Intermission

Sadly, I'm going to be deprived of an Internet connection for the next few days which means that I may miss the next exciting, well maybe exciting is the wrong word, sequel to the little, um, situation mentioned in my previous post :(

And, as usual, I will punctuate a posting hiatus by slapping up some links to assorted old tat sitting in my bookmarks folder…


Exhibit A - Max, 19, hits the road.

‘I'm 19 and live on top of a hill in north London…’

A fine example of the dead tree press harnessing the power of new media and the Internet to branch out into e-nepotism - to rapturous acclaim from a series of delighted and inventively abusive commentators (comments are now closed). Skip the article, read the abuse

(I must admit to some slight prejudice here as I'm a lot older than 19 and live on a reclaimed marsh in South London)


Exhibit B – Catholic Costumes for Children

"Aside from the obvious Catholic reasons, we are absolutely horrified at the costumes that are being offered this season. Want to dress your little girl like a street walker or jail bait? Perhaps you'd like to encourage pedophilia. This company has the solution."

As soon as they start doing a pre-teen Alexander VI costume my first order definitely goes in




And in fairness to Catholic Costumes for Children they do link to some pretty fucked up stuff available elsewhere – even Woolworths are getting in on the paedo-frenzy




See also: ‘Papist or Rapist’ - A photo quiz that's a lot harder than it should be which comes with the following disclaimer - 'This is all meant as a bit of fun and I did go to the trouble of researching these images, but I would hate to piss anyone off, so if you appear here as a sex offender, or worse still, if you appear as a member of the Roman Catholic church, then let me know and I will rectify the situation immediately. Likewise, if you look a bit dodgy and think that you should have been included for one of the categories and can substantiate your claim to either being a working member of the appropriate faith or a convicted sex offender then I will be happy to consider your application.'


Exhibit C – Flickr Photo streams which have caught my eye



This photo and it’s surrounding stream are interesting...

Bush never wants the Troops to pull out

As is this stream...

the decapitator's photos

But not this one...

Barack Obama's photos

Exhibit D – Most apathetic demonstrator ever?

Anti BNP demo today…


Exhibit E - Quizmania (No Legs Caller)





Er, that’s enough Exhibits for now

Intermission begins…

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From the Golden Age of French-Canadian Comedy

Comedy gold from the Canadian army ...

Anti-Tank

Zeut Alors! Crissss alors ! Tabarnake !

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From the Golden Age of British Comedy

The link to this video has been bouncing around for a few days now...

The Dead Parrot Sketch, as performed by a pair of 419 Scammers

Their performance is packed with conviction and breathes new life into a tired old classic...

"Pining for the fjords! What kind of talk is that?"

And whilst I'm posting links, a few days ago I praised a petition submitted to the 10 Downing Street website which called for the Prime Minister to...

"Change police sirens to the Benny Hill theme music"

but sadly, at the time, I couldn't find a quality example of the Benny Hill theme music to link to. I have now

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Juvenile Smut

And, as if further evidence was required that I really should maintain two completely separate blogs...

...it's time for some non work environment, non child-friendly, non geopolitical smut.

It is, after all, the weekend.

First off, it's unlikely that I am, as happened a couple of days ago, the first person in the history of the Internet to confuse former Conservative Party Chairperson Theresa May MP with former British porn legend and professional dominatrix Teresa May...

Theresa May MP - most definitely NOT a pornstar

The poor woman. I cannot begin to imagine the shame and embarrassment there must be in having people regularly confuse you with a senior Conservative politician.

Anyway, Teresa's site it brilliant

My favourite parts can be found here...

FINANCIAL SLAVERY

Mistress Teresa believes that financial slavery is the purest way in which a slave can demonstrate his submission and devotion. A slave who gives his money freely to Mistress Teresa, with no expectation of anything in return, is showing Her that he considers Her far more important than his own material wealth.

While Mistress Teresa especially loves slaves who tribute large amounts, She does realise that not everyone can afford to, so any slave who makes a financial sacrifice for Her, no matter how small, will be looked upon favourably.

and here...

Mistress Teresa is looking to build up a stable of skilled slaves who can provide Her with a range of services.

She requires builders, decorators, electricians, photographers, plumbers, accountants, solicitors, doctors, mechanics and any other slave with a useful skill. She also requires men and women to act as models in photoshoots.

Personal slaves should not expect anything in return for their servitude, however Mistress Teresa will from time to time reward slaves who demonstrate exceptional dedication.

The girl's a financial genius and I can only wish her well

And maybe she should consider boosting her potential income even further by signing up to

extortr - the online blackmailing service

Congratulations! You're being blackmailed using the most technologically advanced extortion service in the world, Extortr. If you haven't already, you should go to the web address in the email you were sent, to check that the photo or video that we have is genuine. If it's not, lucky you — you can let the timer next to it expire witout worry. If it is genuine, we recommend clicking on the "Pay Now" button as soon as possible in order to make sure that the material stays private.

