sewer rodents. The rest of the day was productive but uneventful, with the exception of having to fight a deep desire to fall asleep around 2pm this afternoon (7am back home), a feat that was only achieved by drinking diet coke and having an argument with someone. I’m now back in my hotel where the walls are so thin that I swear I can hear the Belgian bloke in the next room scratching his arse. I am experiencing the deep joy that is business travel – the miniscule pleasure of having a pleasantly attractive front desk girl deliver my wireless password to my room, followed by the almost irresistible urge to walk downstairs and kill with my bare hands the noisy gits standing outside the hotel laughing at inane Belgian jokes. At times like this I realize that I’m not alone. There must be thousands of pissed-off airline travelers and tired, irritable hotel denizens who are just one more problem away from snapping and beating the piss out of some stupid bastard who so desperately deserves it. It’s only a miracle it doesn’t happen every day. On that cheerful note I’m going to get some sleep, provided that the Belgian bloke next door can lay off scratching his arse for five minutes…


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Ten Dollars A Pound

Here's one you can file under "You Couldn't Make That Shit Up": The British government is considering paying fat people to lose weight. Yes, the problem of growing numbers of flabby bastards infesting the green and pleasant land is to be addressed in traditional bureaucratic style - "It's no-one's fault but we have to do something so why don't we throw money at them and see if that helps?" The actual words from the government report into the obesity epidemic are:

"We will look at using financial incentives, such as payments, vouchers and other rewards, to encourage individuals to lose weight and sustain that weight loss, to eat more healthily, or to be consistently more physically active."

I remember one of my mates telling me about a race he'd been in when we were high school age. It was a simple foot race that they had for the kids at some church camp that he attended. He won, but when they came to hand out the prizes the sanctimonious bitch organizing it gave him one of those vacant religious smiles and said "As the Bible says, the first shall be last and the last shall be first" and promptly gave the prize to the fat kid who came last. The sad irony was that my mate had been a fat bastard himself (earning the nickname Jabba a few years previously) but had lost all the weight and become "normal" sized. He should have been a poster child for the new government campaign but instead the reward went to the fat fucker who barely waddled over the finish line. If the government was in charge of rewriting the Bible it might say "The successful shall be penalised and the lazy shall be given free stuff", which sounds suspiciously like "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs", the mantra of communism. I advised my mate not to attend any more Bible camps because they were clearly administered by fuckwits.

It got me wondering though whether a few hundred dollars in incentives would really have any effect on the obesity problem. (By the way, why do they call it an obesity epidemic? An epidemic is defined as an outbreak of disease that spreads rapidly. Last time I checked being a fat bastard wasn't contagious. It's not like you "catch" a propensity to supersize your burger meal by sitting next to someone is it?) Wouldn't there already be enough incentives available to people to encourage them to be thinner? For instance:

• Being able to see your own genitals without the aid of a mirror.
  
• Having sex with thinner girls that you don't have to roll in flour in order to find the entrance.
  
• Not having to buy two seats on planes.
  
• Not having bits of yourself amputated as a result of diabetes.
  
• Not having Greenpeace try and encourage you back into the sea when you lie in the surf.
  
• The joy of being able to reach your own arse and wipe it.
  
• Your furniture lasting longer.
  
• Lower skin area reducing expenditure on moisturizer, bodywash and other "by the square foot" bathroom products.
  
• Savings on the colossal amount of food that you've been consuming.
  
• Being able to walk through doorways without turning sideways.
  

I don't mean to pour scorn on the government's well thought-out plans (actually I do, on account of them being shit, but let's pretend for a minute), it's just that people already ignore so many good reasons to lose weight. Some people believe that poor people are more likely to be fat because they can't afford healthy food, so we need to give them more money and then they'd eat better. What utter bollocks. If you give them more money they won't eat better, they'll just eat more. This is because the same stupidity that stops them getting a better job also stops them figuring out that eating pizza followed by ice cream seven days a week is not the cheapest way to feed a family. The crap they eat isn't low cost - they don't buy it because they have to, they buy it because they want to. I don't see legions of poor kids in the supermarket whining as mum drags them past the spinach and forces them to march down the cookie aisle.

Anyway, I was worried for a moment as I'm sure there's a Congressional committee on obesity somewhere busy coming up with some variation on this idea for the US. But then I relaxed. It couldn't happen here - after all, the US is staggering under a $9 trillion national debt. If you've walked around a WalMart recently you've figured out that giving a few dollars to every fat bastard in America would just about finish the economy off.

So, back to Jabba. How did he lose the weight? He ate a diet of potato chips, cheese, chocolate, candy and peanuts. Seriously. Whatever was going on in his metabolism it certainly didn't fit with accepted thinking in UK government circles. Which is probably why he's now thin and the government, by contrast, is thick.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Balls Out

My boss went to the Bodyworlds 3 exhibition last night and, like most guys who go, he was persuaded to by his wife. I don't know why men seem to be less naturally curious about skinless corpses, although it may have something to do with the fact that we are mostly programmed from birth to focus in on the appreciation of only a few very specific areas of female anatomy. In fact we'll go out of our way to see as many different versions of those bits as we reasonably can before we finally expire, but they really only get our attention when they're alive and covered with skin. Dead ones appeal only to a very diseased minority of our population and dead, peeled ones are, frankly, disturbing.

Anyway, I told him yesterday that I had found the exhibition interesting but that there had been just one thing that really surprised me and I'd be interested to see if it surprised him too. So today he came by my office to find out what it had been, and I told him - it was the balls. I never really gave balls much thought - they're handy to have, provided you can avoid getting smacked in them, and I find they can be relied upon to stay in their skin bag, hanging behind "Junior Bison". For this reason I always assumed that this was their natural state - hanging behind. However it seems that once you remove said skin bag they actually hang in front, dangling from a root on the lower abdomen in a perplexingly misplaced manner (as per the photo above). This apparently hadn't surprised my boss, who was better versed in the evolutionary emergence of balls as part of the transition from fish to person, and consequently understood why they hung there.

I brought this up at the dinner table tonight and managed to get a predictably horrified reaction from Bison Daughter by proposing that my body be donated to Bodyworlds after my death. Mrs.Bison reckons they'd like the muscles and I though it would be handy to be on display - family members could come and meet me on tour. Unfortunately it would likely mean that any such encounter would involve my skinned corpse posed in some bizarre way with its de-sacked nads dangling counter-intuitively; possibly not the best way to be immortalized. In reality I found it hard to understand what would make someone want to be preserved that way. I mean, everything is splayed out and laid out for all to see. For ever.

Maybe these are the same people who frequent nudist camps (or "clothing optional resorts" as they seem to like to be known). I mean, I can get my mind around people wanting an all-over tan and getting it all out on a beach, although a burned scrotum full of sand would be enough of a deterrent for me, but what the fuck would possess someone to go and hang out at a resort where everything was done naked? The thing about balls is that for the purposes of table-tennis, flag football, working out, running or just about any other form of activity they function much better when suitably restrained in some form of underwear. Nothing about them swinging against your leg will improve your golf game. Boobs, too, can swing wildly and interfere with all sorts of sports and games - forget about playing pool. Plus after a few years of support-free living you'd probably be wearing them around your waist.

Which brings up another point - why is it that the sort of people who want to be naturists seem to possess the very kind of bodies best left covered? Big hairy bellies hanging over swollen purple genitals, and stretched-out pendulous breasts with south-facing nipples, all finished off with liver spots and cellulite. Perhaps it's for good reason. I imagine that these resorts frown on guys walking around with a bone on, which would have to be a hazard if you were surrounded by attractive women wouldn't it? I don't know about you but I still get unscheduled "alarm calls" from Junior Bison even without any nudity around me. Wouldn't you walk around in a state of constant fear, worrying that at any moment you're going to pay some complete stranger a great big throbbing compliment? Mind you, not being worried would be worse. I'd hate to think that one day I could find myself in that situation and be absolutely confident that I wouldn't get wood. Fucking hell, you might as well be dead.

