Burning Rubber

I sometimes wonder if I was born twenty years too early - there are so many ways in which life has been made easier and more fun through the application of improved technology. This occurred to me when I was looking at my car today - the thing is nine years old and apart from needing a wash it still pretty much looks like it did when I bought it. The first car I ever bought was ten years old and it was a rusted-out piece of shit, not so much a car as a collection of automotive projects bolted to a chassis and painted orange. Admittedly when things went wrong with it I could fix them myself - nowadays if one of the "you're fucked" lights on my dashboard came on it'd be in the same category of "things I could do myself" as intestinal surgery, dentistry and tattoos.

Other things also got better. I haven't been watching developments in the condom industry very closely over the years but back in the day things were relatively simple. The machine in the pub toilet would give you a choice of Featherlite or Fiesta (basically plain or colored); it wasn't worth spending a lot of time deciding because invariably your coin would get jammed and you wouldn't get either. Even if you went to the chemist (drugstore - this was back in the UK) you didn't exactly have to wade through a hundred options. In fact the only ones I can remember were regular, colored, extra thin and "ribbed, for her pleasure", which roughly translated into "ribbed, so you won't feel a fucking thing". I know there were flavored ones, glow-in-the-dark and stuff like that, but they were typically novelty shit, not the sort of thing you'd trust to prevent unscheduled offspring. Who needs a glow-in-the-dark penis anyway? Unless your partner is going to attempt to run-up, do a double handspring from the bedpost and land on your erection with the light off I can't see the point. "Look, I know it's dark in here but if you haven't worked out by now that my prick is down here, right above the sack with the balls in, I think we have bigger problems."

I just checked out the product line at Durex (for the Brits out there) and Trojan (for the Americans) and things certainly moved on a bit. I'd give the edge to Durex, but that might just be nostalgia. Years ago I used to go shopping with a girlfriend and the first section of the supermarket was the healthcare products aisle. I'd throw a family pack (that doesn't seem right, does it?) of Durex Elite into the bottom of the shopping cart and she'd immediately try and cover it up with fruit and vegetables, in case people noticed that we were HAVING SEX. Durex don't spell things out too graphically though. Their "Extra Safe" product, with thicker walls and extra lubricant, should really just be called Durex Arse Grade. And what's with "Performa"? A benzocaine additive for climax control seems like maybe a bit too much technology. How about you just imagine a fat bloke sitting naked on a glass-topped table instead?

The Trojan site is much more fancy but there are a few things I wondered about. For a start, there's this thing called the Twisted Pleasure condom which looks like it would completely kill any sensation in your nob-head. In fact it reminds me of one of those ice creams we used to get as kids from the van that drove around - you know, the ones that were coiled down on the cone from a dispenser. Perhaps that's the idea - you want your partner to think "That looks just like an ice cream - maybe I'll lick it."

The other one that caught my attention was the Magnum XL. It's even bigger than the Magnum - for all of those guys that are way too big for a standard size. The Trojan people aren't stupid though - they know blokes will buy the bigger size even if they don't need it, so they "taper" the base (i.e. make it narrower) in order that it won't just slip right off your "average size" dick. I can see why this would be a big seller in the drugstore, where blokes can ask for it by name, or conspicuously present it to the check-out girl, but will people really buy this online, where there isn't anyone to notice?

Both brands now have "warming" condoms that are supposed to bring extra sensation. I suppose it's like Bengay or Deep Heat on your dick, but presumably not quite so strong. Here's where I part company with technology and remind myself that on the other side of the condom is something that was already designed to provide all the pleasurable sensations necessary. In fact the only thing I used to require of a condom was for it to feel as much as possible like it wasn't there at all. No color, no flavor, no glowing in the dark, no need to prolong the pleasure or provide ribs, dots and twists.

There was one brand I tried which was fantastic. The sensitivity was great and I thought I'd found a product I could really love, right up until the point where I pulled out and found the ripped rubber all rolled up, concertina-style, around the base of my shaft. Which just goes to show that the best condom of all is the one you don't have to use. (Of course this doesn't apply if you're planning to shag a transsexual street prostitute, with track-marks on her arms, up the arse tonight.) At least technology has given us the Trojan Mint Tingle - designed so she can blow you without swallowing and you can kiss her afterwards and get the taste of minty freshness. Everyone wins! (She being your girlfriend/wife, etc, not the street prostitute - I hope I didn't have to spell that out.)

By the way, don't get me started on the female condom - that thing's like a fucking bin liner. I've seen flat-pack furniture that's easier to assemble. Unless you're planning to fantasize that your partner is a plastic love doll I'd give it a miss if I were you...



Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Beep Beep

Just in case I needed another reason not to get my penis pierced, I saw this news story today about a 37 year-old woman who was forced to remove her nipple piercings to get through a TSA screening at a Texas airport. It seems that one of them required pliers to remove, which the TSA thoughtfully provided. Now the woman is all pissed off that she was made to pull out her nipple jewelry in order to make her flight and is calling for a "civil rights" investigation.

I don't know about you, but when I think about civil rights I'm picturing really big social issues like the right to vote, sitting at the back of the bus and the end of segregation. Somehow wanting to have your fucking tits pierced without getting hassle at an airport metal detector doesn't have quite the same resonance. Why does everything now have to be a "civil rights" issue? Typical of the exaggerated bullshit that accompanies all these civil rights complaints is the assertion by the old boiler concerned that reinserting her titty bars caused "an enormous amount of physical pain". Really? I would have thought that novocaine-free root canals, kidney stones and bone cancer might be the kind of things that would fall into this category; shoving these things back in her mams probably caused something more like "minor discomfort", but that doesn't sound so good in the news, does it?

Anyway, if you're going to shove bits of steel in all your sensitive parts I would imagine that your pain threshhold would have to be fairly high. The chances of me agreeing to have someone shove a giant needle through my tongue so they can insert a screw are somewhere between "zero" and "no fucking way". I can understand ears (if you're a girl), but the idea of piercing something filled with sensitive nerve endings such as, for instance, your helmet or clitoris, strikes me as completely ridiculous. I used to think it would be funny to go through the airport screening with a huge Prince Albert and set off the metal detectors, but not so funny that I'd actually allow someone to do that to Junior Bison. What do you take me for? A complete twat? "Just lie back and relax - I'm going to shove a steel ring through the tip of your old chap." That's the stuff of nightmares - the kind where you wake up sweating and clawing at the sheets, where you check your dick just to make sure everything's OK before you lie back on the pillow.