And whilst I was browsing around Teresa's site I discovered the homepage of what appears to be a professionally managed sado-masochistic purple dungeon which is conveniently located 'only 15 minutes by train from central London'...

The premises are very convenient after a night out at your favourite fetish club, as trains run through the night to East Croydon from Victoria Station. A word of caution, however: engaging in BDSM activity and use of dungeon equipment while inebriated is NOT recommended.

To be honest, if I lived in East Croydon I'd probably want someone to chain me to a wall and beat me senseless every night.

Anyway, I only mention it because the afternoon and evening rates are very reasonable and the place seems worth bearing in mind as somewhere a little different to host Christmas parties and office seminars

This is also an appropriate opportunity to apologise for doubting a friend of mine who told me a somewhat unlikely story about receiving delivery of a van load of Carefree Polish Strippers a while back...



How could I have doubted you?

And I'm not sure if this qualifies as smut or not but the guy does appear to be naked - and that would seem to be the least of his problems...

Stockmarket

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Knobs

One of the many curious quirks of these last ten years under New Labour rule is the virtual disappearance of political stand-up comedy in popular culture. There's scope for someone writing a thesis on the reasons why but one of the main reasons is, I think, the fact that there isn't an easy alternative on offer to the present ruling political party.

Come to think of it, looking back on the 80's and early 90's the comics back then had it astonishingly easy - bang out and few knob gags, moan about how crap the Conservatives were and pocket the royalties.

Which is possibly why that generation of comics quietly turned to writing shite novels and musicals or doing adverts for toilet paper once the going got tougher.

Writes shite musicals

Does voice-overs for bog roll

Or, to put it another way, the cocksucksers lied to us, are too chicken shit to face up to the world they helped bring about and have sold out instead.

Unlike this man...

George Carlin - The Planet is Fine pt1

George Carlin - The Planet is Fine pt2

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And whilst I'm posting videos, I've found a follow-up to the, in hindsight, relatively mundane USB/Keyboard-powered hamster wheel that I linked to a few days back ... the USB-powered humping dog

778,647 views so far and counting...

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Winning Hearts and Minds on the Mystery Train

A few weeks ago I posted a link to a Jarvis Cocker video that featured a taxi driving Crocker crooning away whilst other hapless road users and pedestrians threw themselves away from the front of his oncoming vehicle...




So, imagine my delight at being sent a link to this Cocker tribute video filmed on the streets of Baghdad by members of the US military




In fairness, as some commentators have pointed out, this video is presented without any context and for all we, as viewers, know the guys in the Humvee may very well have been on an urgent life-saving mission

As may the soldiers in this video have been




For all we know, they have been leading those children away from the known location of an IED

As may the mercenaries, oops civilian contractors, in this video may have been

Train train, comin' 'round, 'round the bend
Train train, comin' 'round the bend
Well it took my baby, but it never will again (no, not again)

Again, for all we know, they may have been firing at all those cars to stop them driving over a series of land mines further the down the road

Though why they chose to stitch the clips together with an Elvis backing track and then put the video up on the web passes me right by

Unless they thought it looked really, really cool

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Ms Dewey is Hot

Thanks (yet again) to Tony for suggesting that I...

a) Open the Ms Dewey search engine I linked to in an earlier post

b) Type in the search terms 'fractional banking system' and 'who runs the world?'

Judging by her responses, Ms Dewey knows a lot more than she's admitting to





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Daft link Roundup - January pt2

Links that have taking my mind off the impending global economic apocalypse over the last few days...

• The accurately named - Running from the Camera blogspot

• The equally precisely titled - USB Hamster wheel

and some videos...

• Jean-Claude van Damme dancing with an erection
  

• Dick van Dyke dancing without an erection
  

• A chimp practicing his taekwando
  

• Japanese toilet training for kids
  

and finally...

• The last website you want to have open on your laptop in a public place

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Ooooh ... the irony

There's currently a top notch poster on the PETA UK website featuring Bollywood 'Superstar' and Big Brother contestant Shilpa Shetty...

Boycott The Circus...

I couldn't agree more

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January daft link roundup - extra

Being a) old enough to remember Top Trumps when they first became popular, and b) having worked with some right bastards in my time, I just saw something on the B3TA board that made me choke on the tea I was drinking at the time...


Well, I laughed, a lot

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January daft link roundup

Sundry links of no great sociological import which have made me smile recently...

The Internet

• National stereotypes courtesy of Google - "All of these pictures were the first Google Image result for French man, French woman, Mongolian woman, Mongolian man, Korean man and so on..."

