February 2012
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Internet Start-Up
This is where the money is nowadays, so I am launching my own internet start-up. This will be a top investment opportunity for all of you people reading this. My company, Grotesque Machinations, will launch a top new app that will re-define the way we think about the internet.
A small child (source: every single newspaper in the world) has recently designed something called Summly, which uses an...
January 2012
6 posts
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On Thomson and Thompson, as Politicians
As with everything in and about Tintin, Thomson and Thompson are really interesting characters. They are a lot of things: as well as being identical (but not genuinely twin) idiots, they are: a) police and b) (at least in translation, idk about the original French, where they have different names) English: the only explicitly English characters out of the most frequently-recurring in the Tintin...
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On Why The Orang-Utan Did It
So I recently read an article (‘Nature’s Book: The Language of Science in the American Renaissance’ by David Van Leer, in Cunningham and Jardine (eds), Romanticism and the Sciences, 1990) which in part addressed the relationship between Edgar Allan Poe and natural science. And this got me thinking about ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. As every schoolboy knows, it is...
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Remarks concerning Ed Balls and Labour's inability...
Ever since I heard about Cameron’s ‘full-bladder’ technique, in relation to the EU veto, I have been unable to look at him without imagining a long-retained stream of thick yellow piss working its way down his trouser leg onto the floor. There is something horribly appropriate about the man’s piss-retention, grotesque but banal, just like his plastic mask of a face. He is...
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Police Poem
A poem constructed of various bits from the astonishing PolicePoems.com
Policeman is a special man, he rates above the rest,
A man that wears a silver star on his chest,
‘A Guardian Angel’ dressed in blue,
A mixture of Heaven & Earth.
***
Policeman is your dad, a hero,
While you sleep, he is watching,
My mom the cop she is a true blue,
Finding things with very few...
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Supposing Truth Isn't A Woman... Comments on the...
I often come across people on the internet complaining that Stephen Moffat is pretty off-message about gender/sexuality in his work, and last night’s Sherlock (‘A Scandal In Belgravia’) was a particularly good example of that. Basically (for those who don’t want this spoiled, look away now, although frankly the episode had all the dramatic tension of someone opening a...
December 2011
9 posts
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My BBC Young Sports Personality of the Year Prank
Obviously, we all spent tonight huddled round the television in families watching the awards ceremony for the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year competition, excited for the result. Who would it be? Would Andrew Strauss’s gurn be deemed more characterful than Mo Farah’s significant medal? It is now known.
And of course they also run a competition parallel to the adult sports...
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Morte's story from Planescape: Torment
This is an amazing little fairy story that Morte (who is a talking skull) tells at one point in my favourite computer game of all time, Planescape: Torment.
‘An elderly man was sitting alone on a dark path, right? He wasn’t certain of which direction to go, and he’d forgotten both where he was travelling to and who he was. He’d sat down for a moment to rest his weary...
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Boatswain Higgs
1655. The Golden Age of Piracy. Whilst sailing the Spanish Main, boatswain Lemuel Higgs, of the Hispaniola, is thrown overboard. His crewmates assume him dead, but later in Port Royal they hear rumours of his presence. He is said to have become shadowy, quieter. He does not eat, or drink, or sleep, and from him there appears to emanate a great *power* of some sort, not associable with mortal...
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Efficiency Savings
You are in an accident. The world goes black, now flickers back on.
Broken, your sensory milieu is a rush of white lines, sudden pains, tinnitus. You find yourself lying on a hospital bed, surrounded by concerned parties, tubes and wires hooked into you to keep you alive. Above you the enormous dome of the operating theatre. Over a PA system, you hear: “Doctor Beeching to the emergency room...
November 2011
7 posts
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The Isolationism That We Currently Experience
Being a ‘flarf’ poem constructed out of snippets of the always hilarious Mancunion Politics section.
A question to Uncle Geoffrey about his strong capitalist avocations,
Frankly antediluvian,
First hand and undeniable,
Some form of Dickensian delusion and inequality between men and women,
A simplistic form of recreation, a joyful pastime,
His hand carved ruby encrusted pram.
***
Once,...
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Yawn, by 'Beige' Larry Blumstein
I heard something happening to the best minds of my generation through the walls of my new-build flat,
But I didn’t check to see what it was,
It was raining that day,
Heavily for the time of year,
December.
***
Angel-headed hipsters walking down Portland Street,
Were they going to Underachievers?
It has moved to Gulliver’s,
Or perhaps they were looking for a kebab,
I often like one on...
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A joke about Fichte
Two German society ladies are talking about Fichte’s philosophy. “You know he denies the existence of everything outside him,” says one, somewhat conspiratorially. “Really?” says the other. “Even his wife?” “I believe so,” replies the first.” “And she puts up with this?!”
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Dave Adorno: Hobnobs and Anti-Semitism
Do you remember Hobnobs madam? They were dead popular in t’70s, do you remember them? I bet you remember Hobnobs don’t you sir. You’d have them with your brew, and you see the great thing was about them that behind every Hobnob was the leering face of the Jew, or not precisely the Jew – you remember Jews don’t you sir? With their international banking systems– but the Jew...
