Are You A Premiership Footballer?

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

How Much of a True Muslim Are You?

How much of a true Muslim are you?
Are you a ticking time bomb of malcontent? Has several centuries of persecution from the Crusader states left you with throbbing temples and weird voices in your head and a crushing desire to kill hundreds of infidels? Or are you just a normal guy in a burqa who wants to get on with his life? Just take this simple to use fun multiple-choice quiz and find out just how much of a Muslim fanatic you really are!

1) You are watching the news on TV. There is a report on the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli impasse over illegal Jewish settlements on the West Bank. You are incensed at the USA’s continual backing of Israel in any argument. What do you do?
a. Write a stern letter to the US Embassy and the Israeli Consulate in London, condemning their actions.
b. Refuse to buy any more McDonald’s Hamburgers or Jaffa Oranges.
c. Strap vast amounts of explosives onto your heavily pregnant wife and then drive her to a Pizza Hut in Tel Aviv and detonate her during a children’s party.

2) Your neighbour’s wife is sunbathing in their back garden in just a skimpy bikini. What do you do?
a. Have a quick ogle out the window after all; she has got smashing oompah-loompahs.
b. Ignore her, she can do what she likes, it is a free country after all.
c. Gather a baying crowd of your friends together, drag her into the street and stone her to death in front of her children.

3) An elderly Catholic gentleman gives a lecture in Germany. During this lecture he includes several quotes regarding a variety of major religions throughout the World and illustrates their perception to other cultures in times gone by. One such quote he uses is from a Byzantine Emperor from centuries ago who described the Prophet Mohammed as a bringer of Evil and violence. How do you react?
a. Read through the transcript of his lecture and highlight and underline the bits you find interesting.
b. Write a letter of mild rebuke to the Vatican, pointing out that Islam is a lovely soft fluffy faith, the religious equivalent of a small Labrador puppy.
c. Gather a huge baying mob of ill-educated psychopaths onto the streets waving placards and banners reading “BEHEAD THE POPE!” “ISLAM WILL DEVOUR CATHOLICISM!” and “DEATH TO ABSOLUTELY ANYONE WHO SAYS WE ARE VIOLENT, THE BASTARDS!” and set fire to a couple of churches. And shoot a Nun. In the back.

4) Your parents moved from grinding poverty in a Karachi back street to a smart, modern comfortable home in a pleasant suburb of an English midlands town. All of your wants in life have been catered for. How do you show your appreciation to this country which has given you so many opportunities in your life?
a. Become a local councillor for the local Government Authority and attempt to help the plight of other people of a similar ethnic back ground who have been less lucky than you.
b. Strive to make an even better life for your children than your parents did for you, working hard and enjoying the benefits of your new existence.
c. Ponce off to Afghanistan and learn how to fire anti-tank missiles, make videos of yourself dressed in combat fatigues, holding an AK47 and screaming passages from the Koran, declare death on anyone in the UK who might disagree with your point of view and then blow yourself up on a packed commuter train slaughtering innocent people by the hundreds.

5) You are a one-eyed, two hooks for hands, stark raving bonkers Imam from a disgraced Mosque in north London who has been spreading inflammatory texts to impressionable teenagers, urging his followers to attack and kill infidels and generally spending every waking hour slagging off the United Kingdom as a pile of crap that would disgrace the bottom of a latrine. How do you support your lifestyle and enormous family?
a. Get a job working long hard hours in a local hospital.
b. Do as much part-time work as you can spare when you aren’t frothing at the mouth at your local Mosque.
c. Sign on the dole and get every bloody hand out you can get even though you probably haven’t paid a single penny in income tax or national insurance over the past 20 years.

