Yesterday I received a piece of spam with a title so interesting and dramatic that I felt I had to illustrate it with Photoshop. Presenting: “Unrelenting Massive C*cks Destroy Innocent Pussies!”
Addendum: Of course now my site will be blocked by my brother’s school for another six months. Sigh.
Does anyone remember this TV series? It had like six “friends” – three ‘boys’ and three ‘girls’ -and they kind of lived in this really obvious set in New York and the friends who were boys were Dorky/Slutty, Dorky/Sarcastic and Dorky/Mass Murderer and the friends who were girls were Sassy/Obsessive, Sassy/Self-Obsessive and Sassy/Certifiable? God, you’re got to remember it! It was huge about eight years ago… You remember? It was called “Friends”? Maybe it wasn’t on TV where you come from. Anyway – the point is, that somehow I just caught an episode of it – it’s still on TV! – and goddam is it terrible. Absolutely excruciatingly awful.
So anyway, I’m talking to Kerry – you remember Kerry, he’s my chum in LA – and we’re trying to work out why anyone ever watched that show “Friends”, and we’re trying to think up brilliant alternatives and I think we’ve done terribly well:
Pitch One: My first suggestion was a bit of a doozy – basically it’s a sit-com about hot naked gay men making out – What’s not to love?! When you think about it it’s a miracle that no one’s thought of it before. Location ideas? Fraternity house shower room maybe? Kerry suggested a wrestling team theme – but that’s no good. As I explained to him, US wrestling teams wear weird wrestling outfits. You have to have grown up with them to associate them with lustful feelings – no one else in the world understands that particular weird fetish. And foreign markets are so very important nowadays – you don’t want to make a show that people in New Zealand think is lame, do you? I mean, do you? Essentially, the only truly international sit-coms – maybe the only truly international TV shows – are the totally naked ones. I mean – check out Oprah – do you really think that her show would have been popular in Kazakhstan if she’d been wearing clothes?
Pitch Two: How about a sit-com in which Shania Twain is brutally murdered in a different way each week? It’s got loads of potential catchphrases and running jokes. Each week she could start singing some power pop piece of … art … and then – right in the middle – an anvil could fall onto her head, or she could look down and realise that she’s been pushed off a cliff. It would be like Kenny in South Park, but infinitely more satisfying. And think of the potential for spin-offs! I mean just off the top of my head I can think of “Death to J Lo!” and “The Hideously Thrilling Regular Decapitation of Christina Aguilera!”
You know – I’m wasted working in community software. I should be working in Hollywood! They know how to reward visionary geniuses out there. I mean – look at Joel Schumacher! He gave Batman nipples!
I went to a tanning salon. Obviously I’m ashamed of myself, but it was that or fill in my tax return. I thought to myself, “You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to go to a tanning salon!” Because that’s the kind of thing you do on a Saturday in January…. Obviously. The salon in question was almost empty – there was just some skinny-looking gay bloke hiding in a booth around the back and the one-hundred-year-old grandfather who minded the counter.
My choice – “Fifteen minutes of irradiated cancer-creation, please!” The crumbly old geeker looked at me like I’d landed from space – as if it was possible that I’d accidentally just asked him for his prostate in a jar without realising it. “I should think ten minutes would be enough for you,” he murmured with eyebrows wiggling. So I grudgingly conceded and stood in my light-giving booth like it was some kind of alien hot-stuff storage-tank on my way to Planet Sex. Afterwards I felt disappointed. I looked in the mirror and thought, “Well that didn’t do any good”.
It wasn’t until later that evening that I was forced to realise that – evidently while I wasn’t looking – someone had decided to colour in all of my body with a pink flourescent highlighter pen. It took another twenty-four hours for the upper layers of my facial epidermis to emigrate in search of more fertile farmlands and less harsh weather conditions… But it doesn’t matter. There’s no need for anyone to ever find out that I secretly look like a cross between The English Patient and a recently broiled lobster underneath my shiny shirts. And if anyone asks I can just say, “I don’t really want to talk about it…”
I’ve got a huge black bruise on my leg. It’s the size and colour of an over-ripe plum. I don’t know where it came from. In fact all I do know is that I didn’t get it through doing anything fun. But enough about my complete lack of a sex life – today I’m here to tell you where bruises come from.
