True Love

Mrs Bison is worried that all this weightlifting is going to mess up my joints and turn me into a cripple. Back and knee pain seem to be, to some extent, a fact of life these days, what with the deadlifts, squats and soccer, and she's concerned that by the time I get to fifty I won't be able to walk. "And if that happens I'm not going to wipe your arse for you" she said, lovingly.

"What?" I replied, "not even if I get some debilitating disease?".
"No way. I'll hire a nurse to do it for you. Only it'll have to be a male nurse - I don't want any funny business."

Of course, I can just imagine your typical female nurse, overcome with sexual excitement, unable to resist some fifty year-old bloke sitting in his own excrement in a giant diaper. Yeah, right. As far as I'm concerned fifty is too far away to contemplate but apparently the most I have to look forward to, if I'm lucky, is a diaper change with a happy ending. Kill me now...

Crap No-one Needs, #11

Carbon Reduction Manager

I’m flicking through the Manchester Evening News and I see this job advertised: Carbon Reduction Manager for Manchester Metropolitan University. (That’s Manchester Poly or Manchester College of Basket Weaving to you and me, right?) This is part of the Environmental Sustainability Team, reporting to the Environmental Sustainability Manager, and apparently has responsibility to “devise innovations to reduce our energy use and carbon emissions”. Well, how about this as an idea: if you didn’t take out full-page ads in the newspaper, maybe you could reduce your fucking carbon footprint, tossbags.

What kind of college needs to fill a meaningless, politically correct, fuckwitted position like this anyway? You want to know what it pays? $60-70k per year. I bet that’s reassuring to all the kids taking out loans so they can afford higher education in the UK. You’ll be working hard to pay the salary of a carbon reduction manager, so they can drive, fly and fart around, producing carbon dioxide and perpetuating the utterly baseless myth that global warming (if it exists at all) is man-made and can be controlled by us. It’s ironic that cutting down on carbon is something “industry” is expected to do, while the climate change industry consumes endless resources having conferences and flying around to meet each other.

Here’s an innovative idea for the environmental sustainability manager – how about you take the Manchester Evening News, roll it up and shove it really hard up your arse. That should cut down on your “emissions” for a while.

Shaky

St.Louis had some earthquakes this morning. To be more accurate Evansville, Indiana (or somewhere around there) had the earthquakes, and we just felt the effects. Of course in a city where a thunderstorm or minor snowfall has the weather forecasters and local news people practically coming in their pants with excitement, you can just imagine the delight with which they greeted this new local news miracle.

It was about 4:35 this morning when the first one hit. Fucking thing woke me up - at first I thought it was Bison Daughter jumping on the bed, then that it was a tree falling on the house (which would have been typical, with us just having put a new roof on). If I'd been more awake I might have waited until it finished, then rolled over and asked Mrs Bison "Did the earth move for you too?" That would have been funny. Instead I just lay there with the bed shaking, like some outtake from The Exorcist. I kept expecting to look up and see an old priest chanting "The power of Christ compels you. The power of Christ compels you."

Fortunately my shed-like house didn't fall down, as Allstate canceled my earthquake coverage last year. That would have pissed me off. "Look what they did, your cunting insurance company." I guess you have to have seen the movie...

Now Wash Your Hands?

Ever heard of Republic Airways? I hadn’t, but an insert in the seat pocket of my crappy regional jet flight to St.Louis informs me that they are the parent of Chautauqua Airlines (better known as Shitauqua), the company that does those American Airlines flights on these tiny Embraer 140 jets (cigar-shaped coffins). It also announces that they won Air Transport World’s 2008 Regional Airline of the Year award.

Sweet Jesus, how fucking crap were the other contenders? This is a three hour flight and if they moved livestock in spaces this small someone would be in prison by now. My arse went to sleep about thirty minutes into the flight and I don’t have enough room to relax my shoulder, resulting in a growing pain on one side of my back. And I’m in the coveted exit-row-aisle seat.

I just went for a piss – in case you hadn’t noticed they no longer have water in the bathroom, just a packet of moist hand-wipes. Only the wipes had run out. I’ve been in there before when the toilet wouldn’t flush (which would have been a really bad thing to discover if I’d just parked my breakfast) and have even been subjected to a three hour flight with no toilet at all because it wasn’t working.

