Sickness Quotient: 99%
WARNING: Your Sickness Quotient of 99% is very disturbing.

Detailed Diagnosis

• Interpersonal Insights
  You have difficulty concentrating or keeping on task, probably because you’re an idiot with a short attention-span. You hate your mother and father, your neighbors, co-workers, friends, and just about everyone else who happens to think you’re a worthless boob.
• Job Performance & Attitude
  Rather than do a one-time job that takes ten minutes, you’d work for 5 years to automate it. Your work is of so little value they should just put a shredder in place of your Out basket
• Personality Insight
  Your personal motto is “Hope for the best; prepare for the worst.” Based on what we know about you, you’re going to need a lot of preparation.

ABERRANT – that’s where we start I suppose. This is the first word listed, so where else?  Chopping and mixing the order would be too damn easy – aberrant in fact.  If I’m doing this I’m doing it in alphabetical order, no adjustments for best fit, nothing like Twitter Magnets.  Don’t expect me to construct this thing like a haiku though, there’s no way I could be that creative.  Or that poetic. I got no rhythm, even though I was brought up on Motown. An equal amount of Phil Collins undermined anything I could draw from that.  Blame my mother, and her eccletic musical tastes, mashing up pure soul with pure hallibut.  Still, good drummer.  Although it’s said he’s a rather unpleasant character.  Then again, you’d probably be a bit moody if you’d patently ruined Genesis.  Perhaps even the Biblical one.    I digress.  Phil Collins got divorced.  He paid £25 million in the settlement, and the union with Orianne Cevey was dissolved.  An acrimonious and record breaking end to seven years of marital ‘bliss’.  Yeah, I wouldn’t have married him in the first place either.  Not that I’ve got anything against gay marriage, you understand, it seems to be a reasonable concept to me.  No, I’d not marry Phil Collins because I’d be waking up next to this every blighted morning…

He looks a picture, don’t he?  A picture of Yoda.  But without the awesomeness.  After over 2,555 days of that, I’d be demanding £25 million as well – it’s only £3,571,428.57p a year.  Approximately.  Even the easiest of lovers would be generous if they demanded anything less – it’s only equivalent to 45.5 million Snickers bars, which is nothing, I could polish that lot off in a coffee break.  At least he’s got better hair than Simon Cowell though.  I’ve been itching to have a dig at him for weeks and weeks.  A Svengali worthy of the name I feel; savvy, blessed with top-notch business acumen, a tawdry garbage merchant, King of his own Castle, utterer of ad captandum critiques of starry-eyed, brainwashed kids who are has-beens even as they are-being.  Do they grasp the awful truth that Cowell is using them for his own ends, and when their useful function to him has been served, and his money raked-in, he’ll discard them like Y-fronts full of excrement?  And to cap it all off, he does it all with that haircut!  Even Phil ‘Grumpy the Dwarf’ Collins has the decency to not have hair at all instead of a cut that looks like it’s been shaped with a set square and a plum bob.  Weird enough that both of them receive adulation and millions of £££s for the verbal abortions that spout forth from their cakeholes.  At least Phil Collins had a useful drumming ability.  Cowell has fark all aside an ability to wrap the low-brow media around his little finger, and hock shite pop to eejits.  Man is the King Fish in his own little pond.  Funny how he can only dish it out in circumstances and settings of his own design, the odds loaded in his favour.  The trickiest television interview he’s ever done was with Sinita on Cribs.  Sinita – not much of an adversary I feel.  In short, let me at him.  I’ll go straight for the hair.  Freak.

A SHORT encapsulation of all this: Motown is superior to Phil Collins, Simon Cowell and Sinita.  An odd tangent I went down there.  I’m a wanton tangentalist – which is the number 56 at the Golden Pan, incidentally.  Ambidextrous then.  What the hell am I supposed to do with ambidextrous?  Juggle it into a non sequitir?  Again?  I can’t juggle that well quite frankly.  It would help if I was ambidextrous.  See – there – I did it after all.  I was in severe danger of generating a major blog anomaly for one dangerous moment, but I pulled it out of the fire quicksharp.  Had to remove the Fourth Wall in the process though.  These things happen when moving furniture.  I visualise ‘Ambitdextrous’ as a very large sofa… Okay, I seem to be losing readers here, move on, move on.  Can’t have readers getting apathetic on me, shutting their laptops and ambling off to the kitchen to make a snack.  If you are considering this however, I recommend trying peanut butter on toast.  My sister has that all the time and she’s turned me on to it’s fiendishly enticing flavour.  Not suitable to those with arachibutyrophobia admittedly, but I’d like to think that nobody reading this could even possibly suffer from such an irrational dread.  Weirdest phobia around, if you ask me.