Still, if I was dead I suppose I'd be beyond caring. Maybe I'll fill in the Bodyworlds form and leave them my corpse, provided they agree to pose it with a big grin on its face and a massive great erection. Line up by Mr.Bison - free admission if you can throw a ring over it...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Form A Line For My Money

Apologies in advance - Mrs.Bison pointed out that my writing had got a bit "serious" recently and I had intended to write a gratuitous piece including rectums, animal sex, penis jokes and very large breasts. However, when I saw the wonderful new stimulus package for the US economy unveiled today I felt it could not pass without comment. Clearly we have entered the era of government by the retarded, for the retarded. Basically the package involves rebates of $300-1200 per person, depending on how many kids you have. However, not only does the rebate not apply to people earning above $75k per year but it does apply to tons of fuckers who don't pay any tax in the first place. In this sense it's not a rebate at all, is it? It's a cash handout which cleverly avoids the very people who paid most of it in.

Let's step back and consider what the stimulus package is designed to achieve. The idea is that you inject cash into the US economy by giving it to people who will then, ideally, go right out and spend it on goods and services, thus jump-starting the economy again. This premise makes two key assumptions:

1. People stopped spending because they ran out of cash; if they stopped for some other reason then giving them cash wouldn't make them start would it? They would already have cash.
   
2. The recipients' response to getting some cash will be to instantly go out and spend it all. If they don't it won't affect the economy.
   

Remember how we got in this mess. Millions of people bought shit with money they didn't have and the economy swelled not with the economic fruits of production and value creation but on the back of retail sales of goods that were mostly produced in China. Then people suddenly balked at having to pay back what they borrowed and the economy went in the shitter because people stopped buying. Giving free cash to a nation addicted to spending money it didn't earn is a bit like handing a heroin addict one last fix as he promises that things will be different "if you just help me get through today". Bollocks. So everyone spends a bit of cash and then what? The withdrawal from the addiction of retail-driven economic growth has to come sooner or later and pussy politicians can't hold back the tide. They just want to be seen to be doing something.

It might also be worth considering that you can't buy much with a check of that size. It's not like it will suddenly trigger a boom in car sales. You might hope for a blip in flat-screen TV sales but it will most likely go on burgers, beer, cigarettes, porn, candy, dope and hookers. I've seen "COPS" on TV; I know who these people are. To the extent that people actually buy goods they will almost certainly be made in China, so what did we just achieve?

This whole fucking circus will cost $140 billion. This is at a time when we're whining about our bridges falling down and our roads crumbling. Rather than handing out free cash to Joe Lazyarse and his buddies why not spend $140 billion on making some repairs? Then people could work for their money couldn't they? As it stands all I see is the very dumbshit politicians who presided over our economic decline and balloning debt, as they refused to rein in entitlement spending, now taking my cash away in the form of taxes and giving it to people who didn't earn it with the express intent that they will go and piss it away at WalMart. What the fuck? They didn't earn the money did they? So watch closely as $140 billion ends up trickling through the cracks via the big retailers all the way to China.

Oh, and by the way, if you decided to have four kids then that's your prerogative and your choice. You fucking well feed and clothe them. Why should people with more kids get more free money than people with less? Or none at all? What kind of bullshit reasoning is behind that? America is becoming more socialist by the day - we'll take what you earned and redistribute it to those who didn't earn it, whether you like it or not. If Joe Bloggs down the road decides he doesn't want kids and would rather drive an Aston Martin than pay through the nose for a college education then good for him. Why should Uncle Sam be taking his money and giving it to Juan and his six kids next door?

I don't get to vote in this election but if I did it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference. The principal qualification for political office is clearly a full transorbital lobotomy, whatever side of the house you're on. The Chinese must be pissing themselves with laughter...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Pig Out

There is allegedly a long tradition of religious tolerance here in the US - I say allegedly because any society that has a history of burning people at the stake for witchcraft can hardly be said to be tolerant of other people's beliefs. In fact it's fair to say that the puritan heritage exhibited very little tolerance for basic common sense either. Nevertheless there is now a constitutional amendment that at least goes some way towards ensuring religious freedom, although it doesn't (contrary to popular belief) guarantee "equal rights" for all religions:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.

So all is well for the Church Of The Jedi, a new church established in the UK today by two brothers who clearly possess no desire ever to get to grips with an actual woman's vagina. They can proliferate their beliefs over here with impunity. These beliefs, by the way, are expressed in the form of such things as sermons on the Force and lightsaber training. Now I heard this come up a few times on the radio today and each time the presenters ripped the piss out of these guys and their made-up religion. And that's OK; after all the First Amendment doesn't create a right of freedom from ridicule, or criticism.

However, as I mentioned, the Church Of The Jedi was established in the UK, which has no constitution of any description and consequently no First Amendment. As a result the country is governed by a ruthless regime of political correctness, exemplified today by the decision of the British Government's educational technology agency to reject a story based on the Three Little Pigs from their annual awards because the subject matter could offend muslims.

Let me just run that one by you again, in case your incredulity caused you to fall off your fucking chair and insert your head in your own rectum in pure despair. The Three Little Pigs, a beautiful and traditional story that's been around the once-proud nation of Great Britain for countless generations is being hidden away in case the presence of a cartoon pig story offends the fucking jihad-supporting, female-oppressing, prayer-call wailing, nut-job muslim immigrants. The phrase "political correctness gone mad" no longer gets close to describing the sad state of affairs in my ex-homeland.

By now there's probably a bunch of whiny wankers out there ready to speak up for the muslims. Fuck them. This is a religion that promises death to anyone that questions or mocks their beliefs, and that doesn't fit with my idea of a modern free-thinking society founded on reasoned debate and tolerance of dissent. If the liberal lobby are so determined to stamp out behavior that might offend any religious groups I assume they will be cracking down tomorrow on all the people ridiculing the Church Of The Jedi. After all, if religions need to be respected regardless of the offensiveness of their beliefs and practices then I can't see why it should be open season on the poor old Jedi church. To the unbiased observer I'm not sure one religion's meditation and lightsaber practice is any more weird than the other's refusal to eat pork and fasting for a month.

I'm no fan of the Catholic Church - they're a corrupt organization of pedophile protectors as far as I can make out - but at least I'm free to state that as my belief. I'm sure if they had the chance to reinstate the Inquisition they'd be happy to burn me at the stake for my saying that but until then they're pretty benign when it comes to criticism. When was the last time the Catholics called down a Fatwa on some poor bastard who'd done a cartoon of them? So why all the special consideration for the bloody muslims? If they want the protections of a free society, including freedom to express their beliefs, then they need to take what comes along with that - freedom of others to question, lampoon and criticize their beliefs.

So fuck the UK government and their pathetic accommodations. Three cheers for the Three Little Pigs. And hands off the Church Of The Jedi unless you're prepared to take the piss out of the muslims too. Otherwise, in the words of the great teacher Yoda:

"A wanker you will be. Hmmm. Yes."


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Why Pay More?

It's always funny, when gas prices jump by fifty cents, to hear everyone talk about how this will get people here more interested in fuel economy as part of their car-buying decision process. Sure enough half the crappy car commercials on TV are now including some pitch for the fuel-sipping thrift of their particular vehicle, all the way down to "the most fuel efficient V8 pickup on the market". Never mind that an extra dollar a gallon is nothing compared to the veritable arse-fucking that consumers in Europe experience every time they go to fill up.