A bruise or contusion is caused by some kind of knock or bump to the skin. The soft tissues under the skin are full of tiny blood vessels called capillaries. When you bash yourself, these rupture and spurt out red blood cells all over the shop. This is bad. When your body starts to metabolise these cells – literally reabsorbing them – then the bruise will go through a series of colour changes – from red to purple, purple to blue/black, blue/black to green, green to yellow before finally turning a browny skin tone. This colour means the injury is nearly completely healed.
Smurfs are blue – but don’t leap to the conclusion that their skin is simply bruised all over. In actual fact Smurf skin is naturally blue. It would therefore be wrong to assume that they are experiencing serial physical abuse of any kind. If you think about it carefully, you will realise that you have never seen a yellow, black or purplish Smurf, which you would expect if their skin colour was a result of being bashed around by callous human beings or Gargamel.
Many types of people have blue skin which isn’t the result of being beaten up. My favourite non-bruised blue people are The Blue People of Troublesome Creek who intermarried so much that they had loads and loads of children with blue skin. Sometimes people think that Nightcrawler has blue skin, but I’m reliably informed that it’s actual fur. Whether or not he is bruised underneath the fur is between him and his God.
Some people find bruises and being bruised really really sexy. They’re a bit strange, but much less strange than the people who like to pretend to be furry animals or robots. And way less strange than people who find squeezing spots or watching footage of nuclear bombs to be trouser rocket-launchers (or whatever the girl equivalent is). If you like sexy bruises, then you’re probably in the top-left corner of this map of fetishes.
I believe that if you pick up the magic key in Bestiality and build up enough experience points fighting the kobbolds around Furverts, then it’s possible to completely traverse the map, building up a number of exciting STDs in the process, before coming upon the Orthopaedic Braces in the citadel of Medical Bondage. Watch out for elves. Especially the ones interested in Messy Fun. But I’m wandering off topic…
There are a lot of pictures of bruises on the internet. I found lots and lots via Google images. Some of them are really grim and upsetting. But sometimes they’re quite funny. These two guys have bruises and are quite funny, for example. And this guy’s bruises are really impressive. If I was going to have a bruise that didn’t hurt much to get and looked really cool, I’d get some like his. I wonder, what kind of bruise would you like most?
If you like bruises or are interested in bruise-related issues discussed above, you can find out more about them here:
Some people I know:
Mr Webb, who has a website. Phil also has a site. Mo – unsurprisingly – has a site too. Oh gosh,
Jones has a site. That was a surprise. I think James has a site as well, but I don’t know the URL. Anno doesn’t. But she does have a sword (not pictured). Yoz has worked on a thousand different things. Rob was one of the geniuses behind B3ta. Denise is another. And I work with Andrea. She’s nice.
I couldn’t stop myself. God knows I tried. I spent ages tarting this up more, but in the end I cut all the fluff out of it and kept it to the basics – an image of a modern queen, remembering the bizarre horrors of a history of imperialism and really hard to get into frocks, with a little sex pistols shoved in for good measure. Country remember – fifty years of a sovereign, even a nominal one, isn’t necessarily an entirely good thing.
Katy and I have just had a great idea for a new money-making venture targetting a completely underexploited section of the e-marketplace – professional hitmen and the criminally violent. The idea is just like that in Strangers on a Train, where two people arrange to kill each other’s worst enemy. Since there is no connection between them and the person they kill, there can be no apparent motive (and the person who might have a motive can have a solid alibi). Hence, they are much less likely to get caught.