Is anyone listening at American Airlines? These things are fucking shit. Is this what your brand is meant to represent now? The no-flush, no-wipe, no-relief airline where pain is just part of the experience? Obviously flying with the best regional jet company is a bit like getting the finest colonoscopy or the nicest prostate exam – if you actually enjoy it there must be something wrong with you.

That's Illogical

In a sign of tragic sadness, Mrs Bison and I have got into the habit of watching Star Trek re-runs on Saturday night if we happen to be at home. (Who am I kidding? We're always at home, on account of having no life.) We're not Trekkies, you understand, and I'd heartily support the death penalty for anyone who claims to be able to speak Klingon or who dresses up as Mr Spock on weekends. It's just that the show has now become a piece of history, harkening back to our schooldays, when we used to watch it after tea during the week.

It's also fun because it's so amazingly shit. We missed the start of this week's episode and joined just in time to see Captain Kirk on a planet surface with a few men you'd never seen before, in red shirts, who you just knew were going to die soon. The thing is, this planet looked exactly the fucking same as the last two planets they beamed down onto, i.e. just like a cheap studio mock-up. They're supposed to be on a five year mission, but at the rate they get through anonymous men in red shirts (who meet their end in all sorts of weird ways practically every week) I'd be surprised if they had enough people left to keep the ship running. ("I cannae give ye anymore power Captain, all my engineers are fuckin' deid.")

Fortunately a good Scotch turns Star Trek from pointless ancient shit into fabulous humor-filled viewing. Provided you drink enough of it.

Crap No-one Needs #10

Crafts

Can someone please explain to me how anyone can seriously sit down and watch those TV programs where painfully dull women teach each other to bead, scrapbook, quilt, paint or otherwise make stuff that is the very essence of "crap no-one needs"? Whole stores exist simply to supply the materials that must be bought in order to engage in "crafts", but what happens to all the shit that gets made? Either it sits around, cluttering up people's houses or they must spend half their waking hours peddling it to friends, family and slow-moving strangers.

I mean, once you've made a quilt, how many more quilts do you need? And once you have a couple of fucking awful "one stroke" paintings on your wall how many more can you possibly want? Now, with the benefit of eBay, people all over the world can offer up their particular version of crap for sale. This is stuff you'd be lucky to give away at a garage sale, for fuck's sake. Maybe I'm a miserable cynic but it strikes me that the whole craft industry is just ReTaRdEd...

Resisting Temptation

The next door neighbors are remodeling their bathroom and one of the things they're replacing is the toilet. This is a do-it-yourself job, so the old toilet has to be disposed of in some way. Tomorrow, apparently, is the day when it will be left out for the garbage truck. They're very nice people but the female half of the combination must be a little uptight because she's going to put a large cardboard box over the toilet rather than leave it out "in the raw" as it were. I don't think people in the Mid-West are supposed to admit that they actually have bodily functions - putting a toilet out just screams "I shit - and I've done it in this!" I suppose.

I could understand being a little reluctant to openly dispose of, say, an inflatable plastic love doll. Or a giant porno collection, an S&M suit with gimp mask and a double-ended "pink intruder" vibrating love toy. But a toilet? We all take a dump, don't we?

Anyway, Mrs Bison has dared me to slip out tonight, lift up the box and take a shit in the toilet. Don't think I'm not tempted, but can you imagine what would happen if I was caught? I'd be banned from suburbia for crimes against decency. And if I wasn't caught there's no fucking way I could keep a straight face when they came round to ask if we'd heard anything in the night...

Sick Flags

It must be Spring - in spite of the incessant, pissing rain and the relentless cold I just saw my first TV commercial for Six Flags. (For any Brits out there this is like Alton Towers, only much more shit.) Yes, it's time for all the slack-jawed, flat-footed, low-browed, pot-bellied, toothless WalMart shoppers who apparently make up the majority of their clientele to reach into their welfare check for another round of season passes.

I've tried to see the upside of the local St.Louis Six Flags but fuck me it's a depressing place. The endless queues, utterly shit food and ugly motherfucker crowds just don't do anything for me. "Let's go in the wave pool and stand in a square foot of water, surrounded by about a thousand fat bastards and their kids, who haven't showered in a week, half of whom are probably pissing in the water at this moment. Yeah!"

Last time I was there (and it will be the last time) I nearly had to kill some social retards who tried to cut in line, while all the other retards were going to just let them. I think that's the most depressing part of Six Flags - coming face to face with the dregs of society at play. Line up everyone!