Smell My Finger

I've gone on record in the past that my only criterion for evaluating toilet paper is whether it's strong enough that your finger doesn't go through it. All those TV commercials that go on about how soft it is are wasted on me, and on Mrs Bison too, since her buying decision is based on "what's the cheapest 2-ply stuff in the store today?" I rolled my eyes when they started finding new ways to differentiate their product, such as "it doesn't leave little bits of white paper up your arse when you're done", and I never understood why the product was advertised with fluffy cartoon bears and kittens, unless the subliminal message was that wiping your hole on their product would be just like using the fur of one of those creatures.

Now, however, I am ready to declare a winner in the bogroll stakes - Charmin Ultra Strong gets my vote. Yes I know it has annoying cartoon bears on its commercials, but not only does it pass the finger test, it also seems to enable you to get away with substantially less product.

On an unscientific but statistically meaningful sample of recent uses I was able to achieve zero-tolerance wiping with no more than six sheets in all but one case. The exception was an eight-sheet fudgy encounter, but this would probably have required a good half-roll of certain other products, and was canceled out by a four-sheeter yesterday. This is good stuff! Normally I wouldn't subscribe to the notion that buying a more expensive but superior product gives you better value than the cheap option, especially when the product in question is only purchased to be shoved up your arse, but in this case I would recommend the product for any man reading.

Note that I said "man". One day last week I pulled six sheets off a new roll in the morning; by the next morning the bastard thing was practically fucking empty. What do women do with bog roll? Are they making papier mache hats out of it when I'm not in the house? Do they eat it as a filling but calorifically negligible mid-morning snack? Does it mysteriously migrate out of the house, like all the ballpoint pens which I bring back from hotels, and which disappear so that there's still never a pen by the phone. Ever.

I'm thinking of installing an extra bog roll holder - "His" and "Hers". On mine will be a roll of Charmin Ultra Strong. At six sheets a day I could buy a "Big" roll and it should be good for about a month. A twelve roll pack would last me a whole year. Even allowing for occasional bouts of dysentery I should be able to buy a few jumbo packs of twenty four and have them last me until my fifties. Anything longer than that would be pointless - I might be in Depends by then. On the other bog roll holder would be "Women's Special Roll", i.e. the cheapest most miserable shit that money can buy, which can be wound round your entire hand three times before use. I expect this roll will need replacing daily. There's no point putting the good stuff out because it makes no difference whether it's as thin as tissue paper or thick like a blanket - they'll still yank off thirty sheets. If you really did use kittens to wipe your arse they'd need a whole basket of them every morning. In fact, they'd probably want something larger, like a tiger.

On a not-entirely unrelated note, just over a year ago I stayed at the Taj Mahal Palace hotel in Mumbai, the one that was just attacked.



My abiding memory, other than the incident with the pigeons, the midnight Muslim festival and the man who offered us a hooker when we arrived at the hotel, was a particularly violent spicy chicken dish that made repeated assaults on my sphincter one night. Charmin Ultra Strong was made for such occasions. Of course, my evening wasn't interrupted by gunfire and the sound of lunatic Muslim extremists coming to my room to kill me. I don't think they make a roll strong enough for that...

[By the way, I apologize for the title, but Mrs Bison thought it was funny so what could I do?]


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Entertaining

I recently hired a business director, and since he was in St.Louis with his wife on Friday, house hunting, I thought it would be hospitable if I invited them over for a drink. He'd already made dinner plans for the evening so I didn't have to prevail upon Mrs Bison to cook something. This was probably a good thing: Mrs Bison works pretty much full time, and the things she cooks for us fall more into the "hearty home cooking" category than the "poncy showing off to guests" one. This means that anything wanky we choose to offer is very likely never to have been cooked by us before, and therefore to be something of an experiment. Some of these experiments don't end well - things can look great in a cookery book but end up resembling afterbirth on a plate. However the things that we usually eat can be a little exotic for the Midwestern American palate, by which even onions can be regarded as "over-spicy food of the devil". All in all it's better if people don't come for dinner.

So we got prepared with a range of soda (coke, diet pepsi, root beer) and some beer, as well as chips and little smoked salmon and cream cheese things on crackers, which were great, except that the crackers kept breaking every time Mrs Bison tried to spread the allegedly spreadable cream cheese on them, causing many bad words to be stifled.

The guests arrived; he asked for beer, so Mrs Bison got a bottle from the fridge. We had a very pleasant conversation - he finished the beer but declined a second one. I stuck with soda as I was playing soccer later that night. After a while they left for dinner and I went off to play soccer. (Two great goals but we still lost. Bollocks.) It wasn't until the next morning that Mrs Bison noticed a bottle of root beer missing from the fridge. And a full complement of proper beer still intact. She'd given our guest a root beer without noticing, and he'd not said anything.