PHILIP K. DICK.  He was a card.  Aside from being hooked on Benzadrine, and having – oh – many, many things go wrong with his headspace over the years, he was chock full of phobias and neurotic log jams, probably none as mundane and pathetic as a fear of getting peanut butter stuck to the roof of one’s mouth.  Dick had proper issues instead.  Pretty well illustrated in the film A Scanner Darkly for the non-literate.  Bob Arctor was – as I’m sure everybody is well aware – played by Keanu Reeves.  Winona Ryder was in there as well.  And yet, despite this casting ferrago, the film was actually really good, all credit goes to Richard Linklater there.  Arctor.  Philip K. Dick.  Hmm… Oh yeah!  That’s it – Dick’s short story The Little Movement which appeared in Dick’s anthology Beyond Lies the Wub featured a concealed war between sentient toy soldiers and an alliance of teddy bears and toy pandas beneath the very noses of their unwitting owners.  I dearly hope that didn’t end up on the big screen as… You get the idea.  In any case, teddy bears are collected by arctophiles, which sounds like Arctor.  Coincidence?  I have no idea.  I’m not the Phil Dick argus I’ll have you know.  I just collect tenously-linked conceptual fluff in my head.  I’m stuffed with fluff.  I’m not assiduous in the way I categorise my thoughts and ideas – I’m massively disorganised, though you can probably gather as much from the lurching flow of what passes for my narrative.  My train of thought isn’t the easiest thing in the world to assimilate, I freely admit, though I’d protest that what it lacks in structural integrity it makes up for with it’s audacious spirit.  Yep – that’s me blowing my own trumpet.  I’m not often prone to such crowing, in person I’m rather more avuncular than this ‘ere blog might lead you to believe.

Annnnd I’m done.  Sooner or later – probably later rather than sooner – I’ll do the Bs.

Look – it was either this or juggling on a unicycle.  I got double-dared.

In the meantime, here’s a picture to illustrate current activity herein…

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/8308582.stm

EDIT: Which is now, for some reason, a broken link.

Going by their own meatheaded ideology, restricting the BNP’s membership to ‘”indigenous British ethnic groups” including the “Anglo-Saxon folk community” and the “Celtic Scottish folk community”‘ is broad-churching on an ignominious scale, as well as invoking the WW2-vintage Volk in a supremely creepy way.  Yeah, the ‘Celtic Scottish folk community’ – purely as a definition – just crosses the qualification line (leaving aside the theory that today’s Scots are descended from Irish immigrant stock), but ‘Anglo-Saxon’?  They all shipped in from – of all places – Saxony.  That’s in Germany, for fact fans.  And what about the Jutes?  And the Picts?  And the Danish?  What about the Vikings in general?  And the French?  Plenty of French in our gene pool.  And the Romans – what of they in our mongrel heritage?

In fact, for the BNP’s stance to be in any way consistent – and this is speaking in the broadest terms – their membership should be restricted to descendents of the ancient Britons.  The guys who immigrated here from the continent after the last ice age.  We’re talking Welsh here.  Probably I’d go so far as to say that membership of the BNP should be restricted to druids and paganistic shamen.

I dare say the British Druid Party would be a more palatable electoral option than this bunch of pigdogs.

From the Beeb article I quote -

BNP leader Nick Griffin has agreed to ask his party to amend its constitution so it does not discriminate on grounds of race or religion, a court heard.

Like – isn’t that defying the basic principle of what the BNP is?  Discriminatory?  Especially on race?  I can see why they talk about Volk Communities now.  They mean race.  They mean the white British race, which anybody with a brain can see is a mashup of everything going from Europe as far back as recorded history can take us.  There is no indigenous race – we’re all immigrants or the sons and daughters of immigrants.  No Homo Britannicus evolved on these shores.  We all come from elsewhere.

The BNP would be dangerous if it had an iota of intelligence.  It’s a hateful thing.

Wouldn’t it be so much better if instead of posting the contents of an idea, I just wrote about the idea itself – that is the thought in my mind?  Like a meta-tought post?  I mean easier.  For me.

