Real Cruelty in Imaginary Gardens

Following on from the overwhelming success of a Facebook group raising its collective digital arms in outrage against the not-at-all-fucking-bullshit rumour that Ian Huntley was busy Poking his way around the megaweb from the comfort of his prison cell – equipped with a bowling alley and a plasma screen no doubt – a new group has been set up to “Get Glitter Out Of Hampshire”.

Not actual glitter of course. Actual glitter is nice and shiny and glittery, and has so far not had sex with any Vietnamese children, or spectacularly misjudged the consequences of dropping its laptop into PC World for a quick check up. And if there was no glitter in Hampshire, parents would not be able to so easily make-up their pre-teen offspring to make them look like diminutive prostitutes, and go for a stroll in West Quay.

Which would never do.

No, obviously it’s about Gary Glitter, the “pop paedophile”, as The Sun have strangely dubbed him. But because “pop-paedophile” essentially means “popular paedophile”, it seems strange that the residents of Hampshire would want him out. If Hampshire is home to the most popular paedo in the land, it should be a cause for celebration. Ian Huntley? Fuck you, Cambridgeshire. Hampshire got the Glitter.

Anyway, apparently Gary Glitter is now living near Southampton, and the Facebook moral warriors have established a group to GET HIM OUT. I’m from Southampton, and I’ve received several invitations to join the group and spread the word. But because I’m not particularly interested in torturing Gary Glitter to death in an elaborate fashion, or helping the tabloid press keep tabs on him because all the pinkos and homosexuals and Zionists and immigrants and environmentalists and social workers and media studies students and gypsies and Europeans and women and members of Al Qaeda who make up our government AREN’T DOING THEIR JOB PROPERLY, I declined to join.

The message board of the group is a lively place. The following is a genuine, verbatim, post from “Lee”:

“If it were me, I would put him in a room. I would give him a very blunt, rusty knife. I would say to him “I am going to return in one hour”, “When I get back with my ‘friends’, and you have not killed yourself, we WILL hurt you beyond belief”. Can you imagine the solitude…knowing that if you didn’t use that blunt rusty knife, somehow, on yourself…how horrible it would be after.

None of us could probably do it….. and thats why I would maybe leave him for 2 or 3 hours…. the loneliest and probably the most scary of his whole worthless life, before rattling the door… and then leave him for another hour.

You do that and the person on the recieving end will lose all control of their bowell movements. Then… I’d do it all again, before walking in and asking him to meet the Devil.”

What? “Asking him to meet the Devil”? Gary Glitter is a notorious sex criminal. I wouldn’t have thought he’d be up for a slightly awkward blind date situation with the fictional Devil at Lee’s behest. Especially after losing control of his “bowell” movements. Although you never know, it might go OK.

THE DEVIL: Err, hi. Gary, isn’t it?

GARY GLITTER: Oh, yeah, hi, err, yeah, Gary. You’re the, err, the Devil, right?

THE DEVIL: Yeah. Nice to meet you.

GAR GLITTER: Nice to meet you too. Lees told me a lot about you.

THE DEVIL: Ha ha ha. Nothing bad I hope? Ha ha ha.

GARY GLITTER: Ha ha ha. No, it was all good. Ha ha ha.

THE DEVIL: Ha ha ha.

GARY GLITTER: Sorry about the smell, by the way. I lost control of my bowell movements.

THE DEVIL: Oh, that’s OK. Happens to the best of us. This is a bit strange isn’t it? Have you done this sort of thing before?

GARY GLITTER: No, it’s one of Lee’s ideas. I got into a bit of trouble recently, and he thought it might be good to meet new people. You know, people closer to my own age. He’s a good bloke like that.

THE DEVIL: Yeah, he’s a cool guy. So… Ha ha ha. Sorry, I’m really nervous.

GARY GLITTER: Ha ha ha.

THE DEVIL: Do you want to, err, do you want to go and get some food or something?