Of course I had to e-mail him and call him out as a pussy for not telling the boss's wife that she'd given him the wrong drink. Some people are just too polite. Or maybe he thought we were teetotal weird bastards who didn't believe in alcohol.

Some people are natural entertainers, and others are not. We're in the "not" group. We haven't actually poisoned anyone yet, but we did serve samosas to this Indian bloke and they were still frozen in the middle. It didn't really matter though, because he was a cunt. Poisoning him would actually have been a bonus.

From now on I think we're going to start fucking with guests for fun. If they're too polite and/or scared to say anything we should try adding things to the food, just to see what they'll choke down. How about half a mouse in the dip, or a large centipede on the lettuce? It would take more than a couple of root beers to wash that down...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Bankrupt The Automakers

I've been trying so hard not to comment on the US automakers' begging trip to Washington DC, and their strident bleating for a taxpayer-funded bailout but I just can't let it go by. Not that I have the slightest illusion that anyone gives a flying fuck what I say on the subject, but if I start to let that bother me then what would I do with all my toilet horror stories?

Here's what Rick Wagoner of GM said today: Three million jobs would be lost within the first year, personal income would drop by $150 billion and government tax losses would total $156 billion over three years. "This is about much more than just Detroit. It's about saving the U.S. economy from a catastrophic collapse."

The extent to which this is just complete bollocks beggars belief, but most people are too uninformed about the US bankruptcy process to realize it. Let's imagine that GM runs out of cash and has to declare bankruptcy. It would reorganize under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code as it clearly is a viable business, making millions of cars that people want to buy. However it suffers from a bloated cost structure resulting from years of extortion at the hands of the UAW union, and management weakness.

Once under the protection of Chapter 11 GM would have access to Debtor In Possession (DIP) financing, which would provide operating capital to keep the company running. Ironically, the business would be much better placed to invest in retooling and new technology under Chapter 11 as it would no longer be required to conserve cash to meet obligations that were suspended during the reorganization, and would have ample cash from DIP financing. This is where the $25 billion could be used productively - a secured loan to fund the company during reorganization. (Not that it would likely be required - DIP financing is very secure and there would certainly be plenty of lenders.)

"Ah, but what about all the suppliers to GM? Surely they would go under when GM didn't pay their bills?" No they wouldn't. One of the first tasks of the bankruptcy court is to approve payments to suppliers that are necessary for continued operation of the company; such contracts may be "assumed", i.e. accepted, in which case they remain in force. If they are rejected then the contract holder becomes another creditor in the bankruptcy. In this case, however, since GM has supplier contracts that would be almost impossible to improve (since they fuck their suppliers so hard in the arse already) they would be able to assume contracts and pay bills very quickly. If the government had issues then this is an area that they could usefully intervene - cash payments to auto suppliers to tide them over if there were any delays and avoid a knock-on bankruptcy effect.

Let's look at the facts: GM loses money. A shitload of it. Giving them more money won't change that - it will just buy them a little bit of time. It's like looking at a bucket of water with a big hole in the bottom and thinking "Hmmm. All the water's running out. I'd better solve the problem by topping it up." What GM is facing is common to many industries - it's a sudden reduction in demand. What does every other company do when faced with this? They cut costs and restructure their business to face the new demand picture. Why didn't GM do this already? Because the greedy motherfuckers at the UAW have held all the "Big 3" US automakers to ransom for decades, insisting on gold-plated medical packages and retirement plans, keeping open unprofitable plants and making it punitively expensive to reduce the workforce. Make no mistake - they have bled the companies to the point of death. All the while they managed to keep the exsanguinated body barely alive, but the latest economic downturn has left them staring at a near-corpse. So now it's supposed to be our job to give it a blood transfusion simply so they can go on sucking at it.

[Imagine inserted cartoon of a giant bloated mosquito with the head of Ron Gettelfinger, sucking on a withered body which is attached to a drip. Around it stand Obastard, Pelosi and Reid all murmuring "I see the problem - it just needs more blood". Unfortunately I can't draw it...]

That's why bankruptcy is the best option for GM - it needs to shed its overburdensome cost structure and emerge fit to do battle in a global economy. Why do Rick Wagoner and the UAW make common cause here? Well, the UAW has no interest in restructuring because they'll lose much of their feather-bed pay and benefits system, as well as losing jobs. But that's what it takes! No-one will lend to GM right now because no-one sees any way for them to make money. Unless they're prepared to change that they have no business asking for cash from anyone, be it bank or government. And management has no interest in bankruptcy because the last people on the payout list are shareholders, which means that all their stock in GM would be rendered worthless by the process. So they join hands in an unholy alliance to fleece the taxpayer.