In case the whole procedure isn't enough to put you off, if you do end up with a penis ring you may find that piss dribbles down your leg, requiring you to sit like a girl. Now that's attractive, isn't it? I've been at sports events where you have to fight your way to the trough in the men's khazi through a mass of blokes six deep. Any hint of "performance anxiety" and you're fucked - you go in, piss, zip and out, before someone wizzes on your shoes. The last thing you need is to piss on your own shoes because of your cock piercing.

By the way, I just asked Mrs.Bison if I should get a cock ring and her response was "No. No. Absolutely not. What the fuck is wrong with you?" I guess that means that in future I'll be setting off metal detectors with my watch, belt or keys, like any normal human being. And pissing standing up...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

It Was An Excellent Year

Since returning from China I've not been sleeping worth a shit so today Mrs.Bison bought me a bottle of port. As I think I've mentioned, my favorite drink is Scotch but for some reason port seems to help me sleep. Scotch, by contrast, just makes me happy to be alive. I went to put the port in the cupboard where all the drinks are but it was full; this is mainly a result of all the bottles of tequila that I've been given over the years and still not drunk. It's not that I don't appreciate the occasional tequila but it's not the kind of drink you settle down with in the evening. (It's more the sort of drink you imbibe to excess before vomiting uncontrollably down someone else's stairs.)

In rearranging the contents of the cupboard (it was either that or drink a bottle of tequila to make room) I discovered a bottle of home-made wine from 1994. Now let me immediately state for the record that I only once attempted to make wine - I am quite aware that home winemaking is generally the preserve of beardy morris dancers and that since God saw fit to bestow the gift of the off-licence or liquor store on his people, it would be the height of ingratitude to attempt to make cheap substitutes from turnips, berries and other unsuitable shit.

My old friend Fergie used to make wine before he was old enough to drink it. While the rest of us would show up to parties with cans of lager and bitter or bottles of dry cider he would roll up and produce two bottles of anonymous red liquid which he had himself fermented from some obscure fruit. I am aware that wine is a complex drink with many varied tastes and fragrances; I have made it very clear that I am never going to be a wine-lover and therefore confine myself, on those rare occasions where I am forced to choose a wine, to Australian stuff which always tastes OK and doesn't cost much. I am therefore not qualified to render an opinion on your typical wine, but I feel confident in asserting that one would not have to be an expert to figure out in about half a second that Fergie's wine tasted as much like piss as is possible for something that has not actually passed through the urethra of a mammal. It also had an alcohol content slightly lower than that of vinegar and was consequently useless for advancing any state of drunkenness.

So my decision in 1994 to make wine was something of a character aberration, a sudden impulse brought about by discovering large quantities of elderberries and blackberries by our local canal and thinking "I bet I could do something with those!"
The first thing I did was porcupine my hands collecting the fucking blackberries, leaving about a square foot of skin behind on various bushes in the process. I then had to phone my future father-in-law to get a recipe for wine. (This is what we did before the internet was invented. Had I gone to the library to get a book on home winemaking I may as well have taken out a subscription to "Popular Morris Dancer" and "Beard Weekly".) I also had to buy a whole load of glassware, chemicals, sugar amd bottles for this wine production, which ended up costing me somewhat more than buying eight cases of cheap Australian Cabernet Shiraz would have done.

The resulting elderberry stuff (christened Chateau Basingstoke Canal) was not bad, with the caveat that (a) it was made from berries along a canal that had probably been multiply soaked in dog urine, and (b) I have three fifths of fuck-all discernment regarding wine. The mixed elderberry/blackberry stuff was somewhat less good, principally on account of excessive sweetness caused by a dodgy recipe. (Future father-in-law had a beard but was never a morris dancer and so was only partly qualified to dispense winemaking advice.) Even the good stuff, however, didn't come close to comparing with the taste of, say, a basic Glenlivet, or even eight cans of Special Brew, and so it was not surprising that there was some left over when I moved to the US.

I am planning to open the last remaining bottle of Blackberry Death and see how much like vinegar it tastes. Not today, though, since I want to be able to get out of bed without vomiting tomorrow, and I have low expectations for this stuff. One thing is for sure: even if I took the bottle and strained it through eight pairs of incontinent old man's pants it could hardly taste worse than the piss that Fergie used to make. Wherever he is today I hope he's found the fucking liquor store.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Can You Speak Louder?

There must be something that happens to people when they get old which results in the complete atrophy of any remaining good taste or sense of style. I think I pointed out before that old people's taste in clothes seems to run to beige, brown, grey and not much else, all of it topped off with hats that only an old git would choose to wear. Well there's another way that old farts choose to advertise their proximity to the grave - with their cars.

Step one is the selection. First go out and buy a huge Cadillac, Mercury, Buick or something similar. Then have the dealer fit three vital aftermarket options:

• White wall tires
  
• A vinyl roof
  
• One of those chrome parcel racks on the rear trunk lid

These accessories make absolutely no sense whatsoever - nothing looks quite so shabby on an old car as a tatty vinyl roof - but the stupidest thing has to be the parcel rack. Tell me, how many times have you ever seen anyone carry anything on their parcel rack? I saw one of these specimens today - an old bitch weaving down the road in a huge sedan with a vinyl roof and a parcel rack. She could hardly see over the dashboard and was so old that her next trip might well be made lying down in the back of an even larger car, maybe in a big wooden box. You know she had to have made a special request for that parcel rack but you also know that although she'd probably had them fitted to her last five cars she had never used one once.

Maybe it's the car dealers who do it. You know they're always trying to sell "dealer-installed" accessories in order to boost their dismal profit margins on new car sales. In the case of younger buyers it's all about alloy wheels, spoilers and upgraded stereos but for old people there must be a list of items they try and get sold when they take the order.

"OK Mr.Fulldepends, that's one Cadillac DTS in beige, now how about a nice vinyl roof and a parcel shelf then? It'll make the old girls at the day care center wet with desire. At least the ones who weren't wet already."

"Oooh yes please! And can you lower the seat so I can't see out the front, and install the box of tissues on the back shelf. And I'd like a new plaid rug too."

Maybe I'm feeling less than well-disposed towards old people today because I happened to catch a bit of "The Ten Commandments" on TV today, with Charlton Heston as Moses standing there with his huge beard and sandals giving Yul Bryner as Pharaoh a hard time. And all the while I was wishing that Pharaoh would just cut his fucking head off and be done with it.

