Sponsor a Tory

I recently received an e-mail, perpetrating to be from a Leeds University student, imploring me to give to the Leeds alumni fund. It ran thus.


Dear graduate,


I was once a poor orphan on the desolate North Yorkshire moors. After my father died carrying radioactive water for ten miles so that we could boil our turnips, I was taken in by a pack of wolves. I was raised as if one of their own cubs. During this time, I made friends with a panther and a bear, who helped to teach me human things. I eventually returned to civilization and was taken to the local almshouse. It was horrible. When I finally escaped, I joined a gang of cockney pickpockets working for a kindly old man, and together we scraped by. But I longed to go to university. But how could a desolate young urchin like me ever hope to go to university? So I worked hard, got good grades, applied, and the Leeds University alumni fund gave me a thousand pounds to help me out.


If you could find it in your heart to give just thirty pounds to the Leeds alumni fund, we can work together to make sure disadvantaged people like me can get to University, where I can follow my dreams of becoming an astronaut. Don't let another minute pass. Every second, a child fails to get into University. If everyone I email gives just thirty pounds, we can put another 250 students through university.


Please, help us.


Love, 
Unlikely and probably fictional person.

Thirty pounds will help put someone through university. Or convince Judas to betray the Messiah. Your call.

Now, I'm not going to give any money to the Leeds alumni fund, and at risk of sounding like a bitter old man, here are my reasons why.

1) I have no money.

Today I ate pasta with chili sauce and tinned beef. Do you know how horrific that is? The experience wasn't just harrowing on my taste buds, it was dehumanizing. The ring pull snapped and I had to bash the tin of corned beef in with a heavy blunt object, before ripping it apart with a pair of pliers whilst attempting to lick the meat out of a jagged hole like a raccoon going through someone's trash. Dwell on that, if you will.

Like a raccoon.

2) It isn't my fault.

I did not, once, ever condone people having to pay to go to University. I don't know what this money is supposed to go towards? You get a grant, a loan, a whatever, anyway. So basically, lulwhut? Why do you even need it? And assuming you do, why  the hell should I give it to you? You're only going to turn into a pretentious Tory imbecile anyway, like most of the others. I'm not paying for your Pimms, urchin.

3) Get a job.

Ok, that sounds a bit too conservative for me. But seriously, I had a job. I had a job all the way through university. It sucked, people actually threatened to kill me. With real knives. Don't rely on handouts. Emancipate yourself through wage slavery. Or something.

4) I never got it.

No, you're damn right. Neither me, or anyone I knew, got that. So we didn't go splurge on new laptops, data sticks or whatever kids are 'supposed' to buy with a grand. Hell, I never had a laptop all the way through university. I'm really trying to sympathize, but it's kind of hard. Did I mention I had corned beef chili-pasta for my abomination of a tea?  I'm still hungry now, and though I can't help but feel ashamed at what I've done.



Alright, so maybe I'm being a bit tight fisted, but you know what, I don't care. Because Leeds University could fund 250 more places if I gave them money, but it could also probably choose to not charge nine-grand for an education there anyway, which in a round about way would let more people go to university.

Besides, like a mentioned before, most of the students at Leeds University were horrendous people. I'm not even joking. They were the kind of people that frightened old lady would cross the street TO PUNCH IN THE FACE. Everything about them, from ideology to attitude, from dress sense to accent, made me begin to develop a twitch. It became impossible for me to leave the house. I had to curl into a gibbering ball to block out their short, barking, snobby laughs, or their stupid smirks.

The thing that bugs me the most? Their infernal, thrice cursed flipflops. Even the sound of their footsteps caused headaches and nausea. On the cheap plastic tiles of a supermarket floor it reminded me of the sharp crack of a rainbow trout being repeatedly hammered off the kitchen worktop.

So no, I won't be giving any money. There are some ideological considerations, but it is mainly because I refuse to pay for something that isn't my fault, or sponsor someone to turn into dickhead. There's enough business managers and lazy IT staff ruining the world without  encouraging anyone else to be one. Frankly, I find the idea insulting. Now excuse me while I go rummaging through the bins for a new pair of shoes.

Shades of Blondie

I'm a lucky man. In addition to having one woman lusting after my pallid zombie flesh, I've started to be courted by another young lady. I must confess, I'm rather flattered. The world is a big place, though, so I suppose people with Gargoyleophilia must exist somewhere.