This site would act as a medium of exchange much like ebay, where people could fill in who they wanted dead, and where they were based. This would be stashed on a database until the next stage was complete. They would then be sent a random e-mail from another member, with the details of who they should be poisoning or stabbing or shooting or throttling.
Once confirmation of this kill was made (through some kind of link to the national death records), then the details that had previously been stashed on the database would be sent to another random member who had just signed up, who would be expected to follow through the process themselves. If there was no kill registered within a certain amount of time, then the name and address of the substitute murderer could be sent to the person whose kill it was originally. And since that person must have already killed someone to have got to that stage, this would be enough instigation for the substitute killer to do their job.
The business model is quite simple – targetted advertising from the gun lobby, rope merchants, concrete suppliers and the like would constitute the bulk of the revenue, although clearly paramilitary groups and mercenaries might like to recruit through the site (for a small fee of course). Therapists might also find this a lucrative market to target. And after an initial free period (possibly), high quality service (from someone who has killed a great number of people) could be costed, with the site acting as a broker and taking a commission.
Legally, of course (at least in the initial stages), the site would be completely safe from prosecution. I mean – it’s like Napster isn’t it!? We could put a warning up that read, “no one at our site condones the killing of people” or even “killing people is bad – if you are thinking of killing someone, please contact our psychotherapist at our special discretionary rate”. It’s not like we’d be killing people ourselves (and if we did, I think we could argue that that was separate from the activities of the company).
The only problem is the domain name: killyourcolleagues.com is quite nice, but then so is killthemall.com or ihadtodoitfortheirowngood.com… Opinions would be appreciated, as would venture capital…
Sometimes Mark just does the coolest things (and of course, if he got himself permalinks, we could treasure them forever, instead of being forced to quote them at length):
barbelith dream by Mark Olynciw
I was an Englander, born and lived there my entire life, with accent and all. And Tom was an obvious American, with I LOVE USA shirts and all. Now everything else went along as it does today, him and his weblog, and me with mine….only it was the year 2044.
Suprisingly Tom and I kept our winning good looks over the years, in fact- we looked very much as we did today.
But in the year 2044 they have such remarkable inventions you do know. Such as this streaming webcam that I was using to spy on my friend. I watched him during the day at work, at dinnertime eating a very healthy McDonalds meal, and at night when the parties started….until the next day in which the same thing went on for.
One day Tom and I got into this heated argument because he had promised to me that we’d go eat a picnic in Belgium. (I’m sorry, even my subconscious has no idea between the cities or countries, and where they are in Europe) But Tom cancelled. Because of his work as a ‘Network Scientist’ he was unable to fly to England for this elaborate lunch I had planned.
I was upset, got into drugs…some of that snorting kind….dropped out of high school, and eventually the IRS had to take away RIOTHERO. I became a mess, living on the streets of England. Every once and a while the Spice Girls would invite me in their home for some tea. I would ask them if it was English tea or American tea…because you KNOW how I hate Americans ever since Tom did that to me. And an hour or two later, I was back on the street hungry again.
It was raining this night, and so I knocked the windows in in this boarded up post office building. I hoisted myself up and fell unto the floor of the Post Master’s office. He wasn’t there of course, he had got home for the night… but I was busy snoopy around, looking at the latest technology in air mail, etc.
As I was walking out of the hallway to find something to devour, I kicked this large cardboard box and I look down to see my name on it! And the return address is from Waterford, CT- HEY! That’s where Tom is from! I rip off the cover, pull out all that fun poppy packaging, and look inside. It’s picnic equipment.
A tablecloth, dishes, candlesticks, spoons, and bottle of wine, a frisbee, and basically everything else anyone would need for a successful picnic. Last but not least I reach my hand into the box to pull out Tom and Katy theirselves!
They treat me to an elegant picnic on the roof of the Post Office where it’s now stopped raining. The food’s delicious, the weather is just fine (not the sweaty kind), and it’s the ‘splendidist’ picnic that’s ever been had.