"Pharaoh! Let my people go!"

"Take him away and cut his fucking balls off. And make him get a haircut, for Osiris's sake!"

When Moses eventually reached the Red Sea and parted the waves with his staff I could have sworn I saw him climb in an Oldsmobile 88 with a brown vinyl roof, put on a hat and drive really slowly in the left lane all the way across. And he ran over three goats and never even stopped. Typical.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Feeling OK?

There is apparently much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the world of AIDS research on the news that not only do the hugely expensive vaccines in development not reduce the risk of getting AIDS, they actually increase it, maybe by a factor of two. One US funded study was abandoned after it was realized that the vaccine did no good and was probably harmful. The study was being done on homosexual volunteers in the Americas, the Caribbean and Australia; I have to assume that the only way you can tell the success of the vaccine is by testing these people over a period of time to see how many of them become HIV positive. This begs an interesting question: assuming these volunteers knew about AIDS and the risk of unprotected anal sex with strangers (which would have to be the case under any definition of "informed consent"), and given that they clearly decided to assume the risk anyway, why the fuck is the US spending more than $250 million a year trying to figure out how to save their lives? There are many innocent victims of this disease but promiscuous homosexuals fucking each other in the arse even after all the publicity around the risk do not count among them. Neither do needle-sharing drug abusers, although at least in their case they have the excuse that they're too fucked up on smack to care.

This raises a bigger issue, and one which you will never hear anyone discuss: who should be saved?

The population of the world is growing exponentially. The 6 billion people infesting the globe today will be 10 billion by the year 2150, and the population growth will not be even. The huge population increase in India and China is well documented, but it is Africa which is projected to see the biggest percentage increase. The population of Africa will swell from some 13% of the total today to around one quarter of the whole world's population over this period. What the fuck is it going to cost to keep all these people alive? Clearly the twats in charge in Africa today can't fucking well do it.

It's tempting to approach the issue of healthcare as though everyone can be saved and should be saved, but think about this rationally. When you save someone's life you don't make them immortal - you just postpone their death. If you find a cure for cancer they'll end up dying of something else eventually. This is why the "settlements" imposed on the cigarette companies to compensate the States for the health costs of treating smokers were such bullshit. Statistics show that providing healthcare to smokers costs less than to non-smokers over their lifetimes - in terms of simple cost, cigarettes saved the States billions.

So what happens if we are successful in finding a cure for cancer? And AIDS? What if we can delay the aging process (which seems to be the goal of half the world's healthcare research), reduce heart disease or treat obesity? Where are all these people going to live? Sooner or later we're all going to die wallowing in our own filth, unless a friendly epidemic thins the herd a bit. And what do you get if you knock off all the causes of "premature" death? You get billions of fucking old people, that's what, and how many greeters can WalMart employ in the year 2150?

Of course anyone who suggests that we should take our finite healthcare spending and prioritize it in providing the maximum quality (not quantity) of life will be shouted down. Anyone who implies that maybe death is nature's way of keeping the population young and that we should be more concerned about the staggering population growth in Africa than the tiny decline caused by AIDS, is not going to get invited to any UN conferences.

In the end you can't save everyone. The latest cutting-edge medical procedures are so hideously complex and expensive that healthcare insurance has become unaffordable for millions. Many of them then die from eminently treatable conditions. How stupid is that? We're working harder so that less people can be protected, not more. The whole pharmaceutical industry is working feverishly to produce a drug that will treat obesity, a condition of choice among lazy overeaters, while millions die untreated from malaria. And the AIDS industry grinds on, consuming ever more dollars that could be used to save and improve lives in well known and simple ways in developing countries, simply because it's politically impossible to say no to it. Perhaps instead of giving them experimental vaccines someone should just have handed the volunteers a small card, reading "Don't fuck strangers in the arse or you might die". That would have got my vote.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Looking Back

I'm thinking of getting into recycling. More specifically I'm considering recycling old blog posts. (I hate the word blog because it conjures up images of sad wankers posting pictures of their kids and agonizing over all their tiny little bits of life-angst. On the other hand I'm not really a writer either because almost no-one reads my stuff. And because I probably write the word "cunt" too much.) I got this recycling idea when I checked out a new blog this week. I noticed that Jaggy had a link to a blog by Misssy and so I checked it out. I was not dissapointed - it was excellent, especially the Jeremy Beadle joke, which was first-rate. Here's the problem though: even though Misssy's writing was excellent, entertaining, witty and all that, I only read a few posts. I'll probably go back and read her new stuff but I may never look at all the archived stuff she wrote before.

This is kind of ironic because I know I'll read other stuff in the coming weeks that isn't nearly as good - I ought to just read some of her old stuff each day until I've used it all up, but that's the problem with the blog format - it really brings out the ADD short-attention-span in all of us. "What's new? Anything new? No? OK, move on."

My father is a retired Methodist Minister (I guess this makes him a writer too, especially since he tends not to use the word "cunt" in sermons), and he is now being called upon to preach again in local churches. However, since he moved when he retired, he can pull out, dress up and recycle all his old work. Sure, some of the stuff that was topical twenty years ago is going to have to be junked, but he can still get a lot of mileage out of his "archive". I happened to look back at the crap I've written and there's more than 250 items. Quality control may have been lacking on some of them (owing to jet-lag, pressures of work and complete absence of any discernible talent) but I'm willing to bet that most of the people who "discovered" this site recently (and, for some reason, liked it) won't ever go back and look at the old stuff. What a waste! Some of my best work was back there - most gratuitous use of the word "cunt", most references to animal sex and most disturbing toilet stories - and now it will never be appreciated.

So I've basically got three options:

1. Slip occasional old posts in with the new ones and hope no-one notices.
   
2. Publish a "Best of Mr.Bison" or "Mr.Bison's Finest Hour"
   
3. Forget about the idea because no-one gives a fuck about the old stuff
   

On balance I already know that the right answer is Number 3, but I can't help thinking what fun it would have been to do the "Best Of" thing. I even came up with potential titles:

• "Up Your Cunt - The Best of Mr.Bison"
  
• "100% Bollocks - Mr.Bison Volume 1"
  
• "It's Not Just Sex With Animals - Mr.Bison's First Year"
  

OK, I know I have my head up my own arse on this one, but I did at least create the Bisonthology so that it would be easier for people to access the old crap. I wonder if any of it would be a good basis for a sermon?