The problem is, she doesn't return my calls. Yes, she's being a little coy, and I, for my part, am desperate to hear her sweet voice again. I don't know, it reminds my of that song - Call Me. It's a good one, and anyone fortunate enough to hear my drunken glass-shattering rendition should try the real thing, if you're into cheesey 80's songs about prostitution, or just like gazing at punk-themed Debbie Harry and wanting her to whip you.

Anyway, this affair - I'm calling it an affair because cool misogynistic people would do that - this affair began a few months ago. Me and my level-headed housemate were going over the gas bills, wondering exactly why we'd not been charged for any gas recently. And by recently, I mean, ever. It was a puzzling thing, since we'd done everything right. We'd called British Gas to give them a meter reading. We'd called British Gas to set up a direct debit. We'd called British Gas to encourage them to spell our names correctly on future correspondence - something they have yet to do. We'd even called them to ask why we'd received a final demand for a property that wasn't ours, addressed to our landlord. A landlord whose name they'd spelt wrong.

We'd even called twice to ask why we weren't being charged for our gas.

Anyway, we finally cracked it the other day, with the help of a certain British Gas call center operative who has a voice like honeyed honey. She was very sweet. She told us the reason why we'd not been charged for any gas in the last nine months was that British Gas were actually reading the meter for an unoccupied flat on the other side of the road. That was somewhat inconvenient. Anyway, we were told we could expect an amended bill sometime soon, once they'd gotten the meter reading right.

Without detracting too much from this new girl I've become infatuated with, it's kind of peeving. I mean, is the company ran by blind, dyslexic clowns who work to some sort of arcane, superstitious time frame that stretches into the epochs? By not reading our meter right now, do they hope to reap some enormous benefit in two hundred years time? Do they operate on a scale that is incomprehensible to my puny brain? Do they think the numbers 17 and 84 are interchangeable when billing someones gas usage? Do they think you can spell someones name using entirely vowels?

The British Gas billing Database. It predicts that the world will end in 2012.

Anyway, this girl. She works for British Gas.

I'm really starting to pine for her now. Seven times I've called her in the last three weeks, and each time she's promised to ring back. It's starting to get upsetting, and I'm beginning to feel like a bit of a crazy stalker. So my question to you, Internet, is does the British Gas lady actually want me? Is she being coy, or is she just not interested in me? I've tried to get in touch, I really have, but each time she just taps away on her computer and tells me that she'll ring back. I keep getting my hopes up that I could resolve this nightmare billing problem, and each time she crushes me, like a bulldozer driving over a poppy before exploding.

Except That It Is.

Ken Clarke has messed up. It is to be expected of a cuddly, bumbling politician of seventy years of age, who has spent the last thirty in government and looks like someones grandfather. But it is unusual for Ken, who manages to sit on the boards of hedge funds and tobacco companies in his spare time. Ken Clarke is Ken Clarke, except when he isn't. That's what Internet Blog, Beneath the Wig, says about Ken Clarke's recent comments that rape is, sometimes, not rape.

"These are not the droids you're looking for."

Beneath the Wig is on to something. The classic formula for winning an argument.

Step one, you create a Strawman - in this case, blame the interviewer for asking questions that were too hard for a seasoned politician who is also the Justice Secretary to deal with. 'Wiggy' labours under the impression that journalists should know everything, all the time, forever, and not ask difficult questions. People asking difficult questions should expect difficult answers, right? And the public has no right to express righteous indignation.

While constructing your strawman argument, it is important to focus on irrelevant issues such as the journalist's personal background, and things with no legal basis that are completely irrelevant to the discussion - the legal age of consent. Rape, ergo, is not rape, if it is a seventeen year old having consensual intercourse with a fifteen year old. Ken Clarke said that, and to some degree, we can all sympathize with that. Wiggy makes a big point about this. Apart from that's not the thing that offended people. What offended people was Clarke suggesting that not all rape was 'as serious'.

Step 2: ???

I don't know what this step is.

Step 3: Profit

As evidenced by people leaping to the beleaguered Justice Secretary's defence. Because rape is rape, except when it isn't.

Personally, I'm with Victoria. Rape, is, surprisingly, rape. It's an unfortunate coincidence that two identical words with identical definitions should be regarded as identical, but thems the breaks. Rape is rape. What 'Wiggy' was talking about, was in fact, not rape. So not rape is not rape, except when it is rape. This is starting to look like a theatrical script for GRIMDARK theatre written by Donald Rumsfeld. Ten points to anyone who knows what I'm talking about.

