Reading Jeremy

I didn't start out writing this stuff with a clear idea of what I was trying to do. I'm sure most people look at what they write and think "Of course it's just me being me, 100% genuine, blah blah blah." but in reality you always decide, subconsciously or not, what aspects of your particular diseased personality to push to the fore. And, possibly more importantly, what to keep hidden. So it came as a shock to discover that I am in fact trying to be Jeremy Clarkson. This is a bit unfortunate, as Jeremy kind of got there first, but I didn't read any of his stuff until this year, when my mother-in-law sent me a couple of his books (which were basically reprints of articles he's written). Sure I'd seen him years ago on Top Gear, but I left the country twelve years ago and was too cheap to pay for satellite TV with British channels, so it was all sort of new to me.

So I've figured out that instead of bothering to write anything I could just have posted a lot of links to stuff by Jeremy and saved myself a lot of time. This last book I read (entirely on the toilet, I must add - short articles really lend themselves to small windows of reading opportunity) was a succession of automobile reviews, except that the car in each case was almost incidental to the writing, as if Mr Clarkson were taking us on a scenic tour of some humorous philosophical concept and we just happened to bump into a car along the way which he could usefully weave in to help make his point.

The bloke is a genius - exactly what I'd want to be if I was a self-made millionaire who had explored the world as a young man and now drove cars all day and said funny stuff for a living. Sure I've traveled the world a bit, but I did it as a grown-up, mostly in business class, and consequently didn't experience all the really weird character-forming shit. I also missed out on sodomy at a private school, having been determinedly state-educated; maybe that's important too.

What makes someone like Clarkson so much fun to read is that he makes so much sense, all the time. I don't mean I always agree with him - only sad wankers agree with anyone all the time. For instance he mentioned in today's lavatory-reading that he thought Tom Cruise was a great actor. Personally I believe Tom Cruise is a complete cunt, which disqualifies him from being a great anything. I barely even consider him a human being, what with all the scientology bullshit. But that's not the point. People you enjoy spending time with don't make you want to poke out their eyes when they express an opinion with which you disagree. By contrast, I know people with whom I would avoid spending 60 seconds in an elevator, even were they to do nothing but express sentiments that they had lifted wholesale from my own writing. They are just that fucking irritating.

So there you go. I have established that Jeremy Clarkson is just the kind of man with whom I am prepared to share fifteen minutes in the toilet each morning. But only in the literary sense, you understand. As I said, I never went to an English private school...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

School Of Crap

When Bison Daughter went back to school after the long summer holiday I wondered how long it would take for me to want to tear out my own hair and eat it in frustration at the stupidity of the school district. Three weeks seems to be the answer. Of course there were all the usual politically correct memos from the school at the start of term: the Christmas party must have turned into a Winter Party long ago, but now the Valentine's Party has become a Friendship Party. Why? There was never anything "romantic" about the event anyway, since all the kids were expected to bring in cards for everyone in the class. I always thought this was ridiculous and weird - boys all giving each other Valentine's cards. Are you trying to make them turn out funny? Or does everyone have to act homosexual just to make the actual budding homos feel OK? The bigger question in my mind is why the school finds it necessary to have parties at all. I'm perfectly capable of deciding how much junk food and crap to meter into my offspring without teachers taking it upon themselves to help.

That's another thing I find utterly stupid: the kids are subjected to all sorts of curriculum-based healthy eating indoctrination, presumably to encourage them to eat right. Then the school, at every opportunity, stuffs them with cake, pizza and soda in these unnecessary and gratuitous "parties". What the fuck? Bison Daughter eats well at home, and never eats school meals, which is just as well because, in spite of the advice doled out in the classroom, the cafeteria only serves pizza, macaroni and cheese, corn dogs, burgers and other fatty, carb-laden shite. There isn't a green vegetable to be found. Do as we say, not as we do...