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A fable about horses
They only had so many horses at the race tracks, so they used to get the jockeys to race ponies in order to decide who got them for the race. The rest had to settle for zebras. But the zebras were untamed and not bred for racing, so the jockeys on zebras always lost. But since these were generally the weaker jockeys anyway, because they’d already lost on the ponies, the system worked out...
October 2011
2 posts
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A Shop That Is Just MnMs
So I was walking through London recently, no particular purpose in mind, as one might in this rapidly-crumbling society of ours, when bright lights descended upon my eyes, and a loud screeching sound begun to ring in my ears. When the lights cleared, and the noise diminished, a deeply unexpected vision presented itself to me… was I hallucinating? Had I had a stroke? There was no way this...
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Me and My Exact Double
My exact double is very rich and successful, but vulgar in his tastes and unrefined in his manners. I find him rather overbearing, even threateningly so. We don’t have very much in common. He runs an internet real estate agency that exploits a little-known piece of EU internet legislation to buy up blogs that have remained unused for 18 months or more, strip them of their posts, and sell...
September 2011
4 posts
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Westfield Stratford City and the Skull
If you haven’t visited Westfield Stratford City yet, you really should. It is the greatest achievement of the post-Thatcher era in Britain, a cathedral to consumer capitalism. It freezes all the horror and fearful beauty of overpriced clothes, CDs, and electronics in a giant, static non-place that also happens to be the gateway to the Olympic Village. It is only to be hoped that it will be...
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August 2011
5 posts
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A Photograph From Another World
Today, I received an email from a stranger, one ‘Jane XXXX’ [my surname] which only contained this photograph:
I have since spent all evening struggling to put this photograph in any sort of context. Why have I received it? What is it of? And who — just WHO — is this ‘Jane’ who has sent me it?
One clue is provided by the fact (it is my knowledge) that, if I...
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Twee Fascism
Back in the 1920s, racialist and militaristic imagery worked for fascism because that’s what sold back then. Breakfast cereals were advertised on the basis that they would give you “the might to conquer all seven continents.” (Ricicles ad, 1923) Make-up ads informed young women that x brand of blusher would highlight “the superior facial features of the Caucasian, or white, race.”...
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Walter Benjamin: Notes on Drinking Tea
18th August 1927. 4:15 pm.
1. An earthy flavour on the chessboard of tongues, apparition behind me. Motionless.
2. English breakfasts in the Punjab of endless minds. Memories of Pushkin and samovars.
3. Open eyes, a man approaches me, warming. His hands flop endless, a breathless prayer to Hegelian metaphysics.
4. A cloud of marginal stimulation descends. Heavy-headed, I sit up straight....
July 2011
11 posts
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The A Sensitive Man 'Most Likely To Fail' List...
[imagine horrendously-posed group photograph]
No contacts, no charisma, and no work ethic: we profile a bunch of kids who are destined for the trash-heap of civilization. Welcome to Generation Rubbish: make yourself mediocre.
Pokorny Hardison
[imagine pouty, sullen photograph: P. Hardison]
Angry nerd, 22
Pokorny Hardison has never been diagnosed with any sort of autistic spectrum condition, but...
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A Cruel Picnic
“Summer,” said Lytton Strachey, “is the most spiteful of all seasons.” What better occasion, then, to get back at a jilting lover or double-crossing friend, than a beautiful summer’s day? The sun is in the sky, the smell of fresh grass, the drowsy buzz of hayfever in your nostrils… head for a favourite country spot and prepare them a picnic they’ll never forget: a picnic of...
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New Genre Announcement: Erotic Realism
“He admired the cheap knit of her Primark cardigan, slumped lazily over bulging hips. Her car had an almost infantile aroma of crisps and warm orange drink. Empty bottles of mineral water covered the backseat of her car, spilled over from the little pockets in the doors, rolled around on the dashboard, were everywhere. He imagined Kelly naked, in a great sea of empty mineral water...
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Bionic Eyes
The world is a harsh and ugly place, so of course it seems appealing when you are told that you can have bionic eyes installed that make everything look like how you want it to be. Suddenly the cruel (dirty, potholed) streets of Manchester are transformed into the great crystal walkways of Mantrax-12, a colony founded on a laboratory-grown fungal asteroid that has been placed in orbit around...
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Guest article: The Rise of 'Productified Man'
Jacob Bar Nathan is a left-wing writer and academic who teaches in the Department of English Literature & Cultural Studies at the University of Enfield. He has written extensively on the relationship between media and conceptions of the self, with particular focus on Kafka and Dickens.
“I am not a finished product,” declares Melody from the Apprentice. Note the absence of the definite...
June 2011
2 posts
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THIS WEEK: 2120
The year is 2120. Humanity has expanded across the galaxy, establishing colonies as far away as Dreasak-9. But back on earth, all is not well. The Nuclear war of 2088 has reduced our beloved planet to a scorched crust. Meanwhile, in a studio located somewhere in the alkali flats where once was Salford Quays, the BBC’s nightmarish ‘This Week’ continues to be...
May 2011
3 posts