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Look Harder

This morning, as I left for work, I had to look for my car keys. They were hard to find on account of the fact that they were where I left them, which is, of course, the last place I'd think of looking. This is because of the spousal phenomenon known as "tidying things up". Many is the time I've been running around in a state of increasing exasperation looking for something important, usually when I'm already late; I call out to Mrs.Bison "Do you know where my (insert item) is?" and invariably receive the reply "It's wherever you left it."

"I've already looked there. What have you done with it?"

"I haven't touched it."

Cue more searching, followed by the eventual discovery of said item, almost always in a place where I would never have left it, clearly indicating that it had been tidied up. Sometimes Mrs.Bison admits the offence, sometimes she continues in her denial; occasionally she relies on the defence of "If you tidied up occasionally it wouldn't happen". To complicate matters she will occasionally discover the item I've lost in an amazingly obvious spot, such as right in front of my nose, and she relies on these occasions to extrapolate my situational inability to locate, say, a pair of shoes, into a complete lifetime incapability to find any single, solitary fucking thing. Ever. This has been immortalized in her usual response to Bison Daughter when she has lost something: "Did you have a mummy look or a daddy look?"

When I left for Asia two weeks ago I needed to pack shaving foam. I have asked my wonderful spouse in the past not to throw out the cap from the foam because this is what stops pressure on the top of the can during transit causing the whole thing to empty out into my suitcase in a gigantic frothy emission. Of course I could not find the cap - had it been tidied? After weathering the traditional insulting claim that I couldn't find it because I hadn't bothered to look hard enough, I enlisted Mrs.Bison's assistance and it soon became clear that the cap must have been thrown out. (Not by me, I hasten to add, because I don't even throw out shaving foam cans when they're empty.)

So now when I lose something I don't even bother looking anywhere I might have put it. Instead I ask myself where she would have moved it, had she come across it. Most such exercises end up leading to the "Cupboard of Death", a last resting place for all the stuff that she doesn't want to throw away but can't be bothered to find anywhere better to store. Most of the stuff in the Cupboard of Death is mine, and most of it falls out in an avalanche of assorted junk any time I open the door. This is relevant now because the batteries in this mouse are running low. I know I bought new ones but I haven't the faintest fucking idea where they are now, so I either have to buy more or I try my luck in the Cupboard of Death. The alternative is that I just don't write anything for a month. Don't be surprised if things go quiet...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Eeeeww!

It's now a week since Bison Daughter was treated to "The Video" at school. In my ignorance I assumed this would be the point where the school lifted the veil on the mysterious and disturbing subject which is sex; after all, I was also ten years old when my school did it back in the UK. (Of course it wasn't a video - it was a slide show, I think. Even audio at school was jurassic reel to reel back then. I'm just lucky they weren't still scratching stick-diagrams of penises on the walls of the cave.) However it seems that in the delicate world of the US school system this is only the initial foray into the topic. The girls were separated from the boys and told about "hygiene", in other words periods, sanitary protection and deodorants.

It seems that sexual education here is done on the installment basis, with each of the next two years bringing another episode so that eventually kids will get the picture. Of course by the time the punchline is revealed about half of them will probably be sexually active and several of the ones bussed in from the city will actually be parents. We didn't wait for the school on account of Bison Daughter peppering us with questions at an early age and us being too busy to make shit up. It was easier to tell the truth (by this I mean it was easier for Mrs.Bison to tell the truth; I wasn't touching the subject, obviously) so Bison Daughter already knows about sex. We had to swear her to secrecy in case she spilled the beans to one of her friends, causing them to run home, screaming, and their parents to regard us as the antichrists.

So there was no "aha!" moment for our child. In fact I'm thinking of writing a note to excuse her from future sessions on account of her knowing it already. "Please let us know when the class is ready to move onto learning about masturbation, girl-on-girl, dildos and oral, because we didn't cover that." Somehow I can't see that happening...

I still don't understand why the school doesn't just get it over with in one session. I mean, what the hell sense do periods make unless you know the whole story? What a pisser that would be to learn - "I have to shove what up my clunge every month? What's that all about?" And Mrs.Bison even had to sign a form allowing our child to hear about periods. It's like "Carrie" out here. Is it the inherent discomfort that suburban American schools feel about s-e-x that prevents them disclosing the full picture? Are they worried that parents will rebel at the thought of their innocent children being inducted early into sexuality? Better hurry up; a third of 9th graders report having had sex. (Of course the statistics are not uniform across all neighborhoods; there are schools where the dumbasses repeating the tenth grade (again) are at risk that their own kids will soon join them in the same class.)

Hopefully this won't apply to my offspring. One aspect of the sexual education process that is often under-emphasised at school but which can be given much more attention at home: "If I ever catch some boy so much as looking at you the wrong way I'm going to cut his fucking balls off, just remember that." Yes, it's important that this delicate topic is handled in a sensitive and caring way...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Unbelievable News

One of the problems with newspapers these days is that you don't actually get news in a lot of them. What you get instead is opinion. While I'm not opposed to well-argued analysis in the place of drab facts it would be nice if the analysis were actually based on some facts. Very often the paper has a well-established editorial position and then conveniently slants the story to fit it, by playing down or omitting inconvenient elements and bolstering their viewpoint with selective "facts". Obviously a lot of this is political but here's a nice example of how newspapers in the UK pander to lowest-common-denominator thinking and pre-convceived notions of the public good.

The story shown here from the Daily Mail in the UK has the headline "Family's anger after hit-and-run driver is jailed for just 30 months after killing SECOND pedestrian." Sounds pretty straightforward, right? A 61 year-old bloke kills a mother of two by running her over and fails to stop - let's throw away the key! However if you read on you'll discover that the woman was lying in the road at the time, having spent the day drinking with her family.

Now I don't know about you but I tend to regard lying in the road as inviting death. Her (obviously) similarly moronic mother commented "People say Val was in a drunken stupor but she might have been in the road looking for an earring." I'm sorry, did I understand correctly? She was lying in the road looking for an earring? Fucking hell! Where do they find these idiots?

Also turns out the previous "killing" for which this old bloke was responsible was some 70 year-old deaf man who walked out in front of his car when he was driving too fast. Maybe a speeding ticket would have been more appropriate, especially when the boxer, Nasim Hameed, only did 15 days in jail for overtaking at 90mph, showing off in his new Mercedes, hitting a car head-on and crippling the driver for life.