So lets look again, this time from another perspective, no less bias - but with the advantage of using actual quotations. Read all about it: Outrage as seventy year old Tory causes outrage.

So Ken Clarke was told that rape is rape. He responded by saying, "no, its not". I mean, I didn't expect a grizzly old male Tory to even be able to comprehend the thing he was talking about, but I'm still somewhat disappointed.


""date rape can be as serious as the worst rapes but date rapes ... in my very old experience of being in trials ... they do vary extraordinarily one from another, and in the end the judge has to decide on the circumstances.""
- Reuters

So, basically, date rape is often not as serious as 'the worst rapes'. That would be an awful job. Can you imagine sitting in a cubicle for eight hours a day, typing up criteria to distinguish 'normal' rape from 'the worst rape' or 'date rape'. I think I'd top myself, to be honest, and anyone else caught in the spray of bullets caused by me going postal. 

Said Justice Secretary obviously doesn't know people who verge on the more philosophical end of the Gender Studies seminars. Because rape is rape when consent isn't given. That's pretty much it. There can be a lot more said about it, but it's generally a black and white scenario. It's not a tough definition. I don't see an extraordinary amount of variance between raping someone and raping someone. I'm trying, Ken, I really am, but rape is rape, isn't it?


It's not often I find myself siding with Ed Miliband. So I'm not siding with him, but still. Eddy says that Ken Clarke can't represent people as a Justice Secretary that doesn't know what he's talking about. He can't. Anarchist perspectives on politicians aside, this takes the biscuit. Except when it doesn't.

But old Ken does have one point. He is very old, and very experienced at this sort of thing. And given that about six percent of all rape allegations - the ones that get reported - actually end in a conviction, rape must clearly not be rape in 94% of scenario's, right?

Still, he's obviously old and tired and when journalists are asking things that are too hard to answer, we might be being unkind by keeping him in a job anyway. I think it might be time for this horse to be put out to pasture. And horse is horse, except when it's Ken Clarke. And pasture is pasture, except when it is 'get shot in the face'.

Such is my level of internet fuelled rage, two updates in one day is definately a record. Except when it isn't.

Little Shop of Horrors

There are many diffuse reasons for why I haven't updated in the last two weeks, but the great thing about the internet is that you can never talk about yourself. In doing so, you either pass for a narcissistic egoist or an angsty teenager who doesn't realize all of his abandonment problems could be solved with a haircut and a basic attempt at socializing. So instead, I thought I'd talk about something close to me. A little too close, so much so that it's started to become somewhat unnerving.

Recently, I decided that growing vegetables would be a cheap, fun and worthwhile pursuit. Of course, the initial investment of a bag of compost and a few plants didn't seem like much of an issue. I don't know if anyone else has done this, but the important thing to remember is that plants don't spontaneously grow food for you on a whim. You have to wait, months and months, before it squeezes out even the tiniest vegetable for your meagre dinner plate.

Anyway, I decided to get two tomato plants, a few baby corns, and some spring onions. Initially, it went well. None of them have died yet, apart from a few spring onions which are so numerous and inconsequential they could be pointless internet bloggers. As an aside, apparently spring onions grow faster than disease. Yes, that's what it says in my gardening book. You can out-grow disease. But onion-diseases are the last thing on my mind at the moment. More recently, things have become a little more frightening, and the front room of my house is starting to look like a set from Day of the Triffids.

Why hello thar!

Tomato plants, for anyone who doesn't know - like myself - actually grow into towering monstrosities in a frighteningly short space of time. Having swiftly passed the four and a half foot height allowed by my window, they show no signs of decreasing their growth, and no signs of bearing fruit. What I'm left with is a front-facing window completely covered in plant growth, which has started attaching itself to the curtain-rail and pressing against the windows like an overcrowded Japanese subway train.

The most harrowing detail is that the plants exude a tomatoy miasma which threatens to choke anyone getting too close. They seem resistant to any attempts to curb them, and refuse to produce tomatoes. All I have so far are a bunch of green baubles that could be tomatoes eventually, if they don't turn into pod-people first. I have to say, I'm disappointed.

