Correlate

There's a piece in the media Guardian today saying that there's no correlation between a newspaper's online circulation and any falls in it's print readership. It's fairly interesting and a bit surprising, but not as surprising as finding out that The Daily Mail's online readership is growing by 60% a year.

I truly don't understand. I can imagine the 2m Mail readers pouring over it's racist cancer scare stories and wiping the ink from their fingers on the face of a passing
immigrant child. What I don't expect them to do is be surfing away and choosing the Daily Mail when they could looking for porn footage of someone in a Winston Churchill mask buggering someone dressed up as Jacques Delors.

In short I have a default expectation of Internet users to be young trendy liberal types. In other news Narnia is real and the Government truly believes in fairness. Yup, I'm as naive as a Disney character.

It's not like there's a single sane person commenting at the bottom of BBC articles. These angry drooling maniacs have clearly found a perfect bosom to nestle in with Mail Online. If we could hack into it and, at a peak traffic moment, transmit a deadly ray that pierces their living brains and turns them into smoking husks we might just make the world a better place. Though mass murder probably causes cancer, so I'd better not.

Shedding

When a reptile sheds its skin, does it hang it up next to the lawnmower? Not if it's a snake. Given what happens to a hose pipe when it gets put in the shed, I reckon no snake would be safe to go in there.

Bad jokes, I know. But I wonder how long it will be before the word "shedding" morphs into some sort equivalent of "housing" but with more wood and a tendency to house families of robins? Words change all the time, and since so do human habits (I know some who started a business in their shed) and people need words for them they might just save time and borrow this one.

When I was a kid my parents had an asbestos shed. That's reassuring, isn't it? An entire shed made of one of earth's most poisonous naturally occurring substances. A bit like building a shed out of nuclear waste, or making a chicken coop by tying a load of foxes together in a hoop. We only got rid of it becuase while we were on holiday one of the neighbours' kids climbed on it and fell through the roof. The asbestos roof. She's still alive. So far. I'll wait another decade before I breathe a sigh of relief. With a hankie over my mouth.

Still, the shed never burned down, eh? That's a relief. Almost worth it.

Decay

There's definitely something going on with my teeth. They've come over all sensitive after a lifetime of being fine, like a 35 year old ballet-dancer suddenly thinking "shit, you can basically see my cock in this outfit! Get me some trousers!"

It's most disconcerting.

Of course, my 2 bottles of Irn Bru-a-day habit probably isn't really making positive contribution to my dental health, so it was always a matter of time. It's a miracle that I have anything sticking out of my gums other than blackened stumps. Maybe I should just think "stuff it" and have them all removed. After all, they're all going to fall out in the end anyway (unless I'm beaten to death by members of the Bullingdon Club on a day trip to Cambridge, thus sparing me the pain of ageing). At least I wouldn't have to chew anything anymore. I could have all my hair lasered out to get used to being bald husk, and have tiny brown spots tattooed all over my hands. Genius. Age will hold no fears.

But what to do about my decent skin? I could spend hours a week deliberately exposing myself to harmful radiation in order to accelerate the decay of my skin cells. I hear it has the unfortunate side effect of making you look - very briefly - healthy and good looking, but don't worry, that wears off pretty fucking quickly.

Disguise

There's a tradition in drama and comedy of a lead character disguising himself (or possibly herself) and hearing truths about themselves that they would never normally discover (think Henry V walking amongst his troops). This may be the cause of the old expression that eavesdroppers never heard anything good about themselves.

That's fairly harsh. Are they suggesting that the kind of person who would eavesdrop is clearly a cunt, and therefore all their friends will be saying: "Geoff, he's such a fuckface. And he's an eavesdropper, the weaselly shit, I hacked into his emails and read him talking about it.What a misshapen cock."? Or is it just supposed to be bad luck, so that if you eavesdrop it will be the one moment when someone is saying "... and he fucks badgers..." and then you run away screaming and miss the bit where they add "...but no one minds cos he's so nice the rest of the time and who doesn't occasionally want to violate a medium sized omnivorous mammal anyway, I say fair enough."?

It's a fucking minefield.

Helping

One of these days I will work out why people have second "helpings". How does a bowl of custard become a "helping"? It's not the most helpful of substances. You can't paint your house with it (not for very long, anyway). It won't do the dishes. Apparently it can be promoted to run a government department, but so can squirrels and Chris Grayling, so that's hardly high praise.

It's probably something to do with "helping yourself", showing that the idea of self-service long preceded petrol companies trying to save a packet at gas stations.

I've just looked at the bottom of this blog, where some text is begging me to "label" this blog, and gives the examples "scooters, holidays, autumn". I've like to know who decided that those were the ideal archetypes of a successful blog. Perhaps they'd just returned from a scooter holiday in late September. Or maybe they were just really stuck for something interesting to suggest that a blog might be about, which is fair enough on the basis of this one.

I'm not helping.

Repertory

A hard word to spell, repertory. Even harder to explain what it was. My dad wistfully recalls days when there were many rep theatres, and they were a popular form of entertainment for decades, and a key way for young actors to earn their Equity cards and work their way up to the West End.

I'm sure a lot of it was awful, and you couldn't switch it off after 5 minutes and stick the snooker on, which is probably why television was so beautifully placed to steal its ecological niche and push it towards extinction. It's a shame TV took over, though. Just think what Sky could have achieved if they'd managed to deploy Live Pause at the Bolton Empire.

There probably isn't a Bolton Empire. But I suppose in some sort of post-apocalyptic nuclear bomb ravaged world where the North West of England is the first to recover we could soon all be under the dominion of hordes of suburban Mancunians desperate to avenge the Bolton massacre. Best to die in the first flash, I think.

Chew

My granddad always used to tell me to chew my food 32 times. I don't know where the number came from. It feels somewhat unlikely that extensive field tests had been conducted with a troupe of volunteers munching away on a specially prepared batch of sesame seed buns, all chewing them for a different number of chews and then monitoring their digestion and testing the quality of their stools.

"Sir, I have the results! The stools which demonstrated the most efficient processing of the useful, nutritious parts of the special sesame seed bun belonged to volunteer Clyde, sir."

"Clyde? But isn't he the one you made chew 32 times because he looked at you a bit funny? Something of an own goal!"

One chew for each tooth. It's good as a beginning. If you have no teeth then I suppose you want food that you don't need to chew at all. Where it breaks down is in between. What the fuck are you supposed to do if you only have one tooth left? What requires one chew? And how can you chew with one tooth anyway, even once? It's bullshit, granddad, it's bullshit I tell you!

Still, I miss him sometimes, even if he did talk shit about chewing.