Within one week of the new term starting Bison Daughter's class was given a pizza party as a "reward" for getting "compliments" for good behavior, yet another instance of setting the bar so low that simply not being disruptive is seen as meriting special recognition. Of course the meal wasn't provided for free - along with the news of the reward came the request to send money in to pay for it.

But do the kids learn anything useful in class? Do they bollocks! Last week they made banners for "bus driver appreciation day". At the age of ten. They should have been studying math, learning grammar, exploring science, or even attempting a language. Why the fuck are they making banners for bus drivers? And who gives a shit about bus drivers anyway? They certainly won't remember the banners next time they all go on strike and leave everyone in the shit. Again.

This week Bison Daughter started a drawing of a butterfly. Hmmm, art class - seems reasonable, right? Wrong. It's another money-raising scam by the school district. The kids come home with their "special" picture and a catalogue of all the things you can pay to have it printed on, everything from fridge magnets to mugs and teddy bears. Which you have to order and pay for through the school, who obviously get a cut. Don't want to be a heartless parent? Get your wallet out.

In fact, in three weeks back at school, I would suggest that the teachers have spent barely 25% of the time the kids are in their custody actually teaching them something. This on the back of a three month summer vacation after which you're lucky if kids can still spell their names. What's the fucking deal? If they actually used the time kids are in school to educate them, eliminating all the parties and other useless crap, they'd graduate two years early. If they didn't have ridiculously long summer vacations they could be done with high school by the age of fourteen.

Of course this would require all the teachers to actually spend their days teaching, rather than stuffing their faces with cake and sitting on their fat arses while the kids color in pictures. I guess I shouldn't hold my breath. Still, look on the bright side: with more than ten years' experience doing very little actual work, this generation of kids will be thoroughly prepared for a fulfilling career in education.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

I Have A Nightmare

OK, I can't believe I'm the only person to wonder what kind of pills the media has been taking here in the good old US of A that has made them want to crawl so utterly and unashamedly up Barack Obama's arse. I've been avoiding coverage of the Democratic Congress as much as humanly possible on account of its immediate emetic effect but this evening it was even on the TV in the changing room at my gym. The event hadn't started yet and there were all these so-called newsmen practically coming in their pants with glee over the fact that Obama was going to come out and make this wonderful speech on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's historic "I have a dream..." etc. etc. blah blah blah wanky bollocks.

I long ago gave up expecting the whiny left-wing celebrity-ridden news networks over here to be balanced in their political coverage. I had lots of practice living in the UK, where the BBC seemed to see it as their charter mission to pick at the Tories whatever chance they got, but miraculously developed myopia and amnesia every time a Labour Party official lied, cheated, fucked up or otherwise rendered themselves open to attack. No surprise that the BBC is riddled with PC socialist lefty wankers. Nevertheless I always assumed that this US network bias was supposed to be done somewhat surreptitiously, and not flaunted in the open as though it was no longer considered necessary to pretend.

Forget whether you think Obama would be a good president (here's a hint - he'd be fucking useless because he's nothing but a speech in a suit with a novelty colored skin), you can hardly fail to have noticed the overwhelmingly gushing, "he can't do anything wrong", sickening hero-worship being perpetrated by MSNBC and CNN, for instance. Why not just form a line and ask to suck his dick?

And why make such a big deal about how wonderful it is that a black person (sorry, "African American") got the nomination? I had to laugh when this news jerk was waffling about how this was the "first time in any Western country that an African American" had been contesting the leadership; he had to stop himself and mutter a correction because you can obviously only be African American if you're American, which doesn't tend to be the case in other countries. Black people in the UK aren't African British (at least they weren't when I left - fuck knows what names have been invented since then). The reality is that Obama is in the position he's in precisely because he's black - any fucking cretin should be able to see that. He's not even completed his first term and he's accomplished precisely fuck-all. He stepped right out of a racist church and has associated with fraudsters. Does any of this give the media pause? Fuck no. It was a Democrat who pointed out during the primaries that Obama was only leading the race because he was black, so don't blame that one on the Republicans. If he didn't have that extra emotional appeal, if he was just a nice suburban white guy in a suit, if he came out of a white church that espoused racist tenets, he'd be fucking nowehere. Hillary and the women-vote would have killed him.