It's true that there seem to be people out there prepared to pay for extra fuel economy - just look at the sales of the Toyota Prius. It's worth pointing out, though, that people who buy a Prius aren't buying economy, or making a rational economic decision based on sound analysis of costs; they're buying a fucking big badge that says "I'm a caring earth-lover". The Prius sells because its whole image screams "tree-hugging, gay-marriage supporting, carbon neutral vegan" right down to it's upturned bathtub scarab-like shape. Honda also had a hybrid version of the Accord but no-one bought it, not because it wasn't as good a car as the Prius but because you couldn't tell it was a hybrid - it looked just like any other Accord. Those cardigan-wearing nancy-boy Prius lovers are as guilty as anyone of basing their purchasing decision on image rather than fact.

Image is the major factor in automobile purchasing, even in the age of internet-driven fact-comparison. Why does anyone buy a Hummer H2? Is it because they need the rugged off-road capability that Hummer guarantees, to ensure they make it home? I think not - in my experience you are unlikely ever to see an H2 with so much as an ounce of mud on it. It's just a big toy, partly a chance to drive something like one of the Tonka toys you'd play with as a kid, and partly a penis extension. The same thing goes for your average BMW - all the car magazines jerk off over the car's superior handling and performance at the edge but for your typical buyer, who's driving in a straight line at 40mph to the office, it's a badge of recognition, a way of saying "don't confuse me with the kid in the Chevy Cavalier". You're buying the badge on the back. Maybe people buy a Dodge minivan because they really believe that it will stop their kids hating them, like in the commercial.

I saw a review of the Scion xB the other day. This is the boxy Scion vehicle that was just rounded off a bit and freshened up for 2008. It has a 2.4 liter engine developing about 160hp and 160lb.ft torque, which is to say that it goes OK. It has a basic but practical interior, the sort of thing that would have been considered quite luxurious a few years back. And here's the kicker - it could be yours for less than seventeen grand. New. This is the less well-explored aspect of fuel economy: If you drive 12,000 miles a year and get 20 miles to the gallon (remember, this is the US!) you'll buy 600 gallons of gas. If gas prices jump a whole dollar it will only cost you an extra $600 per year. Should you get 25mpg instead you'll save 120 gallons of gas; at $3/gallon this is a whopping $360 per year.

So, assuming you need to change your car at all, the first thing the economically-minded among you should be looking at is the cost of the car, not the mileage. If you buy a Prius you'll probably pay about $24k. You'll get an extra 20mpg versus the Scion which will save you about 180 gallons of gas, or $540 a year. So after thirteen years you'll have saved enough money to justify the extra cost of the Prius, not adjusting for time-value of money and not doing the calculation exactly with tax incentives included, because frankly I can't be arsed. Plus you'll have spent thirteen years driving around in an upside-down jelly mold with a perpetual virtual sign over your head saying "WANKER".

For the cost of an Acura TL with optional navigation system you could buy a Scion xB, a map and enough gas to keep you going for ten years. And bear in mind that an awful lot of vehicles come in around that price range, and are never asked to do more than driving to the office, the stores and the gym.

So am I going to buy a Scion? Am I fuck. It's not that it isn't a good car, and I might be able get over the boxy shape, given time. It's not even that I need the 300hp that's available in most of the things that I actually want to drive. The problem is that the Prius weirdos have it right in that people judge you by what you drive. If you want a job where you ask "Do you want fries with that?" drive a Scion; if you want to be considered for the Senior VP position maybe a BMW 540i is a better bet. That jump in salary pays for a lot of gas. Plus, someone drove me to lunch today in a car with heated seats, and I have to say that force-heated testicles on a cold day is something I could really get used to. And that's not an option on the Scion, unless you spill your Starbucks...

Friends Like These

One of the sad things that happens to you as you get older is that your friends, on average, become more sensible. This happens for a variety of reasons:

• All your stupid friends died in cases of self-inflicted misadventure, often involing fast cars, winding roads and trees.
  
• You got married and your spouse banished all your old friends in an attempt to civilize you and render you safe for breeding.
  
• You matured into the sort of person that your parents always wanted you to be, began hanging around with people like them, and would now be better off dead.
  
• You got tired of all the hangovers and swapped bar hopping for Pictionary.
  
• It's harder to misbehave with the same reckless abandon when it's your car, your house and your neighbors.
  

They just don't make friends like the ones that you have when you're a teenager or in college/university, and no matter how hard you try you just cannot bring yourself to replicate the ball-shrinkingly stupid shit you did when you were younger. When was the last time you phoned a buddy and asked "What are you doing tonight? You wanna go out and drink eight pints, try and get off with some chunky girls, go down the chip shop and get chips and curry sauce, walk home in the freezing cold and talk about what it'll be like when we get jobs and can afford decent cars?"

Friend selection at that age should never be about picking the one with the right family connections, or good grades, or country club membership. You should choose a few people a notch or two higher on the bad behavior scale than you, so you get to experience interesting new shit, but people who will stand by you in times of trouble, up to and including a full scale bar fight, unless it was your fault, brought on by you vomiting on some hard bloke's girlfriend. These are not people you bring home to introduce to mother and father over a dry sherry; they are the marrow of your life - the ones with whom you'll make the memories that will sustain you thoughout that long and, frankly, somewhat fucking dull phase of your life when you get progressively more sensible jobs, and a somewhat sensible family. Possibly.

My old university mate Daz was a case in point. I have no fucking clue what he did after university (where he completely and utterly failed to earn any sort of degree in three years of "study") beyond getting a job in a battery factory. He was a completely drunken cunt most of the time (at least in the evenings) and was consequently enormous fun. His tendency to consume excessive quantities of "purply nasty" snakebite and black, and then vomit down his own legs, made his subsequent advances on women all the more hopeless, but in spite of this he managed to bag off with a girl called Heidi with the most extreme (and completely natural) breast to waist ratio I have ever seen. She could barely walk they were so large; she was a waif-thin girl with a slight lisp and constant back pain. Daz knocked a hole in the brand new wall of his campus room swinging a five-iron in a space that was barely large enough to hang a coat - for him there was no activity from which you could not wring some fun, provided you first lubricated it with alcohol.

You can never go back, unless of course you never stopped living like that, in which case you're probably reading this on someone else's computer since your semi-derelict mobile home won't even have electricity, let alone internet access. No matter how much fun that last round of golf was, or how great the family holiday, or how good the steak you had last night, it's not the same as the unadulterated joy of youthful and exuberant bad behavior. Which is why, when you find yourself in a position to regress with like-minded people you should grab it with both hands. It doesn't matter if you feel like shit tomorrow - no-one will ever forget how you puked in the yucca plant in the foyer of the Sheraton. Just avoid the activities that would lead to a custodial sentence, leave the car keys at home and don't forget to ask for extra curry sauce on the chips.

Just to get you in the mood for your next bout of bad behavior I have attached a photograph of Daz doing what he did best - completely unwarranted anti-social acts, in this case urinating in the sink in the shared kitchen at my residence at university ca.1987. There was no reason whatsoever, which is why it had to be done. Cheers Daz, wherever the fuck you are!



Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Home Sweet Shed

Here's the story of the three little pigs, updated to reflect the wonderful suburban housing of the Midwestern United States in the twenty first century.