Chapter 11 works - look at the airlines who restructured under the process and emerged fit to survive. And note that the numbers of workers were cut, and their pay and benefits reduced. It was a necessary reaction to years in which their unions had bled the companies by essentially ensuring that the first one to resist would be driven into bankruptcy by a strike. Only when there was no option, after 911, did the companies get to finally deal with the problem.

And on a final note, consider the case of Chrysler. They are not a public company but a privately owned enterprise. The fat cat speculators who funded the buyout from Daimler expected to get a big payout by buying low and running the company for cash. Ooops! Why the fuck should US taxpayers bail them out? When venture capitalists, private equity and hedge funds win big, they claim the outsize payouts are just reward for the risks they take. Well this was a big risk, and guess what motherfuckers: you lost. Step away from the table and take your pain like a man. Don't ask me to bail you out.

What do I expect will happen? Of course they'll get bailed out. Never mind that the successful companies, like Honda, Toyota, Nissan and Hyundai (who interestingly enough are not infested with the UAW sickness) don't need our cash, and build cars here quite happily. This isn't about common sense, but about the Democrats paying off their UAW contributors in return for all that election cash. Welcome to the real world...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Does My Arse Look Big In This?

It's been a while since anything worthwhile has happened, so I've refrained from relaying it to you, faithful readers. Now, however, I am forced to break my silence. Not because of anything worthwhile, you understand, but if I'm not careful I'll forget how to type with two fingers, and next time I try I'll be down to one. So I figured it was time to write something.

As luck would have it, Mrs Bison was looking for a dress at the weekend, for a Christmas party that isn't going to happen. Of course, we didn't know it wasn't going to happen at the time - we're not that stupid, and it would have saved a lot of effort if we'd knowm, but there you go. So off we went to the mall, with Bison Daughter in tow. I fled as soon as we were inside and went in seach of Boring Man Clothes. It seems I only possess two types of clothing - assorted grey/black pants with blue or white shirts for work, and jeans with t-shirts for weekends. It has been so long since I had cause to buy much else that I have become a fashion desert. (Not to be confused with a fashion dessert, which would be altogether more fruity.)

Clothes seem to fall neatly into two categories: stuff that's reasonably priced, which makes me look like a sad suburban middle-aged wanker, and stuff that's cool, which I can't fit in. Not because I'm fat, but because the "male body type" of today is an anorexic weed with a concave chest and no shoulders. Oh, and it's expensive stuff, too, and nothing says "I'm a cunt" like paying top dollar for clothes that don't fit.

Meanwhile Mrs Bison was checking out dresses, ably abetted by Bison Daughter, who has the blend of innate fashion sense and extreme opinionated-ness given to ten year-old girls. By the time I checked in the list was down to two, one of which, my daughter assured me, was "horrible and made Mum look like a fish". I dutifully stood outside the changing room while the fish-dress was tried on. It looked fine to me, which is to say that it accentuated all the best bits of Mrs Bison without leaving any odd parts exposed. Unfortunately they only had one color in her size; all the others were in sizes that ranged from Large through Extra Large and all the way to Giant Waterbuffalo.

I made positive noises, sufficient to encourage purchase, once I had ascertained that said fish-dress was not going to bankrupt me. (What is the point of spending a huge amount on a dress when the very first thing you'll hear next time a dress is required, is "I can't wear that one again - I need a new one"?) Bison Daughter was not happy - "Dad! She has zero fashion sense. You have to stop her!" Did I mention opinionated? I think she gets that from me. When Mrs Bison brought home her new boots last week I suggested that they were very "American Indian" in style, and proceeded to do a rain dance every time she put them on. The difference is that I know when to shut the fuck up, while it's still mildly funny and before I lose important privileges.

So, job done we returned home. I didn't get any Boring Man Clothes, but I got a great deal on some protein supplement at GNC, which will help continue to ensure that I will not be welcome at "no shoulders" Banana Republic anytime soon. Since then the party has been canceled, which means that the dress should go back to the store, because you just know it won't be right the next time a dress is called for. Bison Daughter would be delighted - I think she was rooting for Mrs Bison to choose something from the "My Mommy The Streetwalker" collection. Nice...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

Your Vote Counts - If We Agree

Here's a riddle for you: When is a democracy not a democracy? When the liberals don't like the outcome, that's when. The one bright spot in an otherwise miserable election day was the news that California voters decided to ban same-sex marriage. Not that this hasn't been done before, you understand, but the state Supreme Court decided in its infinite wisdom to overturn the previous law on some spurious basis. So how did the vociferous and self-important gay lobby greet the result of this exercise of democracy? Not with open arms, it's fair to say - two legal challenges have already been filed, and we can expect the issue to go before the courts again as the militant homo community rejects the democratically reached outcome and seeks to make an end-run around the will of the people.