So he runs over a drunken bitch, dressed in black, lying in a dark street. He's guilty of failing to stop, but at what point is the dozy cow herself expected to shoulder the blame for being drunk and lying in the road? (Don't give me the "looking for earrings" bollocks - getting run over while lying in the street searching for an earring would only render her death Darwin-Award-Worthy, as opposed to just dumb.) Then her charming family proceeds to break into and smash up his house. I think we can readily characterize them as traditional English shell-suit scum. This poor cunt gets 30 months in prison and the police think justice is served.

My point is that instead of the original headline you could just as easily have read "Pensioner forced from his home by thugs after accidentally running over drunk in the street." That puts a somewhat different spin on it, doesn't it? Given the positions taken by the Daily Mail on law and order issues I'm not sure how they decided who was the "bad guy" in this story. It certainly doesn't seem to have been on the basis of the facts. So be careful out there, and watch out for drunks in the street searching for jewelry.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

March Madness

Today I expect to go into work and be confronted by legions of twats wearing green. Yes, it's St.Patrick's Day again, and suddenly everyone in the US is "Irish for a day". The flight attendants on my plane from Chicago last night were already wearing green sweaters, so clearly it's more like a St.Patrick's Weekend. What is the fucking fascination with the fucking Irish? Don't tell me it's just because it's a big party - Oktoberfest is a big party too and you don't see everyone coming to work in lederhosen and claiming to be German for a day, do you?

This fawning over all things Irish isn't just stupid. Years ago, when the IRA was busy killing people in the UK, Noraid would collect money for the terrorists and their families in the US, especially in cities like Boston and Chicago. Stupid fat Americans, obsessed with the idea that because their great grandfather might have once drunk Guinness they were now themselves Irish, would stuff money in the hands of people who would then turn around and use it to kill men, women and children in England. They were "Irish freedom fighters" driving the evil English out of the Emerald Isle.

Fast forward to 9/11 and suddenly terrorism is bad. We need to have a war on terror. Let's trace the flow of money and stop it getting into the hands of the evil Islamists. We need our English allies to stand with the US in confronting those who would use explosives and violence to try and achieve their political ends. How many people made the connection to the IRA? When the bombing of a shopping center in Warrington killed two boys, aged 3 and 12, how much of America wanted to declare a war on terror then? What about when the IRA was bombing crowded pubs, or hotels? What about the nailbombs in London? Remember them? I didn't think so. It's a bit different when it's your own back yard, and your own people dying in the streets isn't it?

It's unbelievable how naive people are about Sinn Fein, the IRA, and the muderers, drug dealers, extortionists and thieves that wear their Irish heritage with such pride. And the whole charade was able to go on partly because it was all wrapped up in a US-friendly cuddly leprechaun shamrock green cultural fiction.

So forgive me if I'm cynical about this "let's all be Irish" bollocks. When I see those parades of men in green it takes me back to the pictures of children dying on English streets, the killing paid for in part by stupid people over here, with their mock-Irish sentiments. Still, have a nice St.Patrick's Day, drink some green beer and top of the fucking mornin' to you.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Taste The Justice System

Did you see the Associated Press story about the eighth-grade school kid in Connecticut who was busted for buying forbidden items on school property? He was stripped of his title as class vice president, barred from attending an honors student dinner and suspended for a day after getting caught. Must have been something bad, right? Maybe a weapon of some sort, or drugs. Perhaps it was porn (that always brightens up the school day), beer or cigarettes? No? OK, it had to be gang-related merchandise, or comic books with rude words in. Well actually it was a bag of Skittles. Yes, the little colored candy got this kid in deep shit.

The school spokeswoman told the press that the New Haven school system banned candy sales in 2003 as part of a district-wide school wellness policy. Meanwhile school superintendent Reginald Mayo (surely he should be renamed Reginald Lowfatdressing in the name of school wellness?) said Wednesday that the principal was just trying to keep students safe, but that he would review the suspension decision. This begs the question “safe from what?” Last time I checked “death by Skittles” was not a major contributor to teenage mortality.

Has it really come to this? Kids being hauled up on charges for having some candy? “I’m sorry Mrs.Smith – it seems your son was caught in possession of two Snickers bars. If it had been three the charges would have been increased to possession with intent to distribute and he’d have been expelled.” What the fuck are these people smoking? Clearly not a substance permitted on school property. You might expect the school to be more focused on drugs (which are apparently everywhere in the US public school system), guns, knives, fighting, bullying, stealing and maybe even teaching. I’m quite happy for the schools to take away those vending machines that deal candy and soda to kids at inflated prices to make extra money for the school district, but telling parents what their kids’ dietary choices should be is just bollocks.

It reminds me of that school in the UK which banned all unhealthy food from the cafeteria. Parents responded by buying sandwiches, burgers and fries for them and passing them through the fence. Yes, I know that lots of kids are ignorant, slothful, fat bastards who will drag down the health system with their self-inflicted diabetes, but do you really think they’re going to change their ways because they can’t eat a candy bar at school? It’s all down to the parents. And anyway, how hard do you think it would be to smuggle candy in? It’s not like it shows up on metal detectors. Since it was just announced that one in four American teenage girls has a sexually transmitted disease you might imagine that there would be more pressing social issues facing schools. (Perhaps the issues are related -
maybe they’re sticking a candy bar in their twat each morning and letting someone eat it out.)

When I think back to my own schooldays, where kids made lethal throwing stars in metalwork, a girl in my class brought her dad’s explicit Color Climax porn magazines in to show us, fights were arranged with neighboring schools where kids went tooled up with weapons, and someone burned down the school, I would suggest that New Haven focus a little less on the candy thing. Unless it’s Hersheys, of course. That stuff tastes like shit – if I caught a kid eating that I’d suspend them too, purely on the grounds of taste.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Sing For Fellatio

It’s nearly the end of my trip to Shanghai so a few of us went out last night for a karaoke session. This involves booking a room in one of the karaoke establishments – we selected a new one, known as the Forbidden City (it even has a scale model of this famous tourist attraction) which announces itself as your taxi pulls up with about a million colored lights affixed to its exterior. You walk in and as you pass through the door a row of about ten girls on each side of the door bows and in unison chants some greeting. Or at least I assume it was a greeting; since it was in Chinese they could have been saying “your western dick is very small” for all I know. Once in your private room you are presented with a succession of Chinese girls who you can pick as your evening’s companion – they will sit with you, drink with you, talk to you and, in many cases apparently, for a sum of $200, come back to your hotel and fuck you all night. For those of us who neither speak Chinese nor intend to fuck the karaoke girl the selection criteria are somewhat limited. You might think that it would be a good idea to try and get one who speaks some English but in my experience that’s a mistake – then you’re stuck with someone who will spend all night trying to practice their limited language skills on you. It’s very worthy but if you wanted to spend the evening as a language coach you’d probably be hanging out at a school, or some other establishment where less alcohol is consumed.