I understand that, having had eight years of a president who was incapable of stringing eight words together, it might seem attractive to have a JFK-style rousing speechmaker, but speeches don't do shit. It's just depressing that the best the dumbshit Republicams could come up with to contest this election is John Fucking McCain, coffin dodger extraordinaire. What happened to Giuliani? What happened to anyone with a personality and some track record of leadership? Oh, I'm sorry, maybe they weren't socially conservative enough. Well the last laugh may be on you, litmus-test anti-abortion freaks - you may have opened the door to the kind of lefty populist prick who'll make gay marriage seem like the good old days. Whatever happened to Perot?


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Nothing To Say

If it seems like it's gone a bit quiet on the Bison front recently you're not wrong - I've got out of the habit of writing stuff. At first I put this down to quality control. You know, "I can't think of anything really funny, insightful or cutting to write, so I'll just wait until I come up with something". Except that I still haven't come up with anything.

On one hand I don't know why I should be concerned with the content of this site - I could just fill it up with memes, and pictures of my cat, like half the other crap out there. On the other hand I feel a certain responsibility to the regular visitors to make their visit at least halfway worthwhile. They should expect to be surprised, entertained, appalled or at least moderately offended by what they find here. Besides, I don't have a fucking cat, and memes are for arseholes.

The last few weeks seem to have been consumed by work, working out and soccer. Sure there was the Olympics, but in spite of there being more stupid, incongruous and meaningless events than ever before, if you were watching NBC you'd have assumed there was nothing but swimming, gymnastics, volleyball and diving. Where was all the boxing, weightlifting, javelin, and all the good stuff? Why didn't they show sports where there is actually an objectively determined winner, who threw it further, did it faster or beat everyone else to a pulp, rather than an outcome decided by a panel of judges? And why did we have to put up with synchronized diving, for fuck's sake?

Just when I thought it could not possibly get any worse, the presidential election has descended on us. Now, in addition to the witterings of that supremely unqualified fraud, Obama, and his vacuous dipshit wife, we have endless talking heads clotting up our airwaves with inane speculation and repetitive "analysis".

Maybe I'm a little more acerbic than usual today because I had to go and play golf. I went round in 120 strokes, which is slightly more than I might have expected to take if I had simply kicked the fucking ball, instead of trying to hit it with those singularly unsuitably shaped clubs. And all I have to show for it is soreness in many of my most useful joints and sunburn on the bits of me that I failed to cover with Factor 40. I did produce a divot which was spectacularly large and well-formed, rather like a green porcupine, and I was half tempted to bring that back home as a trophy, but I contented myself with a pocketful of balls discovered on my many forays into the weeds.

Which brings me to the only thing of note that I have observed in the last month: the cart wench who came round with drinks was accompanied on her cart by a large labrador dog. I don't know what she was doing to pass the time between holes, but this thing was sitting there, panting, with the biggest, reddest, most sticky-out doggie hard-on I ever failed to avoid seeing. The lipstick was out by a good three inches. I know, it's not much, but Mrs Bison said I had to write something. Come to think of it, maybe I could turn it into a meme...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

No Need For That

I like a bit of sports on TV, and I have to confess, in spite of my cynicism, that the Olympics has provided some pretty good sports viewing over the last week or so. Who could have failed to jump out of their seat and punch the air when the Americans beat the French in that swimming relay? Now that's what I call a race, with all the added bonus of seeing France lose. I did notice with swimmers that, no matter what the competition, they don't appear to find it necessary to pat each other on the behind in order to provide encouragement or a small recognition of a job well done. I have to say that the most disturbing aspect of the transition to watching sports in the US is the prevalence of the "pat on the butt" between men on the sports field. We certainly didn't do that when we were growing up, I can tell you. It would no more have occurred to one of us to pat a teammate on the arse after he scored a goal than to rip off his shorts and attempt to penetrate him forcibly on the goal line.