GARY GLITTER: That sounds cool. I’ve got fuck all else on except sitting here tied to this chair.

THE DEVIL: Oh, great. It’ll be fun.

GARY GLITTER: Yeah.

THE DEVIL: So, what kind of music are you into?

And so on.

Chill out Lee. You sound exactly like the Manson family (“I am the devil and I am here to do the devil’s work”) and your idea just isn’t feasible. At least Adam Darby from Portsmouth keeps it real: “This man, boy, monster, twat should b injected with aviation fuel 1ce a day just enough so that he dint die just had to endure the pain”. Well said, Adam Darby. Because aviation fuel injections really are the only practical way to deal with Man Boy Monster Twats.

Anyway, that’s the general gist of the group. Not so much “Get Glitter Out Of Hampshire” as “Get Glitter Out Of Hampshire By Introducing Him To Lee’s Mate The Devil And Seeing If They Hit It Off Over A Pizza Express”.

Anyway, make sure you keep buying The Sun and joining hysteric Facebook groups in order to keep tabs on this most popular of nasty sex criminal.

Take THAT, perverts.

Jade Goody gets told she has cancer on live television. WHAT. THE. FUCK.

When I first read that she had been diagnosed with cervical cancer, my cynicism instantly dictated that it was a publicity stunt. Pretty fucking sick even to think that even for a second I suppose. Surely there’s no way you’d fabricate that particular story in order to elicit sympathy from a world that’s turned it’s back on you. Unless you live in a soap opera. Which she does, I suppose.

And bear in mind that her publicist is Max Clifford, the Josef Mengele of public relations. I really don’t think he’d mind cooking up some fake cancer pie, if it got him another swimming pool.

But while Max Clifford is a bona-fide, genuine scumfuck cunt who makes an exhorbitant living by lying, I don’t think Jade Goody is. She might be thick and a bit racist and all the rest of it, but surely no-one makes cancer up, do they? I think Jade Goody is probably basically a decent enough human being.

I don’t think it is a publicity stunt. Jade Goody is probably facing something terrible. No doubt the papers will call her “Brave Jade”, entirely missing the point yet again. Bravery is surely a given when you’ve got cancer. Being brave in the face of something like that is inevitable. Good luck to her. And good to luck to everyone else in the world who’s got a potentially murderous disease to deal with. There’s a shitload of them. And they’re brave too, remember?

Whatever. Perhaps the worst bit was that Jade was given the news ON TELEVISION, in the diary room during her goodwill stint on the Indian version of Big Brother. Umm, what? REALLY? Right, so if you’re waiting on the results of some medical tests, probably best not to go on a mentally-debilitating reality TV show in another country. But, live on television? What? Come on.

And, forever sensitive, The Sun slapped the video on the front of their website, next to a poll about whether Gary Glitter should be put in an English prison or not. That’s entertainment.

There really isn’t anything funny about this.

The Olympics may be weary bullshit, but, somewhat inevitably, I have found myself increasingly exposed to it by viral osmosis. And the telly. “Ooh, Usain Bolt just ran one hundred metres in 9.68 seconds.” Whatevs.

I have also found the time during these games to fall in love with one of the athletes. A gold medal winning one, no less. Punching above my weight? Fuck you, the rules.

Anyway, it’s Nataliia Dobrynska from the Ukraine that has melted my cynical heart. Here she is in all her superhot heptathlete glory:

Stop looking at her. She’s pretty much my girlfriend and whatever (there are some other pictures of her doing the long jump that are perhaps rather more emotionally involving, but we’ve got to keep this respectable…)

Anyway, Nataliia won gold in the heptathalon this afternoon. Take THAT, Team GB. And being the best at the heptathlon in the world means that you’re really good at seven things. And that equals the perfect girlfriend. The seven things include:

100 metre hurdles. Running and jumping AT THE SAME TIME. Can you do that? Didn’t think so.