Last night we hooked up with Gary, an old friend who lives in Shanghai. He has a certain weakness for “healthier” Chinese girls (i.e. chunky ones) and these were little in evidence in the first three line-ups that were paraded in front of us, so the “mama-san” then invited him (and, by extension, me) to come down to the “holding pen” where there had to be about two hundred girls waiting to be dispatched to karaoke rooms. Gary soon selected one, and then a second (he can speak some Mandarin, so it’s not a complete waste of his time), both of them well-upholstered. (He confirmed later that this was the result of them frequenting “Pizza Hut” and “McDonalds”.) When more of our party showed up, and more girls were brought in for them to choose from, Gary selected a third one, with big tits. This one, however, spoke quite a bit of English, which she used to try and encourage me to take a girl to my hotel room. “She stay all night – you have sex”.

The girl I chose had a very dull evening, I’m sure. Other than chopping up watermelon for me, filling my scotch and applauding politely after I crucified yet another rendition of some song or other, there wasn’t really anything for her to do. One of the most common roles of the girls is to engage clients in drinking games, usually Lying Dice. This is played with whiskey forfeits and can result in rapidly accelerated inebriation; I’m well past the point in life where I am willing to risk yawning into the toilet bowl at 3am as a result of this kind of exuberance so I passed. One of the other girls played with Ken and lost repeatedly; she ended up puking in a trash can. On this basis simple boredom doesn’t seem like a bad option – I almost feel saintly.

Anyway, it seems that all karaoke isn’t created equal. Gary was telling us about the Korean version he experienced a few years ago where he was in a group of five. At the end of the evening the lights went down and the Korean guys all got a blowjob from their girls. Gary didn’t, and not just because he’s an all-round good guy – it seems that they only blow Korean blokes. (What’s the deal with that? It almost makes you want to complain on principle.) Apparently the only thing more uncomfortable than getting a blowjob while sitting next to another guy getting one, is not getting a blowjob while sitting there. Especially when the girl finishes, spits his jizz into a cup and places it on the table. I’m willing to bet that this isn’t one of the topics they cover in those business school lessons on “Asian culture”. Sure, you’ll learn to present your business card with both hands, and to sit according to rank, but I don’t recall anyone ever mentioning being expected to sit politely while a business partner gets his dick sucked next to you. If it’s all the same with you I think I’ll stick to the watermelon...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Rising Expectations

Over the weekend we had a day to kill so a few of us took the ferry from Singapore to Bintan to play golf and get a massage. It’s only an hour away, and it offers beautiful scenery, including delightful Indonesian girls. I won’t go into the details of the golf, partly because I played like a cunt, but mostly because people who talk about golf are the most boring fuckers alive. The highlight was definitely the scenery – we were right by the sea and there were magnificent rocks alongside the course (one of which my colleague managed to bounce his ball off, preventing it flying into the sea and causing it to land on the green) and strange wildlife, including huge lizards (about three feet long) who came to watch us play. Obviously life as a lizard is spectacularly dull, since apparently watching crap golf is worth crawling out of your hole for. At one point I was wading into the undergrowth to look for a ball when one of the caddies mentioned that I might want to step back, on account of the cobras; that’s the kind of advice which gets your attention.

Anyway, after the game we went back to the hotel for the massage we’d booked. They split us up and we went off in two groups of two. The massage room was wonderful – it was open to the elements on one side and looked out on the sea. We had to get naked and lie down on the padded massage tables and the two (naturally) pretty and (necessarily) female masseuses started working on us. I can’t get comfortable with the idea of a bloke massaging me – it has to be a woman. It’s not like she needs to be pretty – this is a massage, not a hand-job – but having a bloke rub oil into me would not be relaxing, merely disturbing. Do you remember that episode of Seinfeld where George gets the massage from a guy and then worries that he’s gay because "it moved"? Well, having some strange woman rhythmically rubbing the tops of your thighs can do that, ugly or not.

I had this in mind as this pretty Indonesian girl was working on me, kneading scented oil into parts of me that had never previously needed oiling, to my recollection. I’m lying on my back and it suddenly occurs to me to hope that I don’t get an erection. I don’t worry about the masseuse – I’m sure they’ve seen hundreds, and it may even be considered a compliment – but I don’t generally aim to get wood in the company of colleagues. We’re lying under these really thin sheets while they work on us one part at a time, so we’re not completely naked, but with a good-sized stiffy underneath it would look like one of those mosquito nets had been draped over the table. I cast my mind back to that scene in the Singing Detective, where Michael Gambon gets greased up by Joanne Whalley as part of his psoriasis treatment and tries to think of disgusting things to keep from shooting his load on her. What could I think about, if necessary? Capital delegation requests? Long-range planning scenarios? Monthly income forecasts? It’s hardly conducive to the relaxed state of mind that a massage is supposed to bring about, is it?

Fortunately no wood was produced, although there may have been some stirring at one point, and we all repaired to the lounge for a relaxing cucumber drink. (It was included in the deal, OK? I realize that deliberately ordering a cucumber beverage may be an even more reliable method of determining gayness than achieving erection during a male massage.) This morning I played the game of "find all the parts you missed with the sunscreen" in the shower. Fortunately not too many, although I can’t help wondering if I might have been better off having the sunscreen massaged into me before the golf. I don’t think she missed many spots, and you can be sure that the tops of my thighs wouldn’t have got burned...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Going Up?

I’m sitting in a Japan Airlines 747 somewhere between Tokyo and Singapore, but considerably closer to Tokyo. We just took off and, through the wonders of a camera mounted under the plane, I was treated to a view of the runway ahead and the ground below as we left it. The scene was displayed on a four foot wide screen at the front of the cabin, so you pretty much couldn’t miss it, and I have to say that there’s something slightly unnerving about watching the earth drop away from you like that. Normally when you take off you don’t think about the ground, about how hard it is and what a really bad idea it would be to drop on it from a great height, but watching it underneath like that gives you a real appreciation of the point of no return – that moment where you are off the ground and it’s too late to come back down nicely; you’re either going to take off successfully or perish in a thousand-degree fireball somewhere in those fields you can see ahead.