There are so many other places to pat someone if you want to make such a gesture of congratulation. How about a pat on the back? Or the shoulder? Both are substantial body parts, very conveniently situated for patting and, I would suggest, better suited for conveying an unambiguous sentiment of positive reinforcement than someone's buttocks. The thing about touching another man's arse, no matter whether sports are involved or not, is that it's, well, sort of gay. It's not like there's a good reason for it; if someone patted me on the arse my immediate reaction would be "What the fuck are you doing?" It would be like playing co-ed soccer and patting your female teammate on the breasts - it would come across as weird simply because there was no reason to pat there other than because you wanted to touch her breasts. Consequently the friendly breast-pat has never really taken off in mixed sporting circles.

It's ironic really, because there are few environments so determinedly heterosexual as US sports. As far as I know, no active US baseball player has come out and declared himself to be gay becuase of the huge stigma attached to it (and not because there aren't any). It's an arena in which blokes go out of their way to be "manly" in the traditional sense, so what's with the arse touching then? Big butch football and baseball players in skin-tight leggings all patting each other's buttocks could hardly be more like some stereotypical "Tom Of Finland" gay scenario.

But when it comes to women's beach volleyball, a sport where I would be quite happy to see the competitors engage in a bit of mutual arse-patting, what do I get? Nothing. Misty May's arse is a sporting icon; how anyone could be in the same sandbox and not want to pat it is beyond me. Sure, they hug each other daintily but it's not the same. Still, women's Jello-wrestling might provide a reasonable alternative. I know it's not an Olympic event yet, but if they'll take synchronized diving it's only a matter of time before this swimsuit/lime jelly sporting phenomenon is represented at the Olympiad. Personally I can't wait.

In the meantime, to all the misguided sportsmen who think touching another man's arse is somehow OK when you're dressed in a uniform and standing on grass, I can only say "Cut that shit out. Seriously."


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Get On The Bus

The local news in St Louis last night reported that St Louis City schools were again offering a special incentive to get kids to show up for the start of the school year on Monday. For those of you not familiar with St Louis (or, for that matter, US cities in general) the city represents only about 300,000 people out of the 2,500,000 in the metropolitan St Louis area. People mostly don't live in the city because, frankly, it's shit. It's got high crime, crap services and it's run by the kind of freak show fuckwit local politicians who give incompetence a bad name. Still, if you want to know why the city is such a mess you could do worse than look at this issue.

In the past the city has entered kids who show up for school in a raffle for flat screen TVs and other prizes. Bear in mind that it's a legal obligation on the part of parents to send their delightful offspring to school, so it's not as though they theoretically have any choice. However this is school politics, where everything gets stood on its head, including common sense. Instead of rewarding success, they end up giving out free stuff just for showing up. Meanwhile, here in St Louis County, there are no freebies for getting your kid's arse in a seat on day one.

Fast forward a few years and you'll here all the liberals whining about how unfair it is that so many kids in the city don't get into college, don't have good jobs and don't make much money. Well, no shit. If you don't go to school and you end up knowing fuck all, plus in the meantime you hang around with losers and get into trouble with drugs, why the fuck should you be surprised that no-one wants to employ you? Or maybe that's the point. These arseholes don't want a job - they want an NBA lifestyle, complete with Cadillac Escalade, gold teeth, diamond stud earrings and flashy clothes; they just don't want to have to work for it.