Once upon a time there were three little pigs and they all decided to build houses to keep them safe from the big bad wolf. The three little pigs all sat down to decide what material of construction to use for their houses.
"I know," said the first little pig, "we can use straw!"
"Dumb motherfucker" said the second pig "where are you going to get the straw? Have you ever been to Home Depot? Look down the aisles and tell me where you see a sign that says straw."
"What about brick?" said the third little pig "That'll keep the wolf out!"
"Fuck the wolf," said the second little pig "have you seen the cost of brick? I've got a better idea. We can use a timber frame, nail on some plywood and wrap it in Tyvek. Then we can add some cheap vinyl siding and stick some thin tarpaper shingles on the roof. If we build three of them we can call it a subdivision and give it a fancy name, like Winding Oaks, or Porcine Manors."
"Won't that be a bit, well, er, flimsy?" asked the other little pigs in unison, their curly tails twitching in consternation.
"It meets all the applicable codes," replied the second little pig.
"But aren't the codes just bullshit verbiage that's been watered down by the powerful homebuilders and their lobbyists in order to keep their costs down while leaving the homeowner to deal with long term quality issues, resulting in a time-bomb of shoddily constructed housing and the continuing flight of wealthy homebuyers to new fringe suburbs?" asked little pig number three.
"That's as may be" said the second little pig who, truth be told, hadn't really grasped much of the sentence beyond 'verbiage', "but we need to watch out for resale value and what moves houses these days is kitchens and bathrooms. I'm planning to get some granite counter tops, brushed aluminum appliances and under-cabinet lighting."
"What about a strong fence to keep the wolf out?" suggested the first little pig, trembling a little at the thought of becoming thin strips of bacon.
"I'm afraid we can't have fences in the subdivision" argued the second little pig. "It lowers the tone. We need open spaces and zoysia grass. And subdivision indentures, rigidly enforced to make sure everyone keeps their lawns looking nice."

So the three little pigs tottered off to Home Depot and loaded up with knotty and warped 2x4 timber, sheets of plywood and rolls of waterproof wrapping plastic. They set to work with their little nailguns and very soon had three shoddily built houses standing on the rocky ground. Back they went for the vinyl siding and tarpaper shingles, and soon they were standing inside, looking around at their new homes.
"We'd better get started on the kitchens and bathrooms then" said the first little pig.
"Or maybe we ought to finish the basement and install a flat screen TV" suggested the third little pig.
"Nonsense" said the second little pig "we need to make the yard look nice, with some landscaping - maybe some small shrubs, a low retaining wall and, of course, the lawn.
"But what about the wolf?" asked the other little pigs.
"We have to think about our property values, and a major factor is kerb appeal" said the second little pig "let's get back to Home Depot and buy the landscaping materials.

So the little pigs got to work digging, planting, building and watering, when all of a sudden there was a squeal, and there was the wolf, lollopping off with the second little pig in his mouth. He paused at the edge of the property line and bit deep to sever the arteries in the little pig's neck, then he settled down to rip his flesh off the skeleton and devour it voraciously.

"Do you think that'll be bad for the property values?" asked the first little pig anxiously.
"I don't know - it depends whether we have to declare a wolf on the selling documents I suppose. replied the third little pig.
The wolf stood up from the carcass, his snout bloody, and began to walk towards the other little pigs. Quickly they ran back into the nearest house and slammed the cheap front door with its brass fittings and battery operated bell that sounded like Big Ben.
"Go away Mr.Wolf" said the little pigs as they cowered behind the door "We've used the mortise lock - you won't be able to get in!"
"You can't stay in there forever" sneered the wolf "you should have locked in your mortgage at a low fixed rate. I reckon the bank will be foreclosing in about a week, and when they do I'll be there to rip your entrails out."

So the moral of this story is if you want to keep the wolf from your door stop pissing away money you don't have on luxury fittings in a house that's basically built like a giant fucking shed. And while we're at it, don't buy a bell that sounds like Big Ben, unless you want everyone to know that you're a complete wanker. That's all for tonight folks, I'm going to bed. In my wooden house, under a tarpaper shingle roof, with crappy cheap construction throughout, all of it to code. Many thanks to the homebuilders of America, without whom shit like this just wouldn't be possible.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Accumulated Wisdom

Last night was the Detroit auto show charity preview black tie event; apparently this is the big annual event in Detroit and there were certainly a lot of people in tuxedos and long dresses in evidence (the latter mostly women). Essentially you buy a ticket which entitles you to walk around the auto show and sit in the cars ahead of the general opening of the show. They serve complimentary champagne and other drinks, in case the drinking before and after the event leaves you wondering what to do with your hands as you walk the floor.

We had bought a batch of tickets for the show and invited customers for pre-event drinks and post-event dinner, and the whole thing was done well. At the end of the evening, when all the customers had departed, I was prevailed upon by a colleague to visit a local bar ("only a short walk") for a small scotch. Or two. So the two of us headed out of the Ren Center in downtown Detroit for the allegedly short walk to a bar the name of which I cannot recall, but which had a very nice redheaded bar-wench called Kim.

It's not as though I didn't know that it was cold last night - after all, we'd been over to the Cobo Center and back by shuttle - but I had failed to appreciate the vital difference between a short trot to a shuttle bus and a walk down the block with a biting Canadian wind whistling across the Detroit River and cutting through the cheap fabric of my rental tuxedo like a thousand icy razor blades. Yes, it was cold; so cold that about all I could say as we cut across the grass and waited to cross a six lane highway was "Fuck. Fucking cold. Fuck me. Where's this fucking bar? Fucking hell. Fuck." and so on. The bar turned out to be about two blocks away which meant that by the time we arrived my testicles had ascended in frozen terror to somewhere in the region of my spleen.

I was not disappointed, however. This was a crowded, noisy, smoky neighborhood bar and we were instantly and fabulously out of place by virtue of both our age (versus a twenty-something clientele) and our tuxes. People swiftly made way for us at the bar, perhaps because they reasoned that two large solid-looking blokes in tuxedos walking into that bar at that time of night were not fucking about. Or maybe they were just being friendly - it was certainly a hospitable bar. The aforementioned Kim knew my colleague well from previous late night visits (and lock-ins) and we were offered cakes to help some adjacent twenty five year-old birthday celebrant mourn the passing of his youth (although we were at pains to point out that at twenty five the best was almost certainly yet to come for him). We were inclined to sample peaty scotch from the Islay region but one of the disadvantages of small neighborhood bars is that they tend to cater to people whose idea of sophistication is a beer and a shot, so the selection of single malt was limited to Glenfiddich. Nevertheless Kim was attentive to our glasses and we soon had the remains of the bottle dispatched.

Once we had put the world to rights and agreed that it would definitely be better to shag a fat lass than a bony one, even the big fat one at the end of the bar, I decided that it was time to brave the cold and return to the hotel. I'd booked an early flight back to St.Louis in the hope of salvaging some weekend, little thinking that I'd be offered a lock-in. I toyed with the idea of just drinking through, and showing up for my flight still in tuxedo but I've done that before and it always seems more attractive when you're in the warm bar surrounded by fun people with a drink in one hand and a pretty bar-girl in front of you. The miserable reality is sobering up just enough to start your hangover in a check-in line, feeling like a monkey shat in your mouth, too tired to sleep and dehydrated to buggery, surrounded by irritating airline employees and dumbass passengers just itching for you to smack them.

So we left the bar and immediately realized that we were not in Kansas anymore, Toto. Not only were we the only two white faces anywhere but the tuxes were more than a little out of place. We might as well have been wearing a sign saying "Rob me please. And kill me too, if you want." Detroit is a bad city; this was not a particularly bad area (if it was I wouldn't be writing this without the assistance of a medium) but it was also not an area to hang around in so we ignored the nice non-reflective people asking for money and walked back in the "not so freezing now we've diluted our blood with scotch" wind.