High jump. Like the only good bit in capoeira.

Shot putt. Admittedly, this is the most stupid event in the entire athletic resume – but she’d probably be well good at setting a bottle of vodka on fire and throwing it in a skip.

200 metres. Just running. But it might be almost seven thirty on a Saturday night, and you haven’t bought a lottery ticket yet… Think on.

Long jump. Use a bridge? Wouldn’t have thought so.

Javelin. This. Is. Sparta.

800 metres. Just running. But it might be almost nine thirty on a Friday night, and “Would I Lie To You” starts soon… Think on.

So well done Nataliia. Fancy a honeymoon in Dubai?

In keeping with the spirit of the Olympic games, the Spanish basketball team, as ambassadors for their nation at the coming together of athletes from all over the world as equals and competitors, decided to salute the endeavours of the Chinese people in the only way they knew how…

Yes it’s real. And what’s funny about it is that Chinese people look EXACTLY like this. Racist? PC gone mad more like it. Later in the games, after they are crushed by some other tall people, the Spanish basketball team will be indulging in some other perfectly acceptable racial stereotypes. They’re currently busy learning how to knock you up a mean egg fried rice, read some books backwards, learn Kung Fu (that’s maybe the Japanese, but fuck it, they’re all the same really, innit?), join a Triad, drown some children, make their feet really little and believe in dragons.

After that they’ll probably black up, invent jazz and hitch a ride to Canada on the underground railroad.

What the Spanish basketball team won’t be doing during their time in Beijing is learning how to form an oppressive, totalitarian system of government that actively strives to suppress a free press. Because that’s not a stereotype. It’s what’s going on. And the Spanish basketball team are mainly into playground racism. And catching a sweet rebound and dunking that bitch right in your face.

Hell yeah! The O.L.Y.M.P.I.C.S! The greatest show on Earth!

Let’s all calm down. It’s not the greatest show on Earth. That’s Trexx and Flipside.

So now we get to stumble through three weeks of the greatest feats of jumping over some stuff, running a bit quick in a straight line, throwing stuff about and Dressage that the planet has ever seen. History will be made. People will cry. “Drug cheat” Dwain Chambers will start a fight in a pub. Princess Anne will flick herself wretched. And idiots will lap this shit up like puppies round a sow.

And because it’s funny when foreign websites don’t translate perfectly into English that I, as a white male (the most oppressed minority in England, BY THE WAY) understand and accept entirely, let’s take the piss out of selected highlights from the official website of the Beijing Olympics 2008…

Oh, I really can’t be bothered. I’m more into motorists’ rights. Go read it yourself.

China’s human rights abuses have been a topic of much discussion in the run up to this waste of everyone’s time (athletes aren’t people, remember) and money. As the Olympic torch made it’s way through London (mainly by bus), carried valiantly by a sailor and Lenny Henry, pro-Tibetan activists tried their level best to derail proceedings, in protests against China’s genuinely barbaric treatment of Tibetans and many other groups. And a great deal of the ageing English middle-class came out in support. Fair enough. But if the English are going to protest, perhaps our own administration is the place to start. Seeing as they have said exactly fuck all of any worth regarding China and their human rights record, and continue to trade with them and supply them arms, perhaps skipping them entirely and moving onto the Chinese is a bit redundant. Anyone with the temerity to exercise their right to democratic protest should be applauded of course, but I’m not sure you get to pick and choose. If you’re going to protest against China, the fact that Team GB (heroes to a man, BY THE WAY) are present at all should be the very first point of concern. And that’s down completely to our government’s lack of spine. Just in case you weren’t sure…

I don’t know. But I do know that the Olympics, and anyone who is even vaguely interested in them, can New Jack Swing on my nuts.

Zane Lowe just told me that he “enjoyed being in the ring” with me. I was left with a sense of disquiet. I had only turned the radio on a few seconds before, in a moment of flippancy. I found myself considering various pugillistic scenarios involving me and the antipodean failed rapper stripped to the waist. It was pretty fucking unpleasant.