But it'll all end up being someone else's fault, of course, when it doesn't happen. When I hear crap like "It takes a village to raise a child" then I know people are dodging the issue. It doesn't take a village, because that implies that when things go wrong you can point at the "village" and blame everyone else for your kids' problems. Bullshit - it doesn't take a village, it takes parents. Without parents to impose discipline, provide guidance, teach respect, show interest and set an example, you end up with Lord of the fucking Flies. So if all those parents just took care of raising their own kids there wouldn't be an issue, would there? But in many cases they don't.

Clearly the city has a problem with a lot of parents, or it wouldn't have to resort to stunts like this. And what was the incentive to get junior to school this year? Tickets to see rapper Little Shorty in concert. No stereotyping here then - if you made up shit like this people wouldn't believe you. After a while people self-select out of crap like this, until the only people left are those who can't. But if you want a better life, step one is going to school; otherwise don't bother moaning about how the rest of us need to support the city and all those underprivileged people. Bollocks.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Grapes Of Wrath

You could file this story under "They probably deserve each other". A flight attendant is suing a popular evangelist's wife for assaulting her on a plane where she allegedly "threw her against a bathroom door and elbowed her in the left breast". Now I'm certainly no fan of TV evangelists - smug, self-satisfied bastards, clogging up the airwaves with their inane drivel and ministering to an army of the brainless. I watched one at the weekend and you didn't have to be a genius to figure out that the secret of their success has absolutely fuck-all to do with what they say and absolutely everything to do with how they say it. The recipe is as follows:

1. Pick some simple and basic biblical concept, for instance "God is good".
2. Think of about eighty different ways to say this same thing. (God is good. The goodness of God is all around us. The Lord has blessed us all with his goodness. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow all who believe in God. Lift up your hearts to God in all his goodness, etc. etc.)
3. Put on a smart suit and a tie, and make sure your teeth are very white.
4. Stand at the front of a very expensive church, filled with very simple and gullible people.
5. Run through your eighty different versions of "God is good" or whatever your text is in a loud and artificially proclamatory voice.
6. Smile broadly, wave your arms and say "Amen" a lot.
7. Pass round the collection plate and get very rich.
8. Live in a mansion.

So the news that a TV pastor's wife turns out to be some pampered uber-bitch with a superiority complex doesn't exactly make my personal "never would have believed it" list. On the other hand, where does the flight attendant get off claiming 10% of the bitch's net worth for an elbow in the tit?

The actual harm that was alleged is that the flight attendant now "suffers from anxiety and hemorrhoids because of the incident" and needs "medical expenses for counseling". What total and utter bullshit. What a complete bastardization and abuse of the legal system. This useless flight bitch should be thrown straight in prison for insulting the intelligence of the human race. How the fuck do you allege that getting your boob knocked, even assuming it happened at all, causes hemorrhoids? Newsflash, dumbass: maybe the thirty years you spent standing up in planes at high altitudes has more to do with the purple grapes that you've discovered dangling from your wrinkled arse.

And another thing, what is it with flight attendants that makes them believe they get a pass being rude to customers in the first place? For some reason we're expected to be understanding that they may have had a busy day and lots of difficult passengers, and this should somehow excuse them from being helpful, courteous or remotely useful. In what other line of work is this a reasonable excuse? Do air traffic controllers get to run planes into each other at 30,000 feet because they had a hard day? Is it OK for surgeons to intentionally botch heart operations because they just can't be bothered today? There's a big difference between mistakes (unavoidable in any line of work - for instance "I forgot to get the blanket for the passenger in seat 3C") and downright bloody minded refusal to do your job. Surgeons are employed to do surgery; flight attendants are employed to make customers' flights enjoyable. So why do so many of them seem to regard us as self-loading freight, to be tolerated or not as they see fit. And, apparently, sued.

Maybe it's the hemorrhoids - I can see how this would make you pissy and irritable. Still, bitch, put your faith in the goodness of the Lord, and surely your grapes shall be cured even as was done for the lepers. And that bloke Lazarus. Not that he died of hemorrhoids. Or at least I don't think he did - the Bible is a little vague on this point. Never mind all that deep theology - it's about time for the collection plate. Large bills only please, no checks. Now fasten your seatbelts for your flight to the promised land...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Dream? More Like A Nightmare...