I just think about what I’m thinking instead of having the thought primary in itself.  A bit like I’m watching myself think.  I’m firmly in the saddle when I’m doing the immediate things, speaking, going through my daily sum of operations, but when I really think I immediately step out of the idea and search for its backdoor I suppose.  I’m running the extreme risk of having some student of psychology tell me I’m schitzo or something, but believing that I do that these quacks would have work enough breathing and blinking if they had to live inside this mind let alone consuelling me on mental disorders thereof, I’m not giving a good shit if they do or not.  It’s their keyboards they’d be poking, not me.

At what stage does a professional partnership reach the stage of familiarity where each partner openly sends up their opposite, where the act becomes the act?  Where the object of humour is the Partnership, rather than what the Partnership produces – say sketch comedy.  I mean used to provide – now all it provides is observations on itself.  A feedback loop if you will, where the original source has been overpowered by the laminated, coiled mash of its previous iterations.

At what stage does a double-act bite the shark?  Jump the biscuit?

Bite the shark?

And so what if the double-act – at the apogee of its creative powers – decides to flick two fingers up to the pre-destined natural life-cycle of the Partnership, steal a march on the barbarians storming the frontiers of the maturing cheese empire of their mixed-metaphor schtik, and die a dignified death on live television.

On Dancing on Ice..

I know exactly why it had me gripped – aside from it’s dynamic energy and well-constructed narrative, it also captured the spirit of the age for my generation.  I was watching it being constructed.  While the Amiga range was where I cut my teeth, the Speccy and the Beebs that were unreplaced in my school until the early-to-mid ninetees – by Acorn Arcs and only much later with PC – were like keystone lumps of my heritage I guess.  I was reading Your Sinclair magazine way beyond my use of the machine – where loading from tape was as tricky as Ray Mears would find nursing a campfire into maturity at the bottom of a lake.  The Sinclair was already becomming an anachronism even as I really got into it, and Your Sinclair really encapsulated the whole Speccy worldview.  In the later stages of it’s run the magazine had less and less Spectrum content and more freestyle articles, growing fully into an eccentric hodge-podge motivated by the collective gallows humour of a obsolescent community.  The indigenous British hardware industry was going to seed just as much in the mid-eighties and this was a central theme of Micro Men as the real new talents swung almost instinctivly from nuts and bolts hardware into cottage-industry software development as the destined global industrial superpowers emerged and dwarfed the tiny empires of the Micro Men.

The authenticity of this film is typified by the gilt-edged science-fiction flights of fancy of the day that manifest themselves as today’s indisputable reality, the plausible, pragmatic enterprises of the industry at the time swamped and rendered obsolete over the space of single weeks and months by the freewheeling headlong rush of the age.  This historical context lent Micro Men a weighty heft.

Clever, well-made, well-written and well-acted.  Great stuff!

Let’s list the usual flip – you can redead them, discontinue the pesky gits, negate ‘em, oblivate them or maybe whisk them up with a helicopter.  You can even go biospherical and state in a matter-of-fact way that you’ve reintegrated them into the carbon and nitrogen cycle.

Consider this though: a zombie is not powered by voodoo or magik, the zombie is a biologically reanimated corpse.  It’s not the same individual person raised through supernatural circumstances to reinhabit the hold host, plot and backstory withstanding.  The zombie is a vegetable – a lump of dead flesh optionally killed by and then hotwired by a super-evolved cellular gestalt or a bespoke bioweapon to provide a vehicle to furnish itself with rich, creamy brain proteins.  The zombie is a machine used to feed and promulgate the parasitic puppeteer.  Enough to jumpstart the reptillian and mamillian brains to autopilot the husk, feel hunger and recognise the airborne chemical cues of fresh, unoxidised meat; restart the heart and liquify congealed bodily fluids to re-establish bodily circulation of anaerobically-released oxygen and sugars to bootstrapped tissues and organs; enough – just barely enough – to sustain and spread the infection.  The parasite is a virus, human bodies their one big subverted cell.

The zombie is alive – in the same way that slimemould or fungus is alive.  The zombie is a bipedal mushroom.  The zombie is exactly what it’s imagined to be: undead.  The zombie is a disease vector, a walking mouth and stomach to locate and digest protein succour.  The zombie is alive, and it can be killed.