I would probably win though. Because Zane Lowe talks too much. He would be concentrating so hard on forming sentences containing active verbs that my southpaw would crush him. Zane Lowe talks so much he has unwittingly become a conscious breather. For someone who makes his livelihood disseminating music, that man talks as though he is an organic version of the bus from “Speed”, and will suffer an embolism if his word rate drops under a hundred a minute.

I’m worried about him. I don’t think he can be happy, and that his incessant rambling is a way of disguising a deep-seated existential misery of some kind. Zane Lowe has gazed into the abyss. But the abyss gazes also.

He should concentrate on other things for a change. If I was bezzy mates with Zane Lowe, we’d find a lot of things to do with our time more interesting than merely talking and “getting on board”. Things like bowling, watching Jordan get toe-frigged by Dane Bowers and believing in Jim Jones. It could be sweet. We’d get matching tattoos on our ankles.

I think someone needs to keep an eye on Zane Lowe. I think someone needs to sit him down, make him a cup of tea, and tell him, quietly, that sometimes it’s OK to lose.

Whilst watching Vince Weiguang Lei allegedly eat bits of Tim McLean and dance around with his severed head on a Canadian Greyhound near Portage Le Prairie, somewhere between Edmonton and Winnipeg, the Mounties found time to dub him “Badger”. Thus, the question is raised: why?. Perhaps Mounties fucking hate badgers and have long been itching to associate them with beheaders. Maybe Vince resembled a badger, and looked a bit like Bob Hoskins off of the BBC’s “The Wind in the Willows”.

Maybe they will never release the files, and the truth will not out. But, as a tribute to the megaweb’s latest celebrity badger, here, for your consideration, are the top four world’s best badgers.

1. “BADGER” from “The Wind in the Willows” by Kenneth Grahame.

Fictional miserablist in a dressing gown, Badger spent his formative years running around with the ICF, before putting all that behind him to read books in a stump. However, like Steven Seagal in every film he’s ever made, Badger’s penchant for shocking violence caught up with him, despite protestations of a conversion to Buddhism, after The Invasion of Toad Hall, bringing him out of retirement and back to what he does best: smacking fuck out of weasels with a cudgel.

2. “BADGER” from “Bodger and Badger”

Like a haunted Vietnam vet forced into a life a chemical dependency and half-hearted prostitution by a government that has no further use for him, Badger spent most of his time in a semi-sociopathic quest for mashed potato, whilst attempting to wrest himself from the clutches of Machiavellian puppet master and pimp Bodger, in the BBC’s tender and affecting allegory of crack addiction and societal breakdown. Alas, he found himself thwarted at every turn.

FUN FACT: Since the show, a “bodger” has become obscure homosexual patois for someone who gives puppets rimjobs.

3. THE MAN EATING BADGERS OF BASRA

Sick of the ungrateful behaviour of those godless sand jockeys, in 2007 the British Army apparently flooded the Iraqi city of Basra with a swarm of giant man-eating badgers. Because they weren’t embarrassed enough already.

4. RUTH BADGER

Miserly gammon-jowled ubermensch Ruth Badger got silver in the second season of The Apprentice UK, before taking a brief career hiatus to win at fisticuffs against the merchant navy. Now Ruth runs an ostensibly successful consultancy business called “The Smashing Kids’ Piggy Banks With A Wrench While They Watch Consultancy Business”. According to the website, “We guarantee that if you want a speaker to motivate, entertain and energise your event, Ruth Badger is the person to book. Ruth is guaranteed to inspire them while sharing her life experience generating a few laughs along the way!”.

Why are you still reading this? Go and consult her. Run. RUN!

Only time will tell what other brilliant badgers will pop up to make their mark on our collective consciousness. But it can’t happen too soon.