We’re now entering into one of the darkest economic periods which anyone can remember. Businesses are going to the wall, the jobless total is rising inexorably and the government has mortgaged the entire country for a generation to come. Consumerism has been rampant over the last 10 or 15 years -banks have thrown money at people who were never going to be able to pay it back, and everywhere we’re deluged with endless adverts begging us to buy more crud and satisfy the craven addiction of our “free market” to growth based on false wealth, false aspirations and moral bankruptcy.

But hey! Never mind all that ballyhoo; thanks to the ever-brilliant TOG, I’m delighted to be able to introduce a new feature on the site - (da-da-da-da-da-da-DAAAAAA!!!) - the Wordpress eBay Sales Lister (see below, right). With this handy little gizmo, you can all keep track of items I’m selling on eBay, perhaps get involved in complicated spread bets as to how many times I’ll use the word “RARE!” in my listings, and - who knows - maybe even buy something! Go on, spend, spend, spend!! You know you want to, and, best of all, in the end it’s for the greater economic good of us all!!!

*SPECIAL OFFER* - up ’til Christmas, I’ll MATCH the government’s cut in VAT for any item purchased - that’s an astonishing FIVE PERCENT off the final total (excluding postage, packing and handling fees.) With offers like that, Mr Recession will soon be packing up and leaving town!

The body which promotes cosmetic surgery is known as the British Association of Aesthetic Plastic Surgeons - B.A.A.P.S.

Someone within the organisation either has no sense of humour at all, or is a total comedic genius.

I’m working on a new theory - that the make-up of society can be quantified by a series of direct inverse proportions. It runs much like this; in any given individual or selection of people, incidences of phenomena in group 1) will be directly inversely proportional to those in group 2). Obviously the implications and applications in terms of marketing / social engineering are immense, so the variables have to be pretty accurate. Here’s a sample -

Group 1)

- Number of fireworks lit on November 5th
- Tendency to use the phrase “I’m not a racist, right, but….”
- Proximity of dwellinghouse to Croydon
- Consumption of “Sunny D”
- Probability of display of “Babe on Board!” sticker or nodding dog in back of car
- Estimation of Jordan as a role-model and ideal mum
- Frequency to visits to car boot sales (some statistical anomalies exist for this variable, mostly in the Folkestone area)
- Ability to recall contestant names from current and previous series of “I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!”

Group 2)

- Ability to spell defiantly definately definitely
- Moderation in purchase and display of Christmas lights / decorations
- Ability to write without constant capitalisation / over-use of exclamation marks
- Likelihood of picking up faeces of one’s very aggressive, badly trained dog
- Consumption of vegetables (excluding chipped potatoes)
- Possession of patience required to wait until one gets to a bin before disposing of one’s STINKING FUCKING box of HORRIBLE KFC dead battery chicken remains.

Reader contributions for either group welcome. Perhaps these tendencies manifest themselves in different ways overseas? (eg. might Group 1, for some areas of the States, include the likelihood of one’s cousin - who is also one’s husband and brother - getting involved in banjo duels with out-of-towners…?)

“El Gordo” Brown will today announce a temporary cut in VAT from 17.5% to 15%, in a boost to stimulate consumer spending.  Oooh, crikey! That Nintenditron Megadrive HD-Ready Widescreen Superbluetooth Wii-pod which I had my eye on has  gone down from £199.99 to - wait for it - £195!! Somebody stop me - my wages are burning a hole in my pocket! It’s like the high street is having a crazy giveaway party, and everyone’s invited!

Saint Bob Gandalf has, it was today revealed, pulled out of an engagement to switch on the Christmas lights in Margate, a town which he had previously pot-kettlacularly called “ugly”. He cited “a political arrangement in Qatar”, although I’ve researched thoroughly, and there’s a very suspicious conspiracy of silence web-wide about who’s switching on the Christmas lights in Doha.

Saint Bob is, by dint of regularly shooting his gob off in public (but mostly by siring such an appalling child and letting her appallingness continue unchecked), rapidly eating into the store of goodwill garnered by his amusing “give us the fookin’ money” catchprase in the ’80s. And as Russell Brand said, if he’s been dining out on “I Don’t Like Mondays” for the last 30 years, it’s no wonder he knows so much about famine.

Ahhh, Christmas. A time for giving and receiving and God and stuff and junk. Carols will be sung, yule logs will be burned / flushed (after a couple of days for that bloody stuffing to digest properly), crackers, turkeys blah blah…

What? I’m over a month early? Well don’t blame me; I just believe what the adverts tell me. Bar a brief pumpkiny break a while back, retailers seem to have been desperately screaming “Christmas!!!” at me since mid-August, so I figured that we must be nearly there by now.