Outside, the sweetcorn and spring onions have taken a more leisurely attitude towards growing, having climbed about three inches in seven weeks. They too show no enthusiasm towards being harvested any time soon, so I'm sort of at a loss. I'm not worried, though, I expect I'll have been eaten by flesh hungry Sungolds long before I'm missing sweetcorn. If no one sees me for a couple of weeks, don't go round to my flat. Just destroy it from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

I was later told that apparently they don't stop growing until you decapitate them with knives. So I cut off the top of the tomato plant. Hopefully now it'll give me some tomatoes, before I have to cut off it's toes, one by one.

Change You Can't Believe In

So the AV referendum was up yesterday, and I should have voted. I should have also wrote a blog post, telling other people to vote. And I should have voted yes.

"What?" I hear you cry. "Aren't you one of those Annie-Kists that likes smashing up banks, fighting cops and living in a filthy quagmire of your own half-eaten pitta bread and unwashed socks?"

The short answer is 'yes', the long answer is 'yes but I don't like humous'. So let me explain, in a concise way, the need for voting yes - even though it's too late to change, and by all accounts, we got hammered.

1) David Cameron was voting no. And, as we know, David Cameron is an interdimensional locust sent through time to enslave humanity. He must be stopped at all costs, before we're reduced to a Terminator-style situation, cool as that would be.

2) Trots are voting no. Trots are uniquely evil, misguided trolls who thrive on crushing individuality, autonomy, and progress in general. Imagine them to be like goblins with megaphones. They are fractured into various tribes with frequent infighting. They dislike the sun, and prefer cool, damp, underground caves. They have an incomprehensible goblin-morality, they smell, and are responsible for much pain in the world. The word Trot is derived from the Yorkshire - 'To rot' - meaning to decay and stagnate.

3) Political reform will always be advocated as a final resort. So if you won't want legions of newly awakened radicals settling for the barest minimum of concession instead of making genuine gains, you should be in favour of AV.

4) Disillusionment with the system comes as a long result of small annoyances, betrayals, and increments of disappointment. By reforming now, we add AV to the list of collective failures of organised, hierarchical, 'representative', party-politics.

5) Tzeentch demands it. Or maybe he doesn't. Who knows?

Embrace the Change!

For all of those reasons and more, you should have voted yes in the AV ref. Although if you didn't - much like me - then nevermind. It's not like it would have made anything better.

The Price of Freedom?

Osama bin Laden is dead. This categorically means that there will be no more terrorism, ever again.

Anyone reading the newspapers will immediately know that it was actually President Obama himself who flew to Pakistan, knocked on Osama's front door, and delivered a stunning one liner before roundhouse kicking the terrorist leader to death. He then carried his body for two hundred miles before depositing it into the ocean before nightfall. Then he flew home, cooked his tea, made love to his wife and told the American nation, rather modestly, that Osama was out of the picture.

This has allowed elements of the American people to pour into the streets, cheering in favour of death and thumping chests and slapping backs chanting USA! USA! USA!
Purchases of Freedom Fries and Cheeseburgers have skyrocketed around the globe, and for the first time since December 2001, sales of American flags have outstripped burnings of American flags.

And why shouldn't they be happy? Not only will everyone definitely forget about Bin Laden now, but it will also miraculously bring all of the people who died on September 11th back to life, which some scientists suggest could lead to a zombie-apocalypse. The War in Afghanistan is expected to end immediately, and President Obama is set to receive an Oscar and be Knighted in the New Years Honours list, to go with his Nobel Piece prize which he won after a considerable time in office.

Skeptics has suggested that this will not change anything. Dr. Nat Um Maron, speaking on behalf of the University of Reality, Massachusetts, has said,

"I don't see what killing Osama will achieve. He is nothing more than a figurehead. Killing him has turned him into a martyr and endangered many people through potential retalitory attacks. The mere threat of more attacks means more anti-terrorism powers are needed. Which in turn strips individual freedoms. Somewhere, somehow, Osama is laughing at us."

But others were jubliant. One happy-camper outside the White House told reporters,

"I'm glad Osama got what was coming to him. By killing an old unarmed man in his house, we've proven that justice prevails despite the odds. They thought they were so cool burning flags and shouting like barbarians. That's why I'm standing here, waving this flag and shouting like a barbarian. To prove to the Islamofascists that we've definately won, that we're totally better than them, and that we beat them without killing thousands of innocent people in the process."

Osama bin Laden was World Hide and Seek Champion for ten years, ecplising challenger Roual Moat with ease. He is survived by several wives and many children, and a shadowy underground terrorist network.