Two pieces of so ablute-ly astonishing news today. First from the world air travel; lovely, cuddly blogger’s favourites Ryanair are allegedly considering charging customers £1 a time to use toilets on their flights. Of course, Ryanair customers could be said to have been paying for a load of shit for quite some time (not by this site’s editor, obviously) - but surely this new measure is taking the Michael O’Leary to a ludicrous extent.

I myself stopped flying with Ryanair some time ago (after the third time my suitcase was broken into between check-in and the pick-up carousel); but what might the airline’s remaining customers do to express their displeasure at this new charge that may be, erm, dumped on them? I’d be inclined to do one of the following: a) wear a giant adult nappy for the duration of the flight (the sale of these “Elvis nappies” is surely now an irresistible business opportunity for some enterprising Stansted Airport stallholder, btw…), b) buy a litre bottle of duty free Scotch, down it on the ‘plane and use the empty bottle as a container for anything unpleasant, or c) simply soil my seat in protest. Obviously option b) would involve a reasonable chance of c) happening anyway.

Elsewhere in the world of the smallest room, it appears that our American cousins are YET AGAIN intent on destroying the planet; this time due to their inistence on pampering their backsides with quintuple-ply toilet tissue made from virgin rainforests and enriched with moisturising baby seal blubber (or something). President Obama is said to be investigating the problem, but environmental groups fear that any legislation would just be papering over the cracks…

All has been fairly quiet on the faux-pas front recently; partly because seasonal climatic conditions during the last few months have encouraged me to stay indoors more and hence mingle less with the general public; but also because, following yet another drunken night of lame puns and predictable ethno-geographical insults in late September last year, I’d resolved to avoid the kind of situations in which I let my natural exuberance / big gob / tendency to mild alcoholism have the run of my brain. But you can’t keep a good man down…

I enjoy a pleasant, if perfunctory, relationship with my neighbours on the left-hand side; No. 30. (I have no idea what the inhabitants of No. 34 look like; I do know all too well, however, that they are probably both on the early shift of whatever job they share, and, more pertinently from my sleep-deprived perspective, that they enjoy waking up to the music of Westlife on a daily basis. And may well also be hard of hearing.)

Anyways; last week, a diplomatic mission was sent over from No. 30, consisting of the matriarch of the house, and the elder of her two daughters. The conversation went something like this:

Mum - “Oh, hello, Michael; nice to see you. We’ve got a parcel which the post office left for you earlier, haven’t we, daughter*?”

Michael - “Oh, great - I’ve been waiting for that package to arrive, thanks a lot!”

Mum. - “And daughter’s got something to tell you, haven’t you dear?”

M - “Oh, really?”

Daughter - “Yes; it’s my birthday and I’m having a slumber party with my friends; I hope we don’t make too much noise, but mummy told me that I should let the neighbours know beforehand.”

M - “Great! Happy birthday, and don’t worry about the noise; I hope you have a great time! How old are you? Five? Six?”

[Stony silence lasting approx. 15 seconds. Daughter’s previously-smiling face drops several kilometers.]

Mum. - “She’s TEN, aren’t you dear? Anyway, must be going…”

Since this unfortunate incident last week, daughter AND her younger sister (who is apparently seven, to add insult to… erm… insult) have stopped saying hello and have started crossing the road to avoid me. I used to enjoy a modicum of respect from the “yoot” around these parts, but now many of the girls’ young friends on the street have started to point and laugh. In fact, I might as well be Chris Langham wearing a Jonathan King T-Shirt listening at full volume to Gary Glitter’s greatest hits… to paraphrase William Congreve; hell hath no fury like a 10-year-old girl whose age you badly underestimate…

(* - I can’t actually remember the daughter’s name either, despite having said hello to her on most days for over two years… Molly? Mary? Dad, if you’re reading this - you spoke to her once, I think; can you remember? I’m not even sure if the mother’s name is “Shelley” or “Kelly”. The father is DEFINITELY called “Michael”, so my powers of recall are on safer ground there.)

Sadly, since Milton Greedman’s genius profit-making idea of banks lending money to chavs without them even asking for it proved to be the stupidest idea since the captain of the Titanic decided to play “chicken” with an iceberg, our economy has gone into recession, and the car industry continues to bear the brunt of the job losses. Technical Monkey however, has (as always) got his thinking cap on and, with a little help from friends at the BBC, has pointed out that things aren’t really that bad:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7891913.stm - 850 people gone at Mini, 600 at Aston Martin, 450 at Land Rover and 1,200 at Honda … total job losses 3,100

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7892240.stm - 9,000 new jobs at KFC

Problem solved, no?

Gentle reader; you know my grammatical ways by now - highly knowledgeable about correct applications and strongly in favour of fierce correction of all mistakes (except when I get something wrong, at which point prescriptivism becomes pointless and correction becomes negative reinforcement of meaningless rules / language is ever-changing / people should be encouraged to express themselves how they want blah blah blah.)

Last night, in written conversation with an esteemed colleague, I decided to use “to wikipedia” as a verb; a fairly common occurrence, in much the same way as “to google” has entered the language. But I needed to use it in the past tense, and was somewhat stumped; “wikipediad”?  Looks too much like “Olympiad”, and therefore as if it should signify a worldwide competition for shoddy editing or something. “Wikipedia’d”, then? Surely that’s far worse than any of the apostrophe-based mistake’s you see every day. In the end, I went with “made reference to a popular encyclopaedic website whose editorial and funding practices are somewhat controversial” - but there MUST be a more succinct way of putting it.