• Ms Dewey – a new kind of search engine from those zany guys at Microsoft which resolutely refuses to talk dirty with me
  
  

• Uncyclopedia – like Wikipedia but riddled with lies. Which means that, in practice, it’s exactly the same as the real Wikipedia much of the time – I found the entry on Richard Dawkins (courtesy of T-Mix) to be particularly fact-packed and informative

The Visual Arts

• William Blake saw angels in trees – other people see goats

• Goats in trees - the video ...
  

'I have no idea what she's saying...'

• From the mind behind the excellent Little People Blogspot the slightly less excellent but still occasionally amusing A World of Birds

• Tibet - Underground Expeditions - the photographic chronicles of some loon who spends his time kayaking around sewers, placing malformed die-cast figurines at random around those sewers and photographing them. For some reason that I can't articulate this strikes me as a particularly French thing to do, even though I haven't the faintest idea what his nationality is.
  
  
• A short history of New Zealand flash animation
  

• A homage to Great Britain - from the same people who made the short History of New Zealand
  
  

'Prince Philip ... He's like the grandfather us Kiwis never had because all of ours were shot at Gallipoli...'

• Three blokes in an Indian call centre grooving - from the same people who made the homage to Great Britain
  
  
• OK, those three blokes are Malaysian, not Indian...
  
  
• A fine collection of on-line cartoons from the Perry Bible Fellowship, including a personal favourite line 'He wields the chaos grid'

• and, finally, Zen-like calm and tranquility available here

Oh, and I almost forgot this (thanks Rahid)...

'Fits Adults and Children...'

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Stunning new advance in AI

AI has finally come of age and reached a point where it can perform useful tasks...

Guess the Dictator or Sit-Com character

Spookily accurate. Even when I picked someone who was a bit of both...



It read my mind...

Best picture I've seen of TB for a long time...

Time for some more Jarvis methinks

First, this video popped up on You Tube a few months ago...




and now there's this ...



Sheer bloody genius

Hmmm, with your crazy pop videos you are really spoiling us Mr Jarvis


and whilst I'm pasting up You Tube links...

Ben takes a photo of himself every day

Frog Juice Lady in Peru - Unfortunately, the frog in a blender meme turns out not to be an urban myth after all

The Final Scene from The Third Man - still IMHO arguably the best B&W movie of all time, and certainly the best B&W movie with a zither-based soundtrack of all time, in spite of some stiff competition...

Everyone loves a happy ending

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edit: lurking in the post above I've included a link to the Italian version of the kitsch classic 'Ambassador, with these Ferrero Rocher you are really spoiling us' advert.

I've included the Italian version rather than the English one because die-hard Ferrero fans will note that in the Italian version the bloke who has a mini-orgasm whilst eating his chocolate says 'Excellent!', whereas in the English version he says 'Eccellente!', which makes for a nice change.

Eccellente

Underneath the You Tube clip somebody, somebody who I suspect comes from the North of England, has left one of the most erudite and perceptive artistic critiques I think I have ever read...

"ferrero roshay adverts ar so funny how they tri to make out that there supper posh but there shite"

William Shakespeare eat your heart out

Alas poor Yorick! ferrero roshay adverts ar so funny how they tri to make out there supper posh but there shite ...Horatio

Babelfish had real trouble translating that comment, complete with humorous spelling mistakes, into Italian...

"ar roshay degli annunci di ferrero così divertente come tri rendere fuori quel là supper posh ma là shite"

French ...

"ar roshay d'annonces de ferrero si drôle comment ils tri rendre dehors ce là dîner snob mais là shite"

and German...

"ferrero roshay Adverts ar so lustig, wie man sie Tri heraus dieses dort Abendessen posh aber dort shite bildet"

I am that glad that I never had to learn English as a foreign language

December Link Roundup

A series of links (filched mostly from the b3ta message board) that I should have included in earlier posts but forgot…

Super Furry animals

• Live Action Hamster Video Game – a definite must see

• Robot Guinea Pig for sale - batteries and used carboard tube not included

• Pugs the Pooch modelling some of his favourite outfits

• A sad story about a pigeon cull in Surrey followed by the most entertaining series of user comments on the subject of pigeon extermination that I’ve seen for a long time

• Details of Operation Acoustic Kitty – a cyborg surveillance cat designed by the CIA in the 1960s

• An intriguing and worryingly large Flickr photogallery put together by a man who gets off on photographing squirrels posing with old film cameras

• An intriguing and worryingly large photogallery put together by someone who gets off on photographing funny face ice pops as they melt

• A series of photographs of what appears to be a German project to develop hamsters as a renewable energy source

Evangelical Christians and End Time beliefs

• A story about Left Behind: Eternal Forces the End Time video game (thanks Daniel)... Convert or die!

• A story about an evangelical preacher who drowned whilst trying to walk on water – whether he died because he didn’t have enough faith, placed his faith in the wrong entity or was punished by God for outright blasphemy is not made clear

And, in response to a comment that mentioned the hypothesis that the Book of Revelations was written by a monk off his face on mushrooms, a relink to an old favourite...

• Badger! Badger! Badger!

• Badger! Badger! Badger! fans will be pleased to note that its producers have new stock of themed furry toys and have written a catchy new jingle and advertising video to commemorate the Good News

Nutters on public transport and the collapse of civil society

• A guide to social etiquette on the London Underground system – a bit wordy but it does include a fine selection of photographs of celebrity commuters that I shall be stealing later

• Trailer for Hot Fuzz the movie, from the people who brought you Shaun of the Dead. It’s looking quite good...

• Clips of contemporary war footage set to Paul McCartney's Frog Chorus - in the words of one appreciative commentator - pfah! you're a sick man

Telemarketing

• An audio file of, if it wasn’t staged, arguably one of the finest spoofs ever played on a telemarketer

Unclassifiable

• My Hands are Bananas – the pop video

Seasonal on-line video games and festive fun

• A Christmas greeting from George and Tony

• Attack of the Sprouts – an established classic, complete with its memorable opening music sequence. I actually don’t ever play it as I quite like sprouts – pop a little splash of vinegar on them first though, lovely

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Something for the kids

A few months ago I came across a spoof flash animation called ‘Snuggly – The Security Bear’

'We’re watching you because we love you'

I found it to be quite amusing and I thought no more of it. Being British I didn’t dream for a second that it was based on a real CIA cartoon bear character.

How wrong I was...




Ginger, the badly drawn CIA bear, is the star of the CIA for Kids webpage and gets up to all sorts of badly-illustrated adventures in CIA HQ in Langley, Virginia – walking in the garden, being issued with an entry pass, eating in the staff canteen…

Ginger checking out CIA Central, including that strange Kryptos thing

Ginger is only a little bear so he hasn’t been assigned any overseas missions yet – destabilising democratically elected Leftist governments, supervising extraordinary rendition and torture, stuff like that – or maybe he has but if he told us he’d have to kill us all with a fake heart attack afterwards.



Ginger explains...

When people think of the CIA, they think of people lurking around in trenchcoats, sending messages in code, and using cool tools to do their job. Well, to some extent that's true, but it's not the whole story. The Central Intelligence Agency's job is to help the President, the National Security Council, and all other government officials who make and carry out US national security policy. We do this in two ways:

We give accurate and timely intelligence (or information) on foreign threats to our security.

We conduct counterintelligence or other special activities relating to foreign intelligence and national security when the President asks us to.


Inspired by Ginger’s adventures I performed a few quick Google searches for other Security Agencies for Kids pages and was not disappointed -

There’s the NSA for Kids homepage featuring the adventures of the Cryptokids




Interestingly, the Cryptokids have been trademarked which opens the intriguing possibility that the US National Security Agency may be planning to diversify into the commercial cartoon business at some point.

And then there's the FBI for Kids homepage featuring Steve, Kim, Shirley and Darrell, as well as Special Undercover Agent 'Bobby Bureau' (not his real name)




Having worked through most of the activities sections in all these pages I have established that the FBI site features the best colouring-in pages and the NSA has the most challenging code-breaking puzzles – which is how things should be.

Sadly, once I started searching outside of the US I had considerably less luck. Neither MI6, Mossad, the FSB or the DGSE appear to have dedicated children’s pages. Scotland Yard has a Youth Section but it’s filled with boring stuff like features on drug-taking, violent assault and rape and, as far as I can tell, no cuddly cartoon characters, maze puzzles or photo-adventure stories

Very disappointing.

National Security in the 21st century is all about infowar and the winning of hearts and minds. And where better to start than with the young, the mentally weak and the barely literate in the way that American security agencies have done? As I’ve already mentioned in previous posts, the British should seriously consider following the US example…

Ollie the Spooky MI6 Owl (or is he a Transformer?) -



The bumbling adventures of Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair as COBRA Commander -



And Graham the CO19 Golden Retriever -

'Hello Boys and Girls. Can you help me find the Dead Brazilian?'

Whilst on the subject of mental defectives and cute puppies, Barney the Dog’s new Christmas video ‘Barney’s Holiday Extravaganza’ is now available on the White House Homepage, along with a series of seasonal muzak MP3s performed by the USMC Band for free download.




And just in case anyone in the White House realises that producing a video of the Leader of the Free World talking to a dog about Christmas parties whilst his country is at war is just a little bit insensitive and takes it down, someone has also put a copy of the video up on You Tube for posterity...

My Master is a twat

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