If this sounds unnecessarily pessimistic I blame Delta Airlines. I make dozens of flights every year and I always used to enjoy the taking off part. In fact I still remember the first flight I ever made, on a UK Air small plane. I don’t recall where the flight started or ended (other than that it was from the North of the UK to the South) but it was at night. The feeling of taxiing out, the plane turning onto the runway and all those exciting lights lining up as we straightened for take-off, the sudden rush as the engines propelled us forward and the lightness as we left the ground was so much better than plodding along the M1 motorway.

It’s not as noticeable in a bigger plane but it was still better than the rest of the flight, which typically involves fighting for the armrest with some fat bastard and waiting for three mouthfuls of cheap soda. Until I took a Delta Airlines flight from Brussels back to St.Louis, through their hub in Atlanta. I don’t fly Delta as a rule; those of you who read this journal regularly will note that I have been known to criticize American Airlines, who I usually fly, but compared to Delta they’re not bad. Delta are just shit.

We got into Atlanta, an airport that distinguished itself by having no power outlets anywhere that you could use to plug in your computer, in the pissing rain. When we eventually boarded the connection to St.Louis the plane was full. We did the whole “hurtling down the runway” thing just like usual but as we took off we didn’t seem to be gaining much height, and the plane was a bit wobblier than normal. Out of the window I could see the tops of buildings just below us – the corners looked very hard and pointy compared to the giant tin can that I now realized we were inhabiting. It turns out we’d lost power in an engine. (Good job we didn’t lose power in two engines or we’d have seen those buildings from the side, as we entered one). It seemed like an eternity as we wobbled around in the sky; the pilots announced that we were turning back but their message didn’t include any of the usual platitudes about how this was all “nothing to be concerned about”.

We landed with an accompanying phalanx of fire trucks but reverse thrust wasn’t an option with one engine out (I assume we’d have spun round in a circle) so we just skidded off the end of the runway and sat in the mud for an hour until they could get a truck with knobbly wheels to come and unload us. We even made the news in St.Louis (where there must have been fuck-all happening that day). From that moment on, I no longer approached take-off with the happy assumption that the big cigar-shaped metal coffin in which I was seated would make it into the air and stay there.

On the plus side, when Delta eventually secured us a new plane and we reboarded, there were suddenly, for some reason, a large number of empty seats. So if they fucked up the take-off again I might well have been incinerated in a fiery wreck, but at least I wouldn’t have been fighting a fat bastard for the armrest while it happened.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

The Worst Thing

What’s the worst thing you can say about a bloke? Victor Hugo was supposed to have said that "The worst thing you can say about a man is that in ten years his ideas haven't changed." I don’t know if he did in fact say that, and I don’t know much else about Victor Hugo but if that is any indication of the level of his thinking then I wouldn’t bother with the rest of it. What complete bollocks! Can you imagine going up to someone in a pub, pushing him against the wall and belligerently stating "Oy, mate. Your ideas haven’t changed much recently." It’s not quite on a par with "You’re a fucking pansy cocksucker. What’re you going to do about it?" is it?

I only got thinking about this because I read this story where a guy called Juan Pablo di Pace is complaining that a poster with his naked picture in it that is being used by the Royal Opera House has been airbrushed to make his penis look smaller than it actually is. I guess with a name like Juan Pablo di Pace you’re expected to be a swarthy Latin stallion with the sexual stamina of a rabbit on Viagra, and it punctures the image a bit to be portrayed as hung like a hamster. To be fair to him, having a picture of you with a tiny dick plastered all over the London Underground is probably worse than being told that your ideas haven’t changed in ten years, but it got me wondering if this was indeed the worst thing that could be said about a man.

My guess is that no bloke wants to be told that he has a small penis, although that doesn’t really apply if you’ve got a 12 incher, In that case, in response to the insult you can just whip it out and put the rumor to rest. I’m not sure about blokes who actually do have a Chihuahua dick – do they just reply with "Yep. You’re absolutely right"? I mean, you can deny all you like, but if there’s a woman present that you’re hoping to "slip into" later you may be better coming clean now. I would assume that most blokes fall into the "somewhere in the middle" category though – nothing to be ashamed of, but not going to be called upon to be King Dong’s stunt double either. Would it be worse to be accused of having a small weenie or something else, like being ugly, shit in bed, badly dressed, unfunny, fat or gay? (Apologies to any fat, ugly, badly dressed gay men who are shit in bed and have no sense of humor who might be reading this, especially if you also happen to be in possession of a really small cock.)

There is a quote, sometimes attributed to John Cleese, which states that "an Englishman would rather be told he was a bad lover than he had no sense of humor." (Except he spelled it "humour", obviously.) Is this true? Would you rather be thought of as an unfunny guy who can repeatedly bring a woman to gasping orgasm or a witty and humorous satirist who’s in, off and out in two minutes, barely touching the sides? Let’s throw this one out to the ladies – which one’s more likely to get you frothing at the gash? Frank Skinner once wrote something about the myth that you can use humor to charm a woman into bed, as though it was some "morally acceptable date rape drug", while in fact you can spend a whole evening making a woman laugh and still watch her run off and shag some more good-looking bloke. Clearly a good sense of humor is somewhat overrated.

So is having a small dick or being a bad lover really the end of the world? Probably not. To put things in perspective I’ll leave the final word to a particularly astute stand-up comedian:

This bloke gets a woman back to his room and when they’re getting undressed she looks at his dick and says "Who do you think you’re going to satisfy with that?" So he looks at her and he says "Me".

Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Darwin On A Bike

I try to avoid commenting on stories concerning the ridiculous UK legal system since there are hundreds of them, and if I'm not careful I'll never get around to the "lavatorial and animal sex" humor on which so much of this site appears (in retrospect) to be based. Nevertheless I couldn't help rolling my eyes at this latest example of the process fucking someone over.

The story is available HERE in all its glory but what it comes down to is that a 25 year-old woman has been sentenced to four years in prison for running over a cyclist while speeding at 45mph in a 30mph zone and sending a text message. Seems like a fairly straightforward case, right? Driving is a serious responsibility and no-one should be texting while they pilot a huge iron killing machine through the streets.

However, if you read the small print you'll find that the bloke she killed was run over as he ran a red light on his bicycle. In other words what she was guilty of was driving fast and not paying attention; it was the dozy fucker who ended up dead who caused the accident. What kind of certifiable dumbass runs a red traffic light on a bicycle? And presumably without looking to see if a car was coming. (She was doing 45, remember, not 120, so it's not like she appeared out of nowhere.) I would submit that this particular cycling prick is a candidate for the 2008 Darwin Awards, for taking his DNA out of the reproductive pool before it could be further dispersed.

This story contains examples of two aspects of modern life that piss me off. One is that when someone gets hurt, no matter how stupid they were, it always has to be someone else's fault. This is something learned from the litigious US - some wanker tries to iron their shirt while wearing it and gets burned: now every iron has a label stating that clothes should not be ironed while on the body. Fuck's sake! The other thing is the habit exhibited often by cyclists of refusing to believe that any of the laws of the road apply to them.

I've pointed this out before - you'll be driving down the road and there'll be two cyclists next to each other, filling up half the fucking lane so you have to crawl behind them until there's a gap in the traffic before you can overtake. "We are fellow road-users," they smugly claim "we have just as much right to the road as a car and we're perfectly entitled to do this!" Then you come to a traffic light. It's red. Do the cyclists stop and wait like a "fellow road-user"? Do they fuck. They mount the pavement and ride through the red light. Now they're a pedestrian! "We have just as much right to the pavement as people walking, including small children and pensioners; in fact they must jump out of our way. The roads are so dangerous - we need to be able to use the pavement." And many of them do all this while wearing lycra "homosexual fantasy" attire. I'm just surprised more motorists don't mount the pavement in pursuit of them.

So some dumb fuck blatantly breaks the law, exhibiting a lack of common sense that is staggering - jumping a red light on a bicycle is seriously rolling the dice, and if you lose, the result is always going to be messy. So the silly bitch who hit him was speeding - it's 45 in a 30. Most people I know will drive 35-40 in a 30, and don't tell me you've never let your speed get higher than that. Should she be punished? Sure. But as a traffic violator, not as a killer. Why don't we punish people for what they chose to do rather than what the outcome was? Would she have been less guilty if she'd not killed someone? No. So why make the punishment different? The UK prison system is literally full - they're letting serious criminals out early so they can make room for people like this. A murderer awaiting trial recently killed again. And yet we can find room for an inattentive speeder who was unlucky enough to collide with a red-light jumping cyclist.


Here's what the mother of the victim said about her son's "killer": "When you are using a phone, you are not paying full attention to what is going on around you and you are ultimately playing with lives." Not a word about "When you cycle through a red light you are risking your life and are ultimately responsible for everything that happens to you." I think this proves my point about stupidity being in the DNA. Unfortunately as soon as someone dies they become some sort of fucking saint and nothing bad can be said about them. Bit of a shame for the young woman though, isn't it?


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Croeso y Cymru

That means "Welcome To Wales". Today is St.David's Day, although those of you in the US are unlikely to know this. St.David is the patron saint of Wales (not to be confused with St.Patrick, who is the patron saint of drunkenness, green beer and public urination). You're probably unaware that the rest of the UK has patron saints, given the bizarre habit of so many fat Americans to celebrate St.Patrick's Day and claim some ancestral link to Ireland. If even half these people had Irish ancestors the whole fucking island would have sunk under the weight of them. I don't understand the attention given to St.Patrick. What did he do? Chase the snakes out of Ireland? I've been to Ireland and let me tell you, I think they probably left of their own accord. I mean, the people are wonderful and all that, but it rains every fucking day. If you were a snake I think you'd get fed up crawling around in three inches of water too. How about celebrating St.George's Day? He killed a fucking dragon for heaven's sake.

Anyway, although as far as I know I'm mongrel English by blood, I have a soft spot for Wales. I married into Welsh, Scottish and Irish blood but my excellent mother-in-law is Welsh. From day one she's seen it as her mission in life to feed me, and it always endears people to me when they do that. I have even forgiven her for the time she fed me Lava Bread, a traditional Welsh foodstuff made from slimy seaweed, the consumption of which is not unlike coughing up phlegm, but in reverse.

St.Davids Day can be marked by the wearing of daffodils or leeks. Today we observed it by listening to a recording of Max Boyce, a famous Welsh comedian and singer, which a Welsh friend coincidentally lent me yesterday. It's an old recording; the humor is very gentle and mostly revolves around rugby, drinking and rugby. And more drinking. None of the humor involves sex with sheep, which is another thing the Welsh are famous for, at least allegedly. I like Wales, not because of the sex with sheep you understand, but because of the beautiful countryside, fine beer, good people and wonderful accent. And they do love their rugby.

I remember going to an England v Wales game at the old Cardiff Arms Park. This is a huge rivalry - the Welsh love absolutely nothing better than to beat the English at rugby. Everyone drinks heavily before the game and then walks to the ground in a solid sea of people. The hush that settled on the old stadium and then the rise of Welsh voices in song would make the hair on your neck stand up. But when the game started the voices were of a different nature.

"Fucking hell referee, he was offside!"

All the fans are mixed in together and this Welsh bloke in front was complaining loudly about the English forwards.

"He was bloody miles offside there. Fucking hell referee!"

After a few minutes of this he shouted "Offside, fucking hell" then he turned round to us and said "Oh, sorry, he wasn't offside that time, my mistake." And that's one reason I like the Welsh, and why I like rugby matches.

So just to put things back in balance, here's my favorite Welsh joke. It also involves an Australian, and they too are famous for a love of rugby and for interfering with sheep:

An Australian and a Welshman are on a train together and they get talking. It soon emerges that they are both sheep farmers. After discussing this for a bit there's a silence, and then the Welshman asks the Australian "Have you ever, you know, done it, with a sheep?" The Australian pauses and then replies "Well, you know, it get's kind of lonely out there on the station sometimes. I've been known to, once or twice. What about you?"
"Oh, from time to time - there are a lot of long evenings in Wales, you know. So how do you do it?"
"Well" says the Asutralian, "I just throw the sheep on its back in the shearing room, drop my strides and give it one. What about you?"
"I just grab the sheep from behind, drop the back legs in my Wellington boots and do it that way."
"Strewth mate," says the Australian "how do you kiss 'em?"

Happy St.David's Day!