Maybe you clever blogosphere types with your computers, jobs, wide range of knowledge and different experiences of life can help me… I’ll put it to a poll.

Doing a lookey-likey based on hair alone is very much like making love to a beautiful woman. In your best Shteve McLaren voices -

Dutsch Racisht Shympathisher Geert Wilders (h)….

… and shecond-hand car shaleshman Shwissh Toni.

Number 1 in what is likely to be a very occasional series of restaurant comestible proportion maximisation tips.

Any “family” restaurant worth its salt (e.g. Harvester) will have an unlimited salad buffet, however some others (e.g. Pizza Hut) insist on a one-visit, multi-dimensional bowl policy. The smallest bowl (£1.69) will, when replete, hold little more than two iceberg lettuce leaves, a cherry tomato and a dribble of thousand-island dressing if you’re lucky. However, in partnership with Susan Pito Consulting, we at Very Poor have developed an ingenious mechanism for multiplying the quantity of salad consumed in spite of Pizza Hut’s attempts to enforce meagre rations on those of a tightwad disposition. It’s easy, really; simply line the side of the bowl all the way around with vertical cucumber slices (use the longer, diagonally-cut ones if available). This “cucumber stockade” will stand approx. an inch proud of the rim of the bowl, creating a greater circumference and depth, and therefore increasing bowl volume by a significant amount. As the carefully-drafted scale illustration below shows, the method is foolproof:

Three questions only remain from this scientific analysis; 1) why do I appear to be sporting a pair of huge elliptical testicles in Fig. 1?, 2) What the hell is with the weird “angel wing” arms in Fig 2? And 3) Why, despite a private education, several sets of Caran D’Ache pens and the finest vegetarian vellum money could buy, do I still draw like a three-year-old using its feet?

Today’s (or week’s or however often I can be arsed to change it) tune is “Still of the Night” by Whitesnake, and I’m assuming that it wasn’t inspired by the German carol which (sort-of) shares its name. It’s the apex of a 1980s sub-genre which came to be known as “Hair Metal”; a type of music characterised by sexist lyrics, widdly guitar solos and bouffants likely to have made a 18th century French courtier who’d just subjected himself to a massive electric shock to improve his piliary volume weep with envy (see below. And yes, that’s Whitesnake.)

Of course, come the ’90s, Hair Metal was quickly overtaken by grunge / industrial / all sorts of other “cooler” genres which tended to take “Oh, lorks-a-lordy, I hate myself, why am I so ghastly and loathsome” as their lyrical theme rather than “Ooh baby, I wanna treat you as an object despite feminism having happened over 20 years ago all night long” etc.

Nonetheless (and I’ll admit that the lyrics to “Still of the Night” are shite), the music holds up VERY well. In fact, as one prescient reviewer from “Rolling Stone” points out, it pretty much carries the torch of Led Zeppelin into the ’80s; there are very strong resemblances to “Black Dog”, “Whole Lotta Love” and (to a lesser extent) “Kashmir”. The riff is monstrous, the middle section takes a while to get going but finishes up being colossal, and, of course, the production and playing throughout are top-notch.

I really don’t care what some 20-year-old Hoxton-dwelling twat who “writes” spellcheck articles for the NME might think; to me as an agenda-less fan, this is highly exhilirating hairs-on-the-back-of-your-neck-raising music. NOT in a post-modern-ironic “oh, wasn’t hair metal great” way, but sincerely and genuinely. People will still be listening to and loving this song LONG after the likes of Lady Blah-Blah have disappeared back into obscurity where they belong.

The Pope has apparently ordered Holocaust-denying bishop Richard Williamson to recant.

Why? Isn’t he evidently enough of a cant already?

An almighty “Ross / Brand II”-style row has broken out over the sacking of Carol Thatcher for using the word “Gollywog” in the green room (i.e. backstage, off camera) of BBC’s “The One Show”. The rights and wrongs of the incident don’t really concern me much - my first reaction was “Wow, Carol Thatcher’s a racist, hold the front page!” - but the attendant hoopla certainly has shocked me.

Take the coverage in the Daily Mail and the Guardian. Regular readers will have a good idea where my sympathies lie, so I’ll spare you a full rant and instead invite you to gawp at the often astonishing (especially the ones along the lines of “I had a golliwog when I was growing up, therefore it can’t be offensive”) reader comments. Two things in particular amused me;

1) Mail readers are venturing en masse onto the Guardian website to talk about “liberal fascism” and how it denies freedom of speech. This mass emigration is in part because the Mail doesn’t allow free comment, and (unlike the Guardian) pre-moderates every reader submission to make sure it’s right-wing enough. Hmmm….

2) When Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand said something offensive, right-whingers started squawking that the country was going to hell in a handcart because of the liberal left permissive society. Now that Carol Thatcher (someone they like) has said something offensive, they’re squawking that the country is going to hell in a handcart because of “liberal fascism” and “political correctness gone mad” etc. Hmmmm…

I’ll make one more inflammatory suggestion; the phrase “liberal elite” exists because the intelligent people in any society tend to be liberals. (There are exceptions, of course).

From a pub in Kenilworth -

You can have pudding too, but only if you “Ev-eat-a” up all of your vegetables…

(Pun-wise, that’s the best I could do, and significantly better than “Don’t Fry for Tea, Argentina”, which was the second best - alright, worst - I came up with. You MUST be able to improve on those pathetic efforts…)