I'd agreed to meet another colleague in the foyer at 6:30am to head out to the airport and set the alarm in my room accordingly, not trusting the hotel employees to program a wake-up call for me. It was only going to be three hours anyway. In due course I was awakened by a noise that I realized, as I turned on the light, was not the soft, gentle tones of the radio alarm but the harsh jangling of the telephone. I looked at my clock. It said 6:40am. I looked again. Oh shit. With no desire to spend a bonus day in Detroit (or a bonus morning, come to that) I leapt out of bed. Time for a piss and on with the deodorant. In my semi-conscious stupor as I applied the deodorant it flew out of my hand and fell into the toilet. I left it there. Climbing into my clothes I stuffed the tux and all its accoutrements into my bag and staggered down to the lobby.

We retrieved the rental car from the spectacularly inanimate valet people at the hotel and were soon enjoying the emptiness of I-94 on the way to the airport. In the end we had sufficient time to spare that I could purchase a nutritious breakfast of a Milky Way and Gatorade before the flight. Which just goes to show - if in doubt, drink through the night. It reduces the risk that you'll fail to notice that the clock in your room is actually exactly twelve hours out; so my 6am alarm would, I discovered, have gone off at 6pm today. About fifteen minutes ago, in fact. And I still ended up feeling like a monkey crapped in my mouth so I might as well have had some more scotch and walked out in the relative safety of near-dawn. Oh well, you live and learn, which is exactly the point I was making to that birthday boy. But I think he was too drunk to notice.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Dressed Like A Ponce

This week I get to put on a tuxedo and go to Detroit for a customer event. This is more than a minor irritation - leaving aside the fact that I'll miss my soccer game to experience instead the scrote-shrivelingly cold Detroit winter, and the joy of flying Northwest (an airline that hates me and wants nothing more than to take a crap on my travel plans), I also have to rent the penguin suit. This time I decided to try Mens Wearhouse for the rental because as the hairy bloke in the commercial keeps telling me, I'm going to like the way I look. And he guarantees it.

The trouble with renting a tux is that they only appear to be rented out for two occasions:

• Wedding parties, where it is the role of the wearer to get as drunk as possible and attempt to shag a bridesmaid.
  
• Prom night, where it is the job of the wearer to attempt to get drunk and deflower his date.
  

The common themes seem to be drink and attempted sex, and this always seems to be reflected in the quality of the rental wear, leaving it looking like something in which you might bury an old tramp, if you needed to make him look sort of presentable for the funeral while saving as much money as possible for something more interesting.

Still, this time I expected things might be a little better. For a start, there was an extensive range of suit options. Admittedly most of them would leave you looking like a cross between a homosexual nightclub act and a pimp, but that's always your prerogative. The whole ensemble was also available as a package including the nasty patent leather shoes and a choice of shirt, tie and vest (waistcoat) options. (Don't rent a cummerbund unless you want to look like a cunt; even James Bond couldn't carry that one off.) So I went in last week and ordered all the stuff, making sure that I tried as far as possible to go for a more conservative "club bouncer" look rather than the "cheap lounge singer" image. And today I got to go back in and try all the shit on.

Credit where it's due - the sizes were all about right, and the trousers and jacket didn't look bad (although I resisted the obvious temptation to give them a once-over DNA check with a blacklight). The shirt, however, was a different story. You know those vet shows on TV - the ones where the caring vet is on his way to a grand dinner-dance when he gets an urgent call to go an tend to Farmer Smith's prize cow who is struggling through calving? He's there in the cow-byre, up to his knees in straw and shit with his dinner jacket hung on a nail and his sleeves rolled up. There's a metal pail of water next to him and he has his arm shoulder-deep in the cow's nether regions. It's all blood, shit and afterbirth as he delivers the calf and everyone cheers in relief. Well, the shirt he was wearing was the one they gave me today.

I could only guess at the real story. The stains on the cuff were pretty extensive, and I don't think beer could have been the cause (after all the beer round here's practically water anyway). My working assumption is that either the prom date or the bridesmaid was on the blob at the time of the last wearing, leading to a messy encounter in the dark and much distress when the light was turned on and the bedsheets revealed. What I don't quite understand is why the shirt was laundered and put back into service rather than being bagged and incinerated as a biological hazard.

The store was very accommodating and offered to bring a replacement to my office tomorrow but I ended up buying a shirt since the rental ones have the opacity of single-ply toilet tissue (maybe that was the secret use to which mine had been put) and create a corresponding image of the wearer. So, assuming I remember to pack the whole assortment of cufflinks, studs and other crap I will, if I am lucky, now only look a partial twat. I should blend in perfectly.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

I'm Sweet Enough...

Years ago I got a job in sales for a large candy manufacturer in the UK. (Actually they called themselves a "confectionery manufacturer", and the first lesson on day one was how to spell confectionery). I bet it sounds like a great job - all the candy I could eat, plus a company car - but the reality was more down to earth. For a start we had to make fifteen calls in a day, which meant you just about had time to walk in, survey the outlet, have the customer attempt to hand you a box full of out-of-date product, tell him you weren't going to accept it this time any more than you were last time, and leave again. Fifteen times.

Of course they didn't let us loose on high quality customers while we were training; instead they sent us out to practice on small customers who were usually handled only by a contract merchandising organization. Unlike our competitors we didn't actually sell anything direct - customers had to buy through wholesalers instead, which put us at something of a disadvantage as customers generally hated this arrangement. It also meant that we were the sales equivalent of eunichs since we couldn't actually sell anything; instead we attempted to improve the merchandising of our products so they were in all the best "selling spots".

My sales career didn't exactly get off to an auspicious start when I rolled up at my first training call with my boss. We walked up to the door but the storekeeper was somewhat preoccupied with fighting off an apparent thief. There was a lot of blood involved and the thief was inside while the store owner held the door closed outside. On the whole we decided that he was perhaps not going to be receptive to our pitch about improving his revenues by re-merchandising his counter-top confectionery display, so we left.

Generally the reactions of customers varied between disinterest and mild hospitality. Disinterest was noticeably safer, since hospitality could result in offers of food or drink that might be a subsequent source of profound regret. Few customers were even remotely hostile, although the areas in which they did business sometimes resembled minor war zones, with thick protective glass in front of the counter. On one occasion I parked as close as I could to one store on my training route but quickly established that this was not a place one frequented wearing a suit unless one was a defendant on the way home from a successful court appearance. I considered the sum which I was being paid to make this call and the alternative (and attractive) option of chicken kiev and chips back at my hotel, and turned around.

In spite of the fact that I ate candy every day, took bags of it home and spent just about every lunchtime at McDonalds, I lost about eight pounds doing this job. It was a miserable existence, mainly because I had to pretend to give a flying fuck about the dirty, whiny bastards who constituted the majority of my customers. It takes a very special type of person to run a CTN (confectioner, tobacconist, newsagent) or corner shop in the UK; more specifically it takes a miserly semi-literate with borderline sociopathic tendencies and poor personal hygiene. (Such as my part-time employer during my teenage years). You call on fifteen of these every day and pretty soon you'll be wanting to beat their (tiny) brains in with a rock. In fact that may well have been what I witnessed on my first day on the job.

The day I realized that I hated my job I was calling on a store that rented videos, sold candy and also offered paan. A lot of my customers were of Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi origin and paan is a palate cleanser or breath freshener made from a mixture of assorted seeds, wrapped in a big green leaf. As I stood feigning interest in this process, watching them select seeds from a huge number of pots and combine them on a leaf made moist with what looked uncannily like Elmers glue, they made me one to try. I cannot fault them for kindness (unless they were only pretending to be kind in much the same way I was pretending to be interested) but I was left with little choice but to eat it. It's not that I was worried about the implied insult - I just didn't want to be a pussy.