They should be assured of a warm reception in a court system that seems determined to thwart the democratic process by overturning any laws that go against the prevailing liberal orthodoxy. A recent example was the Supreme Court decision to overturn a Louisiana law that made the death penalty a punishment for child rape. The magnificently arrogant decision was based on the concept of interpreting the Eighth Amendment according to "the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society". In other words society rejects the idea of executing child rapists so any law which allows this must be unconstitutional. How the fuck does this work? I thought society expressed its view on the "evolving standard" very clearly when it decided to pass the law in the first place, so what gives the Supreme Court the right to impose its own lefty views without any constitutional basis whatsoever? The court isn't interested in what society's view of decency actually is, only in what they'd like it to be.

In an ironic twist which would be funny if it weren't so sick, Justice Kennedy suggested that the flow of death penalty cases for child rape could overwhelm the country’s criminal justice system. He noted that in 2005 there were 5,702 reported rapes of children under the age of 12. Hmmmm - seems to me that this is an argument in favor of the death penalty for kiddie rapists, not the other way round. Clearly the message isn't getting through to these criminals.

So how do you measure "the evolving standards of decency" in society? How about a referendum on the issue? What do you bet that if the issue of executing child rapists went to a vote it would be overwhelmingly approved? Not much doubt on that one. Apparently the gay lobby is complaining that the California decision represents a decision by the majority on a law affecting the minority, and as such it should not be allowed.

Well here's an interesting perspective: Obastard has clearly stated that he will increase taxes on the so-called rich in order to fund giveaways to the "poor" (which includes a huge raft of lazy, uneducated scum). The rich are a minority in this country and it seems to be perfectly acceptable to the liberals that a majority who did not create the wealth can elect officials simply to confiscate money from the minority and give it to them. Compared to that the idea of not being able to marry another bloke seems to be pretty trivial.

So how about we take this issue to the fucking Supreme Court? Isn't there something in the consitution about unreasonable seizure? Or do the "evolving standards of decency" only work if you're raping kids or walking down the aisle in a two-sausage freak show? Don't write in - I already know the answer...


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison

TV Sex Lessons

Thanks to the television there's little risk that my child will grow up without a full and complete education on the facts of life. We try to be good parents - we answered all the questions about where babies come from without resorting to lies or fairy tales, and Mrs Bison even bought a book to explain it all properly. (I went away on a business trip so I didn't have to try and keep a straight face when explaining what the "penis" was for.) Nevertheless, we drew the line at basic procreation, not out of some weird religious notions of what sex is for, but because explaining sex toys, girl-on-girl and snowballing to kids is just wrong. Those things you have to learn by yourself as an older kid, which is why porn magazines were such a godsend, not so just to us kids, but also to parents.

I learned all the really good stuff from magazines - stuff that I didn't even know existed, and since all the stories were well written (and often fully illustrated) there was never any need to embarrass my parents by asking them what "cunnilingus" meant. This was just as well - I vividly remember a BBC news story when I was young, where there was a reference made to two men engaging in "intercourse".

"How is that possible?" I asked, my basic understanding of sex not capable of explaining how you could make a hot dog with two sausages and no bun. My dad did not respond, and remained resolutely staring at the TV in silence, until we were called to the dinner table. It was not until later that I learned the dreadful truth about what one man could do to another man's arsehole.

Looking back I have some sympathy for my old man, especially as my younger brothers might have been listening, and might have been less ready than I to process a lecture on the finer points of buggery. Just a couple of days ago I was watching an episode of CSI, where the story revolved around a bullrider who was killed when he discovered someone stealing semen from one of the bulls to sell privately. Here I was, daughter at my side (it was only 8pm) while the detectives discussed the presence of semen on the man's jeans. They then went on to discover a large vibrating tool which was lubricated and shoved up the bull's arse, in order to cause it to ejaculate. They went on to explain how bulls in captivity become homosexual.

I stared at the screen, at any point expecting a small voice at my side to say "Dad? What does ... mean?" I looked over at Mrs Bison. She looked back at me, with a face that said "You're on your own on this one". But thankfully the question never came. Of course this can only mean one of two things - either Bison Daughter doesn't know enough to know what she doesn't know yet, or she already knows way more than I believed.

I used to watch Family Guy with her, safe in the knowledge that the really bad jokes were so "out there" that she wouldn't even know to ask what they meant. Now, however, I'm not so sure. In last night's episode Peter Griffin went into space; on his return he described it as a great place to "rub one out" except that after a while it's like you're "living in a snow globe". I'm so fucking glad we sent the child to bed early. The silence would have been deafening.


Copyright © 2008 Edward Bison