Anyway, now is Christmas for most online retailers, myself included; what happens in the next two or three weeks can make or break their year. It’s prime present-buying time in the increasingly dominant online market, and since I’m pretty much surgically attatched to a computer, I’ve just finished all my purchasing, barring, of course, a few last-minute large and inexpensive items which will make my under-tree present stack look more generous than it really is.

But as we know, ’tis better to receive than to give*; so what will you be getting for Christmas? There’s only one way to find out…

( * - unless you’re in my extended family. Some in clan Tafkass are in the habit of hoarding unwanted presents to be “re-gifted” to other members of the family at a later date; there have been at least two unfortunate incidents of someone receiving, several years later, the exact same present they’d once given (the present having “done the round” of family members) - and I once received a tie from my aunt which, when taken to Marks and Spencer’s to exchange for cash, turned out to have been last actively stocked over 8 years previously.)

Bosses of cuddly racist holocaust-deniers the BNP were up in arms yesterday, when it emerged that a list of names and addresses of party activists had been posted on the internet. They were particularly worried because some of the names on the list were apparently only former racist holocaust-deniers.

Evidently the BNP leadership fears that members might be exposed to prejudice or even violence based on the one fact of their inclusion on this list; and, as any responsible politician would tell you, it’s utterly wrong to be prejudiced against people based on very limited knowledge of who they are and what th…. oh.

The more perspicacious (is that even a word, and if so, doesn’t it just mean “sweaty”?) will have noticed that TOG has left the land of surprisingly poor internet access (China) and has finally, thanks to Japanese technical ingenuity, had the chance to upload my latest TTOTDOWOHOHCBATCI - “Warmth of the Sun” by the Beach Boys.

Why this particular tune? Because a) it’s an early sign of Brian Wilson’s songwriting genius and b) it’s a good illustration of the Beach Boys’ mighty gift of harmony. If you understand harmony, you understand music. EVERYONE understands rhythm and melody at some level, because rhythm surrounds us in everyday life and everyone can hum a basic tune; but if you can get your head round chords - starting with the simplest tonic-mediant-dominant (notes 1,3 and 5 in the scale) - and their endless variations and applications within a tune, you can consider yourself “proper” musical. (Oh, and c) because every single song I’ve uploaded up to this point, apart from the ill-fated Van Morrison one, seems to have been taken from a 45-day period in 1983 and my musical taste is looking shockingly narrow as a result.)

I have a theory, which I hope to be able to test out one day; if you expose children at an early age to lots of harmony-heavy music (like this song, any good barbershop, or something more modern like the Puppini Sisters), you’ll end up with an individual who can’t help but instinctively understand chord formation. OK, that may not mean that they’ll automatically win The X Factor in later life (which, as I understand it, is judged solely on whether a contestant can make their voice do a ridiculous Mariah Carey-esque vibrato on EVERY SINGLE NOTE), but at least it’s some kind of parental gift with meaning.

Prince Charles is 60 today. I know he’s fairly old-looking compared to, say, Cliff Richard (68) or Helen Mirren (63), but am I the only one who thought that he was actually about 80 or something?

Some think that Charles gets a bit of a rough ride from the press; but I suspect that the “lovable buffoon” impression that we have of our future king is actually something of a PR triumph, and that actually he’s an arsehole of the first order. He’s known to be short-tempered and difficult, he was shockingly nasty and unfaithful to Diana for most of their marriage, he has OVER A HUNDRED personal servants (more than the Queen or the Queen Mother, apparently, including one who squeezes his toothpaste onto the brush) and, whilst he did admittedly set up the Prince’s Trust, the moneys raised by the charity are still microscopic compared to his personal wealth and attendant extravagance. This is not a man who’s in touch with, or gives a particular shit about, “his people”, despite whatever impression his various ridiculous outbursts on architecture or homeopathy might be trying to convey to the contrary. The one thing I can find to say in his favour is that he’s not an obviously screaming racist, like most of the other Windsors.

Happy Birthday, Charlie…

A couple of moral mazes for y’all; firstly, a friend of mine is considering a course of sperm donation. He’s single, about my age (mid-30s), has never been married, has no kids and believes himself 80% unlikely settle down and procreate; yet (at the risk of ringing big alarm bells with Cane) he’s a bit superstitiously Darwinian about the whole gene thing, and would like the chance for his “line” to continue. As such, whilst recognizing that he’ll be helping a family conceive a much-wanted child (and sperm donors are in very short supply in the UK), he reckons it’s a fairly selfish and even shallow motivation for doing so. He’s worried that it may come back to bite him on the behind later in life when up to 10 offspring come looking for him and he has no answers for them; this would of course be compounded if he did end up marrying and having kids of his own.

He’s asked my advice, and apart from a slightly vague hippy Ben Kenobi-ish “you must do what you think is right”, I’m really not sure what to tell him….

Oh, and secondly, one I’ve been struggling with myself - is it morally wrong to make a “clown’s car horn” honking noise when touching your partner’s breast?

Opinions welcome.