The thing about eating something made of seeds in a leaf is that it tastes exactly like a bunch of seeds in a leaf. And if you think back to the last time you had a craving for a leaf full of seeds (presumably never) you will understand the sheer disgustingness of consuming one. The leaf was of the sort you might find on a rubber plant, only larger and "greener". The seeds had the consistency of woodshop floor-sweepings with an admixture of grit. The glue merely tasted like glue. I ate half and left the store with my head held high, my pride intact and my tongue and cheeks coated immutably with tiny bits of seedy shit.

"Fuck it" I thought "I can't keep pretending to like people. There's no telling what crap they're going to feed me." Since then I've never looked back. And now, in 2008, I'm finally hoping to get the last of the fucking seeds out of my teeth. Maybe.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Talk To The Animals

By the time you read this it will probably be Monday morning. You may well be at work, pondering the futility of your existence. Or, in the case of anyone living in Dallas, the futility of your football team's existence. Nevertheless I am here to tell you that it could be worse. Today's offering in the category of "Jobs No-one Needs" is Pet Medium.

I don't know what classes you take to prepare for a career as a pet medium. My guess is that drugs would be more helpful. Lots and lots of drugs. In fact the only thing sadder than being a pet medium is probably being the person paying $75 an hour to a pet medium to help them form a better relationship with their dead cat. It's worth pointing out here that pet mediums (and amazingly there is more than one in the world) don't just talk with your dead pets; they also communicate with your live ones, relaying messages to you about what they're really thinking. This is what makes a career as a pet medium so much more fulfilling than that of a "dead people" medium. Not only do you not have to draw your contacts solely from the ranks of the deceased (who aren't there anymore to tell their relatives that you're talking bollocks) but you can expand your sales pitch to the realms of the living (albeit only pets, who also are in no position to tell their owner that you're still talking bollocks).

The work of a pet medium is not limited to communicating with your pet, however; they also offer healing. The specific methods for healing your pet get a bit vague and appear to fall into the category of "things which you can offer without any training or certification whatsoever but which have fancy enough names that you can charge a bundle for them". One example is aromatherapy. We all know the principle of this - you expose someone to nice smells and they get better. OK, I'll suspend disbelief for a second, but here's the thing: I know what dogs like to smell, and I wouldn't pay anyone to serve these things up on purpose. They don't seek out peppermint oil or sandalwood; no, they prefer essence of other dogs anus, fragrance of their own testicles, fire hydrant urine, roadkill and fresh excrement. Lovely!

You'd think that life would be tough as a pet medium - after all you're essentially peddling bullshit to people who should know better. It's worth remembering though that there is a sizeable subset of pet owners who are so freakishly fucking obsessed with their dogs and cats that they are willing to pay almost any money to some dumb bitch who will tell them that "yes, little Kitty loves you very much but just wishes you'd rub her tummy more in the evenings".

Here's a little test, just in case you're considering hiring a pet medium and you would like to know whether they are genuine: just ask "Why does my dog keep licking his balls?" If you get any other answer than "Because he can, of course" then you can safely assume the medium is a lying sack of poodle droppings.

By the way, if you happen to be attempting to make contact with a black cat called Arthur, don't believe any pet medium who tells you that he's at peace on a higher astral plane where he's perpetually chasing wool. He is in fact (at least partly) contained within the knobbly tread of the offside rear wheel of my neighbor's truck, from which he is apparently proving to be tricky to dislodge with a pointy stick. See - life could be worse.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Absolutely, Sir Thomas

With the release of the film "The Bucket List" it's going to become extremely (but temporarily) fashionable to compile lists of shit that you want to do before you die. You even hear about people writing "life mission statements", which has to be the very apogee of self-absorption. It's at times like this that I think back to the sage advice received from my father; he once recited to me a quotation attributed to Sir Thomas Beecham (a famous English conductor in case, like me, you are a one-man cultural wilderness):

One should try everything once except sodomy and morris dancing.

I always thought this was excellent advice, especially the part about sodomy, so I attempted to look up the quote today. It wasn't to be found (at least in the kind of cursory online search that was the limit of my commitment to literature) but I did find a similar quote attributed:

Try everything once except folk dancing and incest.

Hmmm, can't argue with that one either. Trouble is, there must be more things than sodomy, incest and folk dancing (morris or otherwise) which should be scratched from the to-do list. That got me thinking about sodomy. No, not in the sense of trying something new, but in regard to the precise definition of what constitutes sodomy. I, like most people, always had it fairly narrowly defined as "man fucking man in arse" but apparently there were a good deal more acts blamed on the people of Sodom and rendered into law under the term "sodomy". One definition broadens the term to include fucking a man or a woman in the arse, while another includes any oral or anal penetration. Whoa! Hold on a minute Mr.Judge, are you telling me that getting a straightforward "woman-on-man" blow job would put me into the category of a sodomite?

There exist even broader definitions such as that used in Ecclesiastical or religious law, where sodomy is defined as any sex act except vaginal penetration between a man and a woman (and that probably only in the missionary position). So getting a topless hand-shandy is right up there with fucking a dog in the "Go straight to hell, do not pass "Go", do not collect $200" stakes.

No, as far as I'm, concerned sodomy means the same as buggery, so I looked up buggery. Well bugger me! Apparently the courts have interpreted buggery to mean the act of anal intercourse with a man or a woman, or the act of vaginal intercourse by either a man or a woman with an animal. This clarifies things a little bit but still raises one obvious question:

If you fuck an animal in the arse, have you exploited a loophole in the buggery laws which could lead to acquital? Well, Perry Mason, apparently not in 17 US states where fucking an animal isn't an offence at all. Anyway, I guess the whole point Sir Thomas was trying to get across, assuming he ever said anything like this in reality, was that you may as well try anything that takes your fancy because you only get one life. And since the whole concept of sodomy is just the sexual hang-ups of the Catholic church, who it has to be said have more sodomites per square foot than any other religion known to man, you may as well go for it there too.

So when someone asks you what you'd have on your personal bucket list I suggest you tell them "I'd like to smear honey on my nipples and have it licked off by a pair of chinchillas while I mount a completely shaven female goat in a bath of lime jelly." Or you could just punch them in the head instead, which I have to say will be a more difficult temptation to avoid than sodomy. Or buggery, come to that...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

How To Be Politically Incorrect

I don't know about you but when I finally broke down and got an iGoogle home page it came with this "How To Of The Day" gadget from Wikihow where some group of like-minded people with nothing better to do share insturctions on how to do something. These range from the potentially useful (How to buy a motorcycle) through the arcane (How to grip the ball to bowl offspin - not much use in the US where cricket ranks below synchronized sodomy in the sports popularity list) to the simply bizarre (How to hug a stranger). Today's delights included "How to respect a transgender person".

Is it now the case that absolutely nothing anyone does or wishes to do can be considered abnormal? We've probably already reached the point where even expressing surprise that someone would want to have their dick turned inside out will give rise to the charge of intolerance or "hate speech". Nevertheless I read through the guidance and it did raise a few questions:

Some believe the problem lies in society's refusal to acknowledge the variations of sex and gender present in nature (including human beings).

There are only three varieties of sex and gender present in nature - male, female and hermaphrodite. And there's fucking few human hermaphrodites so it basically comes down to male and female. Society may well be justified in refusing to recognize any others on account of the fact that they don't fucking exist.

If the person was assigned male at birth, she is a transwoman, MtF, or simply a female/woman. If the person was assigned female at birth, he is a transman, FtM, or simply a male/man.

This is bullshit speak at its best - people aren't assigned gender at birth like it's a label you can change later. It's not like going to the DMV and waiting to see what number plate they give you. You're male or female by chromosome type, end of story.

Asking about peoples' genitals and how they have sex is not appropriate, in the same way that asking cisgendered (people born in the sex they identify as) people how they have sex is not appropriate.

OK, forget whether it would be good form or not to ask someone how they manage to interlock aftermarket genitals, the real question here is "who the fuck invented the term cisgendered to mean all us normal men and women?" I suppose they needed some word other than "normal" to identify men who think they're men and women who think they're women, because "normal" implies that they are "abnormal" doesn't it? And they can't be abnormal (even though the meaning of the word, "not normal, typical or usual" seems to be perfectly applicable) because that would imply deviant in some way. I have a chemical background and am therefore familiar with the cis- and trans- prefixes in denoting the possible relative positions of two groups on a C=C double bond but how that relates to my potential desire to be a woman is beyond me.

Do you remember that scene in Monty Python's Life Of Brian where the People's Front Of Judaea is sitting around and Stan announces that he wants to be a woman and they should henceforth call him Loretta? He wants to have babies, and John Cleese gives this great little speech which culminates in this bit where he says something like "He can't have babies - he hasn't got a womb; where's the fetus going to gestate? Is he going to keep it in a box?" Back then Life Of Brian was controversial because it satirized religion; these days it would be banned for exhibiting intolerance towards transgendered people.

There is no "cure" for being transgender, except to correct the physical appearance to match the mental gender identity. There is a problem with the body, not the mind.

This is one assertion with which I have a colossal fucking issue. How can you say that when a person born with a perfectly healthy body wants a sex change there is something wrong with the body? I'm sorry, Stephen Hawking has a problem with his body, as do many other people with MS and ALS; wanting to be a different gender is all in the mind. You can call it a chemical imbalance or whatever you like but there's nothing wrong with these people's bodies. In fact there's another class of people who aren't happy with their bodies and who want to change them through surgery. They have "body dysmorphic disorders" which cause them to want one or more of their limbs removed in order to make them "complete". Note that this is called a "disorder", implying that it is a medical issue, not a question of being "assigned too many limbs at birth".

So if it's perfectly natural to want to have your dick cut off and its skin stuffed inside you like the flap on the end of the turkey, what could possibly be wrong with someone wanting to have both their legs cut off so they can spend the rest of their life in a wheelchair? Below is a quote from a man seeking to have both his legs amputated above the knee, in a BBC interview:

"For me sexuality is being comfortable with your body and enjoying your body."

Sounds a bit like the whole transgender thing to me. Now perfectly physically healthy people are getting amputations which render them cripples because of some serious and untreated mental problems. Is that really so very different from wanting a perfectly healthy penis removed?

Maybe the real issue is the whole psychiatric industry that has grown up around this subject, all of them in a big rush to cash in, as was pointed out in a Sunday Telegraph article:

Some critics are even going as far as to say that psychiatrists have not, in fact, "discovered" transsexuals but created them. The problem is that psychiatrists, surgeons and counsellors have a vested interest in diagnosing as many transgender people as possible. "I felt they couldn’t wait to get hold of my money" said Sandra, a twenty five year-old, six foot, MtF bus driver, "they would have diagnosed a German Shepherd as transsexual if it had enough money for the consultation."

Human beings seem to be unique in our ability to inflict horrific suffering on ourselves based on the disparity between how we look and how we want to look. Just consider anorexics starving themselves to death, all the while worrying that they are too fat. Sometimes when people are fucked up in the head they need help; they don't need to be turned into a protected class for discrimination litigation purposes.

Anyway, the other Wikihow today was "How to make a hair roll" and I had to give that one up very quickly on account of not having nearly enough left on my head (or any other part of my body, for that matter). I immediately felt left out; I briefly considered gender reassignment so that I could be a woman and roll my long hair but Mrs.Bison told me not to be so fucking stupid. I think she likes my penis where it is...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Expletive Deleted

You know you're living in the Mid-West when a local township decides that it's time to introduce new legislation to curb bad language in bars. For no apparent reason St.Charles City Council has decided to ban swearing, table-dancing, drinking games and profane music in bars, just in case people get too rowdy. They even want to ban profane literature and entertainment. This is hard for me to understand. I used to live close to pubs growing up in the UK and there was a fair amount of antisocial activity perpetrated by the customers, especially at closing time, including (but not limited to) fighting, vomiting, shouting, singing, urinating in gardens, vandalism and sleeping with ugly women. It had such a profound impact on me that I could hardly wait to join in when I was old enough.

Now, as a fully paid-up sensible adult I can see how all those terrible things we did after eight pints could be construed as disruptive or yobbish. I bet, though, that if you looked for the underlying cause of all the above bad behavior it had absolutely nothing to do with the bad language we were using, or the profane nature of our conversation. No, it was caused by us being arseholed. Forget bad language - alcohol is what caused us to stagger up the street, piss up the side of someone's car, noisily hurdle their hedge and attempt to consume the special fried rice from the Yummy chinese takeaway in Kenilworth, a dish that resembled nothing so much as perfumed cat with bits in.

This begs the question - why are suburban Americans so obsessed with bad language? What is it that leads them to believe that saying "fuck" in public is going to lead to the end of civilization as we know it? Bear in mind that this is a society which has yet to confront drink-driving as a serious cause of untimely death. Thousands of well-paid suburban professionals here happily get in their expensive cars whilst half-cut on pissy beer and drive home. Will the St.Charles police be out in force, cracking down on these potential killers? No, they're too busy checking that no-one said "cunt" in the sports bar down the street. Swearing kills - didn't you hear?

Nothing brings this home to you like the radio. Leave aside the almost hysterical over-reaction to Janet Jackson's almost-boob on TV and the subsequent purging of most risque humor from regular radio; the simple matter of song lyrics in St.Louis (and presumably much of the rest of the country) has now gone beyond laughable to utterly sad. They played "What It's Like" by Everlast, off Whitey Ford Sings The Blues while I was driving to work today. All the bad words were replaced by squeaky sounds so as not to offend the populace. Here are some of the words that were considered too bad to hear:

Fucking; goddamn; balls; whore; green; drugs; shit-faced; chrome 45; shit.

Now I'll let them off with "fucking" and maybe the shit ones, although it's not exactly subversive, but when did any reference to drugs and guns in a song become off-limits? By pretending they aren't there do these pricks think they'll go away? "Maybe if we stop our kids hearing the word "drugs" on the radio they won't use!" Bollocks. There are so many drugs in schools already, plus the endless (and pointless) "Dare" campaigns to keep kids off drugs, that today's teenager has a knowledge of illegal substances beyond anything I could have hoped to acquire in my innocent youth. And as for guns, fuck me! Hardly a day goes by that some spotty twat isn't caught bringing a gun to school, so it's a bit late there.

It's enough to drive you to drink, which is convenient, because that's all you'll be able to do in a St.Charles bar if the city council gets their wish; everything else will be forbidden. Still, there is an upside. I confidently predict an upswing in the general consumption of crappy chinese food in the St.Charles area as a consequence of the new focus on drinking. In fact I have secured the recipe to "Perfumed Cat" from the good people at the Yummy in Kenilworth and am planning to open the "Yummy Too" in St.Charles next month. I do hope you come. If not I'll hunt you down and piss on your car...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

A Wonderful Idea

A terrible thing happened yesterday; we finished the box of Cadbury's chocolate biscuits that we bought for Christmas. It wasn't a big box (actually a tin) but you always hope that when you lift out the black plastic insert that there will be another layer of biscuits underneath, even if it's desperately obvious just from examining the depth of the tin that it couldn't be the case. I mentioned to Mrs.Bison how wonderful it would be to own a "bottomless biscuit box", in which every time you pulled out the plastic insert there would be revealed a new, fresh layer of wonderful chocolate covered biscuits underneath. For ever and ever. I have to say that she was unconvinced that this would be an entirely good thing, unless we were planning a future as gigantic fat bastards, but it got me thinking: if you could have a bottomless packet of any grocery product, what would it be?