It's that time of year when summer colds are doing the rounds; both Mrs Bison and Bison Daughter caught one, and I'm trying very hard not to get it since I don't have the energy to be ill. Colds are one of those things around which a great myth has grown up, namely that of the "man flu", whereby men are supposed to be incapable of handling a simple cold while women, clearly a far superior and hardier segment of the species, could catch a cold and still climb a mountain with three children on their backs, without the need for Sudafed. This is patently a load of old bollocks, promulgated by certain wimmin to cover up the fact that for 10-15% of the month they are prone to unwarranted bitchiness, acne, bloating, whining and occasional homicidal urges.

Mrs Bison learned this lesson many years ago; after taunting me for my pussiness when I succumbed to a cold she promptly contracted it herself and immediately grew whiskers and retired to her basket. I always remember this and remind her of it in the event that I get some minor disease and she accuses me of being a giant wuss. Of course, being a man, I can probably remember about three occasions such as this while my spouse, being a woman, has a fully-stocked Grievance Database of all the hundreds of occasions when I have been wrong / screwed up / acted like a twat. It's not that there have been that many occasions (well it's not just that) but her recall of them is, uncannily, almost photographic.

Anyway, this is not the point. What is the point is that Mrs Bison informed me this evening that while she was hopped up on nighttime cold remedy she had a weird dream where we renewed our wedding vows. This is strange because we both regard the idea of renewing wedding vows as utterly ludicrous, the kind of fatuous suburban bullshit that gets married people a bad name. What kind of people renew their vows, and, more importantly, why?

A cynic might suggest that, having made the mistake once, deciding to do it again would be a bit like the experience of cutting off a testicle and then going back twenty years later and cutting off the other one, to refresh the memory. However, even as a happily married man (is that an oxymoron?) I have to say that any male who would willingly indulge in the "renewing your vows" charade should have his man-card forcibly removed, possibly along with his dick. Assuming he still has one. No real man would renew his vows would he? But how many men still have the balls left after two decades of wedded bliss (aka sack-withering oppression) to say "No, I don't think that's a very good idea" when their spouse suggests renewing their vows in front of their children, "just like Elspeth at the book club did last month". Let alone responding with a loud guffaw, and "You're fucking joking, right?"

Still, the fact that the whole idea is stupid (and that 50% of the participants are at best dragged into it unwillingly) hasn't stopped a whole industry springing up to cater for the dumb bastards who do it. You can renew your vows on cruise ships, at Disneyland and in Las Vegas. You can't vent your creativity with a gift list second time around but instead you can make up dick-shrivelingly excruciating new vows and force people to stand around with a straight face as you exchange them.

"Twenty years ago I promised to love and cherish you and now as I stand here at the crossroads of our life together I realise the enormity of my commitment and the depth of our bond. Honestly I would rather chew off my own nuts than be parted from you. No, seriously, you're great, especially that thing you let me do in bed which is illegal in thirty-two states. And I don't even mind that much about your tits hanging down, because, to be honest, when we do it face to face I'm usually thinking about someone else anyway. I hope we're still together in another twenty years, so we can sit around in our own waste trying to remember each other's names. Yeah, that would be great."

You can even buy books to guide you through the whole unnecessary process, should you so desire. I wouldn't bother though - my guess is that married people fall into two categories: happy ones (who don't need to renew vows since their original ones did the job and they have better things to do) and fucked-up ones (who desperately hope that re-pledging their love will make it come true and somehow fill the aching, bottomless void in their sad lives).

And if you're contemplating renewing your vows after only five years of marriage I would have to suggest that you wait. You're still on the warm-up lap, dumbass. Go buy some electric pink love toys to while away the decades. It'll give you something to talk about in your excruciating new vows...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison