Yay! Lingerie Blog! Yay!

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Who said all blogs, including this one, were merely useless collections of unstructured ramblings?
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Well, me probably.
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However, there are blogs out there that do reinforce the strength and richness of Western Civilisation. There's this one ...
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http://www.lingeriedreams.blogspot.com/

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which is basically a series of posts of lingerie pictures with suitably brief commentary. There is also a sister site, cleverly entitled ...
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http://corsetdreams.blogspot.com/

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and, just like a proper non-virtual girlfriend, the author, Jennifer, will dress up in the outfit of your choice provided you buy it for her first.
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What a sport.
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Germans object to crass British stereotyping

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In the aftermath of the Prince Harry story, I came across this shrewd and insightful explanation of the English mindset in the online version of the German magazine Der Speigel ...

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'... World War II, which became England's "greatest hour," retains a large place in England's conscience even today. Hardly an evening goes by in the UK without a television special on the war, Churchill's resistance, or on German war crimes. There are soap operas featuring dim-witted Nazis and heroic small-town Britons, and documentary series about Rommel and his daredevil lightening operations in Northern Africa. With such a menu, it isn't surprising that today's party-going youth -- with their paltry attention spans -- reach for such a tasteless costume.
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Yeah, and we all drink tea at 4.00pm and have to feel our way home in the evenings because of the thick fog; dressed in deerstalker hats and bumping into caped policemen on the way.
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In the same spirit of informed, Pan European understanding I'll just write this article off as being due to the fact that the Germans are still upset with us for beating them twice in the World Finals of their national sport.
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The best line about the Prince Harry story so far came from Rory Bremner ...
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"Harry didn't mean to dress as a Nazi to go to that party - he was just pushed for time that day and didn't get time to change into anything else before going "
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For anyone contemplating Tiscali UK as an ISP

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Just arrived back home from a few days away to be welcomed by this email from Tiscali customer support. No prizes for guessing that whoever wrote this doesn't come from, or work in, the UK ...
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Thank you for contacting Tiscali Customer Support.
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I am sorry for the delay in responding to your email.
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I sincerely apologise for the unprecedented delay in getting the issue resolved.
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On some occasions, there is a need to run a diagnostic test to ensure that every aspect of the product is working fine so that our customer’s get the best of our service. As a result, it is during these times that the connection speed could be affected temporarily. I realise that you have been inconvenienced over the past two weeks and I would implore you to bear with us a little while longer as the process is nearing completion. Your extended patience is greatly solicited and appreciated in this regard.
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Well, given that the situation is unprecedented and they are imploring and soliciting my patience what can I say?

Bathroom art

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Off to Hungary for a couple of days later this morning. Until my return, here's a picture taken in East London yesterday, during a wrist-slashingly depressing photo walk around one this great City's very many sinkholes of humanity. I think I might print this off A3-size and place it strategically somewhere in the bathroom. That way there will be at least several minutes every day when I can contemplate just how lucky I am in so many ways. Well, for the time being anyway.
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Max strength kitsch animal photography

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Those who like a) cute animals and b) the sheer other-worldliness of Japanese culture must visit this site here, now ...
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http://www.10e.org/mt/archives/animal/

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and don't leave before you've skimmed all five pages of the current archive. If you do you just cannot imagine what you might be missing. Believe me you really cannot.
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Those who don't like cute animals or have no fascination for all things Japanese are excused.
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mmm ... brain hurts ... blog about genocide ... then blog about man whores ... then link to cute animal picture page ... confused
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I really do apologise. That's the way I'm made I'm afraid
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So, you want to be a Full-Service Man Whore

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One of the more handy coincidences in my life is the fact that I have been lucky to be partnered up since a few weeks before my 30th birthday. This means that, unusually for man, I can keep track of the size of the anniversary without any give-away fumbling.
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It is our 10th this weekend. Not 10th wedding anniversary. We're too cheap to pay for one. Just 10 years together. Tracy has commemorated the occasion by flying off to Budapest with work, leaving me to celebrate on my own by writing a pretty drab-looking website for a friend's Land Fill Monitoring training programme.
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I remember when Saturday nights were more interesting.
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Anyway, as mentioned previously I am going through the process of distilling the wisdom I have acquired with age in the run-up to my next birthday. The kind of knowledge I wish I had when I was 20.
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After finishing the drab landfill monitoring website, I found myself contemplating what I have learned from 10 years of cohabitation and close observation of a representative member of the opposite sex. The answer is quite a lot. So much in fact that I feel fully qualified to set myself up as a trainer of Full-Service Man Whores.
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I think I was still half-thinking about that web site at the time.
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I'm not talking about your stereotypical male gigolo here. I'm talking about giving women what they really want, good and hard. Provided the price is right of course.
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Many members of my fellow sex seem to think that being nice to ladies involves banging away, spaniel style in front of the TV (showing porn or football) with a bacon sandwich in your free hand, then rolling over on your back afterwards and asking the lady in your life if she could pick up a beer and some wet-wipes when next in the kitchen.
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Sadly not.
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By and large, it's not the physical thing they're after. Consequently, even such useful advice as …

• Wash hands thoroughly before sex, particularly if you've been handling chillies
• Do not break wind during oral sex, not matter how relaxed you're feeling
• Farting under the blankets is NEVER funny

doesn’t really get to the heart of what a full-service man whore should be all about.
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No, what ladies really want from a man is for him to be her father, brother, son, lover, provider, caveman, psychiatrist, fashion consultant, best friend, stand up comic, chef and soul mate wrapped up in one package. Now, men aren’t expected to fulfil these roles simultaneously. That would be unfair. No, all they have to do is psychically sense what role their partner needs at any one time, even if she is unsure herself, and act appropriately. Successful navigation through a typical romantic evening, from a cold start through to penetrative sex, should never require any more than 14 or 15 personality changes.
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This is quite difficult for the untrained heterosexual man, who usually sees relationships in terms of sex, food and laundry, roughly in that order. The strain of achieving the female ideal is mentally and physically impossible to meet for anything longer than five or six seconds; after which he stumbles around compounding each mistake with a new one. Whipping out his tackle just when she's comparing his finer qualities with those of her father or acting all sensitive and caring when a full-on rogering is what's in order.
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That's where my man whore training program comes into play. Key lessons will include:

• The need for cuddles before, after and frequently as a replacement for sexual intercourse
• When to be cleverer than your partner and when to be dumber
• Top 10 snuggling tips
• The importance of taking an interest in fictional soap opera characters and discussing their lives as if they really existed
• When to take charge of a situation and when not to
• How to empathise and, above all, when to avoid offering practical solutions to problems when a hug is what's required
• Why getting on with her best mate, but not so far as shagging the best mate, is always a good idea
• Pet names aren’t stupid
• Don't even bother to think about lying unless it's a compliment
• Cosmetics are not overpriced crap
• Why 'free' gifts given away with cosmetic sets really are a fantastic way to save money
• The value of expensive junk and comfort food
• Spotting new hair styles within 24 hours of their creation
• What to say and what not to say about new outfits
• There's no such thing as too many shoes
• Being Dirty in Bed - the importance of personal hygiene

Oooh, I feel a new website coming on. Maybe even a printed user's manual..
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I'll be flying off to Budapest tomorrow to spend a couple of days with the other half. Presumably we'll celebrate our anniversary then. I might even treat Tracy to a 'free one'. She deserves it.
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A Sign ...

Copy Shop Poster - Walthamstow

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Hooray for Harry (not)

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So, Prince Harry is in trouble over wearing a party costume with a swastika on it. The level of manufactured rage and offence is ringing around the globe. Well, it makes a change from Nazis dressing up as members of the Royal Family. Prince Philip comes to mind for some reason.
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It is tempting to simply write Prince Harry off as an example of the result of centuries on inbreeding and unearned privilege. But that would be too easy.
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There's more than that going on.
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Many of the British, particularly upper class British, have retained a grudging admiration for Germans. By and large the Germans and the British fought a clean war against each other and, in many respects, British officers had more in common with their German counterparts than some of their own allies. On top of that, the Germans were just so good at what they did.
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As any British schoolboy war geek knew, the Germans in WW2 had the coolest looking tanks, planes, uniforms, hats, camouflage patterns, everything. Their soldiers were more effective, their generals smarter. They were almost always outnumbered but still frequently managed to prevail, regardless. The only teensy weensy fly in the ointment was that they fought for a repugnant regime. However, 14 year old schoolboys have little or no understanding of the significance of repugnant regimes.
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When they get older, British schoolboy war geeks usually get a life and lose interest in such things but the admiration remains. Speaking as a former schoolboy war geek, I retained an interest but began to understand the significance of repugnant regimes. I also came to the knowledge that guns killed people and that 5p's worth of lead could end a life which had 18 or more years of a mother's love and care behind it. The end-product of all those years of nappy changes, bed time stories and parents' love, snuffed out in a second. Nazis were not cool. War is not cool.
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Yet somehow, a perverse glamour remains. As PJ O'Rourke once said 'nobody fantasises about being tied to a bed and dominated by a liberal'. Bookshops and documentary channels are packed full of material about the Nazis. Maybe it's something to do with all that leather. Sixty years on the bizarre fascination is still there and the capacity to shock is there. From Punk Rock to The Producers.
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The Nazis were masters of manipulating human psychology and they and their symbolism retain a twisted attraction, which probably says a lot about the human psyche.
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I doubt if Prince Harry had thought so deeply before donning Nazi regalia. I'm only guessing here, but I reckon he did it because he is an ignorant dick. A privileged, stupid, inbred, ignorant dick. Actually, maybe not as inbred as we are all meant to believe. I defy anyone to compare photographs of Harry, Prince Charles and James Hewitt and not have any lingering questions about Junior's real parentage.
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Actually, what bothers me more about the whole Prince Harry story was that he was attending a 'Colonials and Natives' costume party. What kind of collection of tools would dress up for and attend something like that?
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However, Prince Harry and his friends aren't the only dicks out there.
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Somehow, as evidenced by the 'outrage' this week, holocaust pressure groups have cornered the genocide market and have sold what the Nazi's did to Jews in WW2 as being somehow so unique that it's worthy to be singled out above all other crimes against humanity.
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Personally, I don’t buy that line. If only genocide were so unique. The murder of the Jews by the Nazis was not the first genocide, the most complete, or the most recent. From throwing Christians to the lions, trading smallpox victims' blankets with native Indians, depopulation of entire Caribbean Islands and continental America, through to the horrors of the 20th Century; genocide has been widespread and certainly not restricted to the Germans or the Jews.
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The murder of Jews wasn't even the largest European genocide in the 20th century. To my, admittedly imperfect, knowledge Stalin was responsible for the deliberate starvation and murder of something between 4 to 10 million Ukrainians in the 1930's. To date, Steven Spielberg hasn't made any movies about that particular horror.
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The list of outfits that Prince Harry should not have worn is potentially enormous and includes a British Army uniform. Harry is expected to start officer training at Sandhurst later in the year. He will be wearing the same uniform as Lord Kitchener, arguably one of the most repugnant figures in British military history and the man responsible for the birth of modern concentration camps in South Africa in 1902.
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The Nazis were responsible for the death of something in excess of 50 million people, roughly half of them were Russians. We can never be too sure of the final number because the death toll was so vast. The Russian figures are so enormous that they can only be estimated by changes in census record totals between one decade and the next. The figures are consequently only accurate to a level of 'give or take a few million'.
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Give or take a few million.
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Yet, somehow. The media this week was full of people demanding that Prince Harry pay a visit to Auschwitz. Why not Leningrad/ St Petersburg where hundreds of thousands people, maybe as many as 3 million, were starved to death? Or Lidice in the Czech Republic where an entire town and its population were erased from the map? Or Warsaw, where the Nazis set about enslaving an entire nation by selectively murdering everyone with an education, with the intention of producing a leaderless, slave people? One in four Poles were killed in the last war.
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But no, Auschwitz is the place Harry should visit in order to atone. It would seem that holocaust pressure groups have laid first claim not only to the concept of genocide but to the entire Second World War as well.
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We are frequently told that we should never forget and never let such an enormous crime ever happen again. But which crimes do we remember? Surely holding up Jewish victims higher than any others insults the memory of the others and their suffering. Also, living in a country that is frequently criticised for not forgetting about the war this is all a bit rich. OK, we're not allowed to dwell on the fact that Britain is responsible for the liberation of all Europe from Nazi oppression but we do have to remember one particular atrocity more than any other for perpetuity.
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Genocide remembrance is a selective process and we are told quite specifically which horrors to remember. For example, we don't remember the 25 million dead Russians because that might have lead to Western sympathy and understanding as to why Russia maintained a strong military after WW2. For some stupid reason those silly Ruskies didn't want to be invaded and slaughtered in multiples of a million ever again.
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Nope, I can't imagine the holocaust industry having much positive impact on people in Russia, Eastern Europe, Armenia, Vietnam, China, Cambodia, Africa or South America; even with Hollywood and the rest of the media instructing them to believe that one particular attempt at genocide was more significant or horrible than other genocides committed much nearer to home. It won't wash.
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I know that I'm on shaky ground writing about this stuff. The merest hint of criticism can be hysterically denounced as anti-Semitism and that is how the game has been played, particularly over the last 20 years or so. However, the rise of the holocaust guilt for cash business has grown to such an extent that it is arguably having a negative impact on people's opinions. It certainly has had a negative impact on my own. How dare the holocaust industry desensitise me and others to past horrors; hijacking the imagery of countless thousands of wretched, innocent people being taking away to extermination, and using that imagery to mask the more extreme actions of Israel or to lever an enormous, and undiminished flow of reparations from around the world. It's a sick industry, a business; Shoah business.
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Italians rendered obsolete by tasty new technology

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No serious blog entries for the next day or two methinks. I am going to be a good boy and spend some time trying seriously trying to come up with something productive to do with MMV (has a nice symmetry to it methinks). I have also committed to helping a friend design a short website for his new landfill monitoring training business and spend some time with another walking around London photographing squalor and curiousness. Or had I agreed to write a website about squalor and curiousness and photograph landfill sites? I get mixed up.

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Walking around looking for curiousness is important to me. How else, for example, would I find such things as the new pizza vending machines sprouting outside the more dubious 24/7 convenience stores of this great city?

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For only £4 you can be treated to a 'fresh baked' pizza within 90 seconds. Examining the machine close-up it is clear that it is large enough to accommodate an entire human being, microwave oven and supply of frozen pizzas. I hung around my nearest installation in a suspicious manner for some time yesterday, waiting to see if an illegal immigrant would pop out at some point for a toilet or cigarette break, but to no avail. Maybe they only employ non-smokers who pee inside the machine? Actually, the machines are heavily padlocked so I guess they shut the guys inside. Well, at least they won't starve to death and a lot of them sleep on the floor at work to save money to send home anyway ...

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Please forward all mail to: Stanlislav Ostrowski, c/o The Wonder Pizza Machine, Outside Khan's 24hr Happy Shopper, Kennington Park Road, London

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The pizza machine is inscribed with a .net website name and @hotmail email address, always a bad sign. They're probably being used to sell drugs. If not they will be converted to that purpose once the operators discover that's one of the only two things people are looking to buy on the streets of South London at 3.00am in the morning.

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And the other thing isn't pizza either.

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For those who would like to know more, here we go …

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http://www.wonderpizza.net/eng/

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http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_921796.html

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Actually, on reflection, I'm not being altogether fair. There are several services that could be offered from a person-sized vending machine in the wee small hours around here. Off the top of my head I can think of:

• heroin; served hot, fresh and delicious, straight from the foil
• sex (not necessarily fresh or delicious)
• a fight
• a mugging victim
• a vicious, child-eating dog

I think I'm onto something here and may have found something productive to do with MMV. I will start to work on a rough menu selection for each of the possible services right away ...

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There goes my planned early night.

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Mid life crises and office cubes

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Noel's on top form today. After I posted the link to the 'Meet the Cubes' site he sent me a picture almost by return of post. It's not captioned, but I presume that it's his cube. Now there's a slap in the face for anyone labouring under the misaprehension that New Zealand is all about green open spaces, brawny women, prodigious quantities of sheep, hobbits and whale watching. They have cubes there as well.
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Now there's a thought. Maybe this will spiral into some kind of web meme, with lots of people emailing me pictures of their cubes. Then maybe I could collect all those pictures on a site called 'RateMyCube.com' then sell it to some Muppet for $4m on the basis of inflated projections of advertising revenue.
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On second thoughts, maybe not. However, if anyone chancing on this blog does have some additional cube pics I'd love to see them. Particularly if they’re really, really grim and make me laugh so much that I'm physically sick.
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I need a laugh because I am, all being well, due to hit a certain age in a few weeks time. Tick tock tick tock. I packed my 'professional' job in some time ago and still haven’t figured out the next step. Under the circumstances, pictures of people in cubes would definitely cheer me up and go some way to compensating for being poor and without a discernible future. Fortunately or unfortunately, I am still not yet old enough to credibly hold down a part-time minimum wage role in a Superstore and basically have more than enough time between now and retirement to start an entirely new, more meaningful career and get bored with that as well. If I'm quick I might even be able to fit two in as it happens.
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Don’t get me wrong. Getting older is a capital idea and infinitely preferable to the only other option that I'm aware of.
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Also, one of the benefits of hitting a certain age is that I will find myself in an even more contemplative frame of mind and will be in just the right kind of mood to distil all the wisdom that I have picked up over the years. Adoring adolescents will sit on my lap and gaze up at me in wonder as I dispense wisdom in copious and bountiful quantities. I will probably be arrested shortly afterwards on suspicion of grooming.
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The first piece of sage wisdom distilled from my life experience to date is the following:

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'It's never too late to get a sh*t job'

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Yes, there's always time to get a sh*t job so why hurry? Live a little first. If possible, live a lot first. I wish someone had told me that at 21. Without going into the soul searching and potted biographies that are the staple of blogdom, let's just say that I followed a particular life path because I was good at Maths and Science. I was also good at Literature and History but Maths and Science carried more weight with the adults around me and they advised me to follow that path. I enjoyed Literature and History a lot more but there aren't any proper jobs in that kind of stuff are there? Such is the price of growing up from relatively humble origins. The poorer your background the more likely you are to seek higher education that sounds like it might make you employable …
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Da da da di da … science A levels, science degree, work for a firm of accountants and, finally, sh*t job.
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Admittedly a sh*t job that pays well but at the price of your soul and only advisable if don’t have a soul to start with. And it doesn’t work out in the long-run anyway. You only end up having a mid-life crisis, jacking it all in and find yourself typing blogs about cubic office design and pornographic calling cards in telephone boxes. Overall, playing the game this way just isn’t a very good idea.
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If I ever get round to procreating and if I ever catch my kids using words like 'profession' and 'career' or opting for 'useful' subjects at school and not learning acoustic guitar, creating conceptual art and networking with other poseurs, I really will consider myself a failure.
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The amusing thing is that I'm thinking about becoming a teacher. I might even sneak in under the guise of a Trojan science or maths teacher. Imagine the fun I could have with a group of impressionable children. (puts on Freddie Kruger typing style) Maybe YOUR children HoHoHoHO!
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