Leaving aside the high probability of obesity and early death resulting from a bottomless cookie tin there is also the problem of boredom. I like Cadbury's biscuits as much as anyone but I'm not sure I would want them quite so much if they were available every day. That's the whole point of "luxury" foods - if you have them all the time then they aren't special anymore. I'd want to mix things up a bit, with mint Oreos, Fox's biscuit assortment, Clubs, KitKats and Penguins. Same problem with bottomless chocolate boxes - too boring.

What about a bottomless sixpack? Endless beer, any time you want - keep it in the fridge and it's always chilled. Not bad for the kind of sad wanker who only drinks one type of beer (step forward anyone who thinks Budweiser really is the King of Beers, you sad, pathetic fuck). The world is full of excellent beer; there are many hundreds of beers brewed in tiny Belgium alone, almost all of which could be recycled after drinking to produce something not entirely unlike Budweiser, but none of which I'd want to drink for the rest of my life.

This could be a problem with just about any food. You think you like it now, but just wait until you've been at it for five years. I suppose you could go with something basic, like bread; you'll always need bread. But even that gets dull if you're always eating the same crap. So maybe the answer isn't a food item at all. What about some other supermarket product? There's a good size list of things which, when I run out of them, are a pain in the arse:

• Toothpaste, especially after I've been squeezing the last bit out for two weeks.
  
• Shower gel.
  
• Deodorant, since I find smelling like a wildebeest's crotch to be more than a little disturbing.
  
• Razor blades.
  
• Binliners or rubbish sacks.
  

But when it comes right down to it there's probably one product whose absence from my house would cause more aggravation than all the others put together. Yes, it's bog roll. For anyone who's got down to the cardboard tube and attempted to peel it into thin layers in order to finish the job, for all those people who've fingered the local free newspaper just to see if it might be acceptable and for those who've staggered out of the smallest room in a sumo stance with their pants halfway down, trying not to spread the chocolate while they search for any serviceable alternative, a bottomless packet of toilet roll is for you. No one cares if you only ever have white - it never goes out of style. No-one ever gets bored with one variety because no-one cares about it; you just stick it up your arse so what is there to be worried about?

Still, it's a fucking stupid thing to be thinking about because it's not going to happen. Tomorrow I'm going to the store to buy more biscuits. And while I'm there I'll pick up some more bog roll - you can never have too much you know.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

World's Scariest Animal Videos

I was listening to a couple of guys in the gym yesterday discussing the relative merits of a video that one had loaned to the other. This particular video was not something you'd typically pick up at Blockbuster, and apparently involved two young ladies providing services to a horse that a horse would not normally expect to receive, even from another horse, since horses are not possessed of opposable thumbs. These videos fall into the category of "I can't believe they're doing that" compulsive viewing. I assume that what motivates people to watch is the same impulse that makes people look when they drive by a bad road accident; although I can't imagine people exchanging videos of road accidents, Fox certainly filled a lot of time with its "World's Scariest Police Chases" which amounts to much the same thing.

Anyway, I asked about the videos that have done the rounds and they include, by all accounts, man-on-chicken activities as well as traditional girl-on-horse, and dog-on-woman, followed by man-on-woman-after-dog. I understand the compulsive nature of the viewing; I just hope, for the sake of humanity, that there aren't too many people out there who actually get aroused by this sort of thing. One of the gentlemen at the gym started off on a whole discussion about the high percentage of people growing up on farms who, when surveyed, admit to having engaged in sexual activities with animals, and in particular the favored status of sheep in this regard. I didn't ask how they go about recruiting people to administer these surveys, how many surveyors get their heads punched after asking small-town Cletus if he's ever molested any of his livestock, or what would possess small-town Cletus or any of his kin to answer "yes" to a question of this nature.

It occurred to me to wonder whether humans are the only species that engages in sex with other species. I mean, you don't hear of dogs getting it on with cats, or giraffes shagging gazelles (although there may be some physical limits that come into play if you happen to be a giraffe). Why do humans (albeit a small, twisted segment of humanity) want to have sex with other animals? I don't know about the sexual habits of other species (comments welcome from qualified biologists) but I'm willing to bet that we're the only species that crosses the species boundary to get its jollies.

Someone commented that even if you're a lonely Iowa farm boy, ugly and surrounded by hogs, surely it would be better just to jerk off rather than mount the bacon, as it were. On the other hand tales from the prison system seem to suggest that even a felon's bung-hole is preferable to many other felons than just going manual. It is, without any doubt, a disturbing world in which we live.

Anyway, it's Sunday, the day on which many of us confront the miserable reality of going back to work for five more days on the morrow. A thought to cheer you up as the inevitable looms ever larger: there are many miserable jobs out there, replete with irritating co-workers, inadequate remuneration and uninspiring daily activities, but I'm willing to bet that you wouldn't trade for the man whose job it will be on Monday to fuck a chicken, or any of the women whose first assignment involves fellating a quarter-horse. You see? Life seems better already doesn't it? It's just a matter of perspective. And maybe that's the real reason those videos make the rounds: they are guaranteed to make your own life seem suddenly wonderful.

Having said all that, my life doesn't seem too bad right now, and I don't believe it would be improved any by watching a man doing it with a chicken, so thanks but no thanks.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

The Smallest Office

I think when they constructed the toilets in my office building they left out some of the more expensive bits, like ventilation. This office is not even ten years old and was presumably built with the benefit of the very latest in latrine engineering but in spite of this I walked in to take a piss this afternoon and was greeted with a smell like a dirty protest being carried out by three tramps in a prison cell. I honestly wondered if someone had curled one down on the floor, maybe caught short as a result of one of the more offensive cafeteria offerings from lunch time.

The men's toilet has two urinals and two cubicles, the latter barely separated by metal-clad dividers so that you're practically sharing the shitter with the bloke next to you. (I haven't checked out the ladies' but I'm sure it's got couches in case they need to lie down, giant tampon dispensers, heated seats, luxury soaps, real towels and thick pile carpet.) This means that in the unfortunate event that you feel the need to have a shit on company time (and, let's face it, for some of us that's the most productive we get) you really don't want anyone in the other cubicle. I don't know about you but I loath having to share the sounds and smells of someone else's defecation when science has provided a perfectly good mechanism to prevent this. It's called a wall; I hear they've been around for years and are very popular. No walls in our company shitter though (in common with most toilets in the US), just dividers that you could probably limbo under, a sobering thought if you're hoping to avoid advances from Larry Craig and his buddies.

So you can do the "drive-by" and swing into the toilet casually, checking if either of the cubicles is occupied; if so you can divert to the sink and just wash your hands, or turn and head back out as if it's the most natural thing in the world, prior to checking out a different toilet. Let's suppose you get lucky and claim a cubicle. You check for piss on the seat (why do people piss on the seat?) and the presence of toilet paper; everything is ready, so it's pants-down and settle in. As if by some homing instinct some other fucker suddenly decides that now is the time for them to disgorge the reheated vegetable lasagna from lunch. You hear them come into the cubicle next to you. They start arranging paper on the seat in an elaborate prelude to sitting down. You're thinking "Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off!" They pull down their pants and you try and ima