6) You are another stark raving bonkers Imam from another disgraced Mosque somewhere in London. Your many years of firebrand preaching of hatred and death towards all non-believers of your religion finally lands you in trouble with the authorities and you find yourself deported to the Lebanon. A short while after your deportation, Israeli jets start dropping bloody great big bombs almost smack bang on your front door mat. The British Royal Navy, on a mercy mission is helping evacuate people from this war zone. How do you react?
a. Sneer with derision at the British infidels with their fake concern for your Muslim brothers and sisters. You wouldn’t go back to that God-less island hell-hole of Britain if they paid you!
b. Gather your family and friends together and make a break for the quieter north of the country taking all your possession with you – anything rather than face the ignominy of crawling back to the British authorities for help. You are made of stern stuff!
c. Shit your pants as soon as the first bomb goes off and turn up white faced and trembling at the gang plank of the first British ship you see, begging, crying and screaming to be allowed back in to Britain, like a great big girly.

7) A small insignificant Danish newspaper prints a frankly pretty lame cartoon showing the Prophet Mohammed in heaven complaining that with all the suicide bombers that have been around lately, they are running short of virgins for them. How do you react when you are told about this cartoon? (Remember, you haven’t actually seen it!)
a. Snigger a little at the joke, but agree with your mates it is not that funny.
b. Shrug your shoulders and get on with what you were doing before.
c. Run screaming into the Swedish Embassy brandishing a sword, threatening to behead people who thought the cartoon was funny. Look mightily embarrassed as it is explained to you that this is the Swedish Embassy and the cartoon was actually published in a Danish newspaper, before rushing into the Danish Embassy with your sword and setting fire to a home made Danish flag, once again threatening decapitation to anyone who has any connection with the cartoon at all.

8) You are getting sick and fed up of constantly hearing people who know nothing about your faith, referring to Islam as a religion of violence and hatred. How would you go about disproving these beliefs?
a. Write an eloquent disclaimer in the letters page of The Times, littering your missive with many excellent quotes and references.
b. Appear on a TV chat show and prove what a calm measured person you are by laughing off these criticisms and giving a proper idea of what Islam is all about.
c. Hijack several aircraft full of terrified innocent people and crash them into a skyscraper, which then collapses killing thousands of people in the process.

9) Another suicide bomber has killed hundreds of innocent people and in recently broadcast video footage on Al Jazeera TV he is seen claiming he did this as an act of martyrdom in the name of Islam. The World and Middle East situation changes not one jot. How do you react?
a. Feel depressed that another young life has been wasted for no reason whatsoever.
b. Read the news avidly to see if anything happens.
c. Run out onto the street brandishing AK47’s, pictures of the dead man and copies of the Koran. Then dress your two year old son up as a pretend suicide bomber and parade the terrified looking child up and down in front of the baying mob of lunatics.

10) Another high profile western politician or journalist has written an item in a newspaper condemning Islam as a religion of hatred and violence. Hatred and violence erupt all over the Muslim world with people blowing up Western owned hotels and newspapers, unfortunately proving once and for all that the politician/journalist was right. How do you react?
a. Condemn the rioters as not being indicative of your average Muslim.
b. Condemn the author of the offending article for being insensitive to Muslims.
c. Say very calmly and collectedly that all faiths should just sit down together and have a dialogue so that this sort of thing doesn’t happen again. And when it does, then go on a huge and bloody rampage through a street somewhere demanding various people be beheaded for suggesting that Islam is about violence and hatred. (Continued forever)

So how did you get on? Check your answers here!

· If you answered mainly A’s then you are nothing more than a shivering infidel not worthy of shining the Prophet’s sandals and should therefore nip off and behead yourself immediately.
· If you answered mainly B’s then you are probably a sympathetic ear for any Muslim in this troubled world, but unfortunately as an unbeliever you are not worthy of being in the same room as a true follower of Islam and you are an infidel. So you’d better just nip off and behead yourself to save time.
· If you answered mainly C’s, then Allah be praised! You are a true Islamic Fundamentalist lunatic! Strap some more explosives on and head downtown to be amongst the unholy and let the evening go with a bang! You deserve it!

NEXT WEEK’S QUIZ…….

What sort of Muslim are you? Sunni or Shia? Who cares, you’ll be blowing each other up anyway! Bye!

Being a Manchester City fan.

I knew what would happen tonight. I just knew. Even about a week ago I knew what the result was going to be. As soon as Manchester City were paired up with Chesterfield in the "Whatever Name We Are Giving the League Cup This Season" Cup, I just knew that we would lose. It is what you come to expect after over 30 years as a fan.

I am not from Manchester and have only visited the City on a few occasions in my life, but I became a true blue fan in the early 70's from watching such genius' like Colin Bell, Francis Lee, Mike Sumerbee, Neil Young, Joe Corrigan and so many other legends of the game performing for the Sky Blues and actually winning silverware. Since 1976 the Mancester City trophy cabinet has been as empty as a hermit's address book. But still I follow, still I hope, still I yearn that one day we will rise again to the dizzy heights enjoyed by Joe Mercer and Malcolm Allison's reign as Manager and Coach. But nights, like tonight, really stretch your loyalty to it's very limits.

I think what pisses me off more than anything else is the crushing inevitability of it all. We were so obviously going to lose to Chesterfield this evening that we might has well have sent a telegram to the management of Chesterfield FC and just said something like "clearly you are going to stuff us, so we won't bother popping over this evening, we'll just sit in and have a cup of cocoa and an early night."

I personally have nothing against Stuart Pearce as a human being and as a footballer. One of the greatest left backs this country has ever produced and one of the hardest men ever to have played professiona football. But a manager...? I am beginning to have my doubts. After his initial honeymoon period, when City won a few games and people even began talking him up as a possible future England manager, things have gone from bad, to worse, to awful, to fucking dreadful. The one game we have won this season, at home to Arsenal, was the luckiest win you have ever seen. They pulverised us! They should have stuck about seven past us. But with Arsenal seemingly intent on actually walking the ball into our net, we rode our luck and got away with it. But not since. We needed someone like Martin O'Neill in charge. About the only bright spot of last season's woeful campaign was the early season goalscoring of the evergreen Andy Cole. Now, I know he was an ex-rag and almost due to draw his pension, but he had guile and he knew where the back of the net was. So why did we let him go off to Harry Redknapp's south coast pensioners club where all he is going to do there is warm the bench every week? Who have we got up front now? Paul Dickov. For Christ's sake. Paul Dickov used to struggle to score for us when we were in the old Second Division, why have we got him now when he is clearly past whatever peak he might have had, and couldn't hit the backside of a cow with a banjo? Darius Vassell? Darius "toe-poke-Tom" Vassell, quick, direct, unaware of anyone around him and stupid. Bernardo Corradi? Has failed to score or set the world alight wherever he has played, so he should fit in a treat at Eastlands. Georgios Samaras. I have a grudging respect for Samaras, not particularly for his footballing skills, but anyone prepared to walk around Manchester with that sort of hair cut must be a tough man.

We need some things urgently:

1. A defender. The last decent commanding central defender we had was Daniel van Buyten, but Kevin Keegan elected to let him go back to Hamburg and replaced him with...? Ben Thatcher. Enough said really.
2. A creative midfielder. We haven't had someone who can unlock an opposing team's defence since Ali Benarbia took his walking frame and false teeth off to the footballer's graveyard of Qatar.
3. A striker. Someone like Andy Cole. Someone who knows where the back of the net is and has more than one brain cell.
4. Another manager. Sorry Stuart. You are a lovely lovely man, but you are out of your depth and sinking fast.

One of my favourite stories involving a City fan and the depths to which we are taken by this club, was of some years back, when City were skulking in the depths of the old 2nd Dvision. We played Stockport County at Maine Road and were getting caned 2-0. A third Stockport goal finished the match and there was a minor pitch invasion by disgruntled City fans. One man, throughly sickened by what he was watching, marched across the pitch, stood in front of the Directors box, took his season ticket from his pocket, tore it up in a very theatrical way and threw it to the turf, before storming out the ground vowing never to return. Two days later, through the post an anonymous letter arrives at this City fan's house. Inside is his season ticket, lovingly selotaped back together with a note attached reading: "If we have to suffer it, so do you!"

I am thoroughly sick and tired of supporting Manchester City and I would like them confined to Room 101 so I can get on with my life and support another team that might do well for a change. Like fucking Chesterfield.

Diego Maradona - Cheating Short-Arse.

With the World Cup nearly upon us, I felt it was time I put fingers to keyboard and write something about the World's favourite sport. For me personally, I have no greater hate figure in the world of sport as Diego Maradona. I feel I should say that I have no desire to slander anyone on these pages, so let me get through some of my objections to this human being one at a time and make sure I don't say anything illegal.

Maradona is a short, cheating, drug-taking, Argentinian footballer. Nothing illegal there, as far as I can see. He is short, something like 5 feet 5 inches in stature. Cheating? Yep, let's just take a quick look at the "Hand of God" moment from 1986. I think only blinkered Argentinian fans and the sodding referee and linesmen from that match would possibly think otherwise. Drug-taking? How much proof do you need? Diego has probably stuck more Colombian marching powder up his hooter then the Rolling Stones combined. Argentinian footballer? OK, OK.

I, like many England football fans, sat and watched that match from Mexico in 1986, live on TV. I still remember the moment the homunculoid little shit fisted the ball into the net beyond the despairing Peter Shilton. I sat and waited for the referee to rule it out. And I sat. And I waited. And I waited a bit more. After several more waits, it suddenly dawned on me that the half-wit in black was going to let it stand. How on Earth could he have missed it? To compound matters, he then goes on to score one of the finest individual goals ever seen. Gary Lineker pulls one back for England. Then in the dying seconds, John Barnes skips round the back of the Argentinian defence, scoops over a perfect cross and Lineker, steaming in, JUST misses nodding it into an inviting net. It never crossed Gary's mind to raise his hand and punch it past the Argentinian goalie. What would dear little Diego have said then if it had been allowed to stand? Would he have just shrugged his tiny shoulders, mumbled something about waiting all this time for a hand of God and then two come along at once and carried on with the game? Somehow I doubt it. Whenever there is a poll of the most skillfull player who has ever lived, Pele has to win. Everytime. Not just because he was a better all round player than the vertically challenged, cocaine-snorting, ball punching, cheating little toss-pot, but because punching a ball past an opponents goalkeeper would never have crossed Pele's mind. Why should it? If you have that much skill at your disposal, why bother to cheat as well?

In the latest National Geographical Magazine, they have an article which, in typical American style, is called "Soccer - The World's Favorite Game". In it, Thomas Jones from the London Review of Books writes about Diego Maradona and THAT match. He rather gratingly states at the end of his piece: I've always suspected that high-minded censure of the Hand of God is a way of dressing up disappointment and frustration that England lost; that the behavior for which England fans will never be able to forgive Maradona is not his cheating, but his running around five England players like so many wooden posts to score the greatest goal that's ever been scored and knock England out of the World Cup. Is it BOLLOCKS. If Maradona had beaten England by two superb LEGAL goals he would be rightly feted as the greatest footballer of all time. But he didn't. He beat England by cheating disgustingly and THEN showing the world his true class. And that is something real football fans will never be able to forgive him for, which just goes to show that Thomas Jones is not a real football fan.

Room 101 for both him and Diego.

Horsey People

I am a very lucky person. I live in a rural area of the West Country in England. It is a lovely place to live, very peaceful and tranquil, and the vast majority of locals are kind, welcoming and friendly. And then there are the horsey people. You know the sort. All the women look like Camilla Parker Bowles on steroids and the men have faces so red they appear to have just been slapped on both cheeks with a pair of halibuts. You tend to encounter them driving along quiet country lanes, they generally travel in pairs. Now although this is a public highway and little more than a single car's width wide, they just HAVE to trot along on their horses side by side - two abreast. They will get over, but in their own time and when they feel like it. You can slow down to a speed so tiny that the only movement from your car is caused by the rotation of the Earth and move as far over into the over grown hedge and into the ditch as you dare to go without beaching your car, and they STILL glare at you as though you have just tried to murder them, their family, their families families and, worst of all, THEIR HORSES... Because, you see, to horsey people nothing, but nothing is more important on this planet than HORSES. Now I personally have absolutely nothing against horses. Lovely creatures most of the time. Far too much of the bloody things hurtling over fences on sports programmes for my liking, but live and let live. But these people WORSHIP them. Adore them. In the words of the Fast Show, horsey people rate creatures on this planet in this order: Horses - Dogs - People. And don't you forget it...
Some years ago, when I still lived in Essex, I was driving back to my flat in a lovely village between Chelmsford and Billericay. The road to my flat was extremely twisting and winding, and of a single track, just to make it that bit more buttock clenchingly exciting. On going along this road it was custom to sound your horn as you approached each blind bend, there being about four of them, as I recollect. I was doing just this, being a good little boy and attempting not to dish out harm, damage or destruction to any other human being, motor vehicle or horse and rider. As I rounded the final bend I was greeted to the site of a "HORSEY" lady standing in the middle of the road, holding the bridle of her horse. She glared and me and forced me to stop. I wound down my window.
"WAS THAT YOU SOUNDING THE CAR HORN?" She shrieked in a stridulating, posh home counties voice. I nodded dumbly. "WELL, DON'T! YOU COULD HAVE STARTLED THE HORSE!" I was gob smacked.
"OK" I replied. "Next time I'll just career round the bends with my lights off and mow you both down - but just as long as I don't startle the horse..." And I drove off.
Generally, as far as I can see, the majority of horsey people are frustrated middle-aged women, who love horses this much as it is their only chance of ever having something that exciting and wild between their legs these days. Personally, I am thinking about starting my own glue factory. No, I won't go that far. I shall simply condemn the horsey people (not the horses, you note) to my Room 101, and start issuing my own replies to their patronising "SLOW DOWN FOR HORSES!" car stickers. My stickers will be for the arses of horses and the back of horse boxes. It will say "FOR CHRIST SAKE EITHER MOVE OVER OR SPEED UP FOR CARS YOU SELFISH EQUINE OBSESSED PRICKS!"

Sadly...

Still no response from Giles Coren, so I guess lunch is off this weekend. Shame...

Giles Coren and the Evils of Nepotism!

I, like many people in the UK, love reading my newspaper at the weekend. There is something heart-warmingly lovely about simply sitting down with a nice cup of tea and wading your way through The Times on a Saturday. Heaven. But there are parts of the paper, or more particularly the magazine, that I sadly can no longer look at, as they cause me to froth at the mouth, tear at what is left of my hair and use language that would make a docker vomit. The worst part for me, aside from the asinine inane fashion crap (I'll save that for another Spleen...), is in the food section. Here, The Times employs as their restaurant critic, a certain Giles Coren. Who? Well, let’s look at his qualifications for this post. Can he cook? By his own admission on a TV interview, no he jolly well can't. What experience has he got of running a restaurant? Just this side of sod all. His journalistic experience? Slightly less than the previous answer. So just how does a young man, simply waltz into a national newspaper and pick up the rather enviable job of reviewing restaurants every week? It's a good question. Now just by lucky chance, Giles Coren has a rather famous Daddy who is well known throughout Fleet Street as a commentator, writer and former editor of Punch. His name is Alan Coren. So imagine when young Master Coren was scratching round for a job after his GCSE's, what do you think he did? Get jobs flipping burgers at McDonalds? Or as the tea boy at a local regional newspaper and work his way up in the world of journalism? Did he bollocks. He approaches a national newspaper, mentions Daddy to the Editor and Bob's your uncle, or as in this case, Alan is your Daddy. Let us change the set up. Imagine Giles is the wonderfully gifted son of Sid Knobend, a panel beater from Plumstead. Young Giles Knobend has decided to better himself, has worked hard at school, gained some great qualifications and shows tremendous promise as a writer. On leaving his College/University with a perfectly respectable degree, he approaches a well known national newspaper editor and demands the job of restaurant critic. The answer he would receive would probably rhyme with "puck cough you cheeky mustard". So, now Giles Coren has this lovely job, where does he go to review restaurants? The length and breadth of this great land of ours? No, sadly not. The poor little cherub can barely seem to stagger further than the west end of London these days, I mean is there life outside of central London? (SNORT BRAY SNORT!). And for Christ's sake don't get me started on his sister Victoria...
But nepotism is everywhere. You can't honestly tell me that Stella-sodding-McCartney could have flogged her tacked together abominations to other celebrity half-wits if she didn't just happen to be the daughter of everyone's favourite surviving mop top (unless of course you were always a Ringo fan)? And have you also noticed that one of the BBC's new political correspondents is very obviously a mini-me of John Sergeant, their old political correspondent? I wonder how HE got the job?? Peter and Dan Snow? Is it just a coincidence that when the BBC was putting their "Battlefield Britain" series together that the best two CV's they came across happened to come from the same family? Even Judith-bloody-Chalmers progeny, Mark Durden-Smith is getting in on the act, frequently appearing on third rate TV shows on various obscure digital channels. Give him his due, he didn't call himself Mark Chalmers, but I can't believe mumsy didn't have a teensy weensy word in someone's ear when Marky-Warky's career success looked about as real and long lasting as his Mother's orange tan.
Nepotism is everywhere in British media. So many very gifted and talented people miss out, simply because someone else happens to know someone in a position of power, or more likely, is related to that person. It is wrong, it should never happen and it HAS to go into Room 101. And so does Giles Coren, unless he wants to buy me lunch this week, somewhere other than the west end of London, mate!?

Banks and Lloyds TSB especially

What does the word “Bankers” rhyme with? Tankers? Close. Rankers? Not really. Ah, I see by the smile on your face you have worked it out.

British banks are wonderful things aren’t they? Imagine if you will that you are incredibly rich. You live in a whacking great big house, several cars, acres and acres of land, and all the Polo Ponies you could ever possibly eat. You work in the City earning more in one lunch time than some poor sods will clock up in a lifetime of toil and drudgery. No doubt, every single day of your life, your post box is full of offers and offers of money from a variety of high street banks at almost laughably low interest rates? Lovely. Now the scene switches. You are now a single parent in a nasty area of town. You work two days a week in the local supermarket and a couple of nights here and there in various pubs. Your children and you survive in your one bedroom flat on a terribly unhealthy diet of micro chips and blue pop. You are in debt up to your eyeballs and everywhere you turn there seems to be another bill leaping up to snatch away any tiny sum of money you may have. You desperately need financial help, so you go to your bank and explain your situation. When they have finished pissing themselves and wiping the tears of mirth from their eyes, they will no doubt show you the walls, the floor and then the door quicker than you can say “F*CK OFF”. You end up going to a money lender and eventually losing your flat, your pride and your knee caps. All thanks to British banks! HOORAH FOR LLOYDS TSB!

Banks survive in this bizarre world of altered logic. You write a cheque for £21.54 for some shopping. If the bank had decided to honour this cheque it would have taken your account £4.26 into the red. So instead, they bounce the cheque. They then write you a letter, telling you they have bounced this cheque as it would have taken you £4.26 overdrawn. They also tell you that because they have written you this letter telling you this, they are going to charge you £35 for doing it. Because of this, instead of being only £4.26 overdrawn as you would have been if they had honoured the cheque in the first place, you are now £17.72 overdrawn. This will then no doubt give them carte blanche to fire off any number of further letters telling you about how overdrawn you are and charging you like a wounded Elephant in the process. HOORAH FOR LLOYDS TSB!

Banks only survive by keeping as many people in the red as they can. They are like parasites, slowly bleeding the host to death to keep themselves alive. Most have all the conscience and general decency of a particularly loathsome and down at heel psychotic cockroach with a personality disorder and halitosis. They are merchant bankers of the highest order and they deserve to rot in Room 101 for eternity. HOORAH FOR LLOYDS TSB!

Rap "Music"

In recent years, you will have noticed on nearly every radio station around the country that is broadcasting "yoof choons" (young people's music to you and me), 90%+ of all songs seem to have sampled (i.e. nicked) a bloody great chunk out of some older song. Usually the older song is far superior in every way, but people still refer to this butchery and robbery as music. Once the person in question has nicked this bit of older song, he or she repeats it ad nauseum and sticks an annoying repetitive drum beat over the top. You will also know you are in the correct genre of "music" as before anything has even happened on the song, the gentleman or lady who is "performing" it will have informed us on numerous occasions:

1. Their name.
2. Their name, again.
3. Uh-huh.
4. Oh-yeah.

and last and by very no means least:

5. You know what I'm talking 'bout.

This is all very well and good, but I mostly haven't got a clue what they are talking about, and to be brutally bloody frank, I couldn't give less of a toss if my life depended on it.

Now things get really bad. Not content with knackering a perfectly good older song they proceed to "talk" over what is left of it. That's right (you know what I'm talking 'bout - to coin a phrase), not sing, or dazzle us with musical virtuosity on some instrument, no they simply talk. What sort of things do they talk about? Something pleasant or time passing like the weather or how the match went for City at the weekend? No, it usually revolves around shooting people, slapping women around and the size of their own genitalia. The videos that accompany these noises, for want of a better description, usually involve the "artist" themselves, surrounded by lots of his or her chums, similarly attired in either combat gear, American sports wear or lots of brightly coloured fur coats. They shout and point at the camera a lot. Their jewellery seems to consist of the contents of several Argos catalogues, and one or two of them have their trousers at half mast. Now if someone turned up at your local hospital and acted in this manner, the psychiatric nurses wouldn't even let them home for their pyjamas. The finishing touch to these videos are the near endless parade of gargantuanly chested young ladies in minute bikinis who seem to find a man with his trousers round his knees and a hat on backwards stupifyingly sexually arousing.

What REALLY annoys me about rapping and the "music" that goes with it, is the way the music press and some serious newspapers treat it as an art form. Someone shouting about the size of their wedding tackle infront of a drum machine beat is, I am sorry to say, NOT an art form. It is simply musical dexterity taken to the lowest common denominator. You could possibly call it poetry, but poetry with a minute "p" and of the same level of dexterity and sophistication as E J Thribb aged 17 and three quarters.

The final annoyance of rap music with me is the way it turns all cultures around the world into the same run down "ghetto in the west side". You can be driving through the most delightful old English village, and there, slap bang in the middle of it will be three spotty teenage half wits, trousers at half mast, covered with cheap gold chains and wearing "Public Enemy" and "gangsta rap" t-shirts and hoodies. This sort of outfit probably looks pretty cool in the Bronx or Watts, but in Little Dozy-on-the-Wold it just looks bloody silly. To recompence matters I personally think we should insist that all modern day Huggy Bear types in the lower east side should be made to wear yokels smocks and play CD's by the Wurzels very loudly in their pimp mobiles. I suppose I am a little naive, but when the rap group NWA brought out their album "Straight Outta Compton" I imagined they were refering to Nether Compton just outside Yeovil.

Rap music is annoying, repetitive, repugnant and silly and fully deserves to be put into my Room 101 forever.

Gillian McKeith

Gillian McKeith. Sorry, Doctor Gillian McKeith. Or should that be "Doctor" Gillian McKeith? (Heck, if I knew I could get a medical qualification and a Channel 4 TV series from the University of Rednecks in Hicksville, Louisiana, I would have applied years ago). For those of you not in the know, and surely there can be few of you, Gillian McKeith presents a toe-curlingly embarrassing TV programme on Channel 4 entitled "You Are What You Eat". If this title is to be believed then "Dr" McKeith has obviously been chowing down on Gollum's little brother of late. Every show is the same. First we see some human being, who appears to be the unnatural off-spring of a doomed relationship between a water-bed and a gannet, who spends every waking hour shovelling every conceivable item of high-fat, high-cholesterol, and sugar-infused junk food into their gaping maw. Then "Dr" McKeith arrives with a face like Kenneth Williams sucking ear-wax off a razor blade. She rummages through their fridge, freezer and food cabinets. Guess what she finds? Well, lawks-a-mercy! It appears to be piles and piles of high-fat, high-cholesterol, and sugar-infused junk food! Goodness me! Does she find any fresh fruit or vegetables? Well bugger me backwards, no she bleeding-well doesn't. Is she pleased? Her normal facial expression goes way off the top end of the "SOURNESS" richter scale, but at this juncture in most programmes, she is positively stratospherically sour. Next she gets all the junk food that the aforesaid water-bed/gannet hybrid has managed to chomp through in a week, and piles it up on a table for the poor mongrel to look at. She asks them how they feel about it. Lets be honest - most of them are thinking "PARTY!" and are just preparing to launch themselves into a swan-dive onto the profitterole and chicken nugget mountain, when they realise that the sour-faced hobbit creature infront of them is expecting a slightly different reaction. So they obediently shake their heads and tut-tut quietly to themselves. Next we come to the highlight of every show. "Dr" McKeith gets the water-bed/gannet creature to shit into a tupperware sandwich box. Fantastic! Who said variety was dead? She then analyzes the turd and invariably reports back to the poor sod who has brought this upon themselves, that their crap "stinks". Now, stop me if I am wrong, but have YOU ever, EVER crimped off a length and then found yourself going "blimey, that smells good! A sort of subtle mixture of parma violets and fresh mown grass..." NO! Of course you haven't. Crap stinks! I would be round at my Doctor's surgery (that is a real Doctor of course) first thing if I ever produced a Dreadnought that smelt of anything other than fecal material. Finally, she tells the huge person that if they keep eating the high-fat, high-cholesterol, and sugar-infused junk food, they will die. Now you don't have to be a rocket-scientist to work that one out. I could have told them that. My four-year-old son could have told them that. Bloody hell, even George-W-fucking-Bush could have told them that! She ends up leaving them with piles of fresh fruit and veg, half a ton of her own curious mixtures of mulches, weeds, seeds and brown knobbly things and buggers off. And guess what? When she comes back - THEY HAVE LOST WEIGHT! "Dr" McKeith invariably puts this down to the healthy food she has left for them. I reckon the poor fat bastards have simply starved rather than eat the food Gillian has left which appears to be the scraped out remnants of a recently used cat litter tray. This woman has the gall to call herself an expert. Telling fat people to stop chomping chips, chocolate and fizzy pop drinks or they'll die is about as medically astute and clever as pointing out to someone about to leap off an office block that they might do themselves a mischief when they re-make an acquaintance with terra firma. And yet Channel 4 are obviously paying her vast sums of money for this "expertise". For that reason alone she would deserve a place in Room 101, but it is her complete lack of a sense of humour. Have a look at any of the pictures of her on the internet where she is "smiling". I have to put that in inverted commas as she is not smiling, she is simply contorting her face into what she thinks is a smile. Another reason I cannot stand her is how she looks. If she is supposed to be an advert for her so-called healthy diet then pass the lard, please. She hasn't even got an arse! Look at her! Most women have lovely rounded bottoms, even very skinny women. But "Dr" McKeith appears to have had a buttock-ectomy. Either that or she keeps two planks of 4 x 2 down the back of her slacks. I can think of no-reason why this woman should not be condemned to my own personal Room 101. Oh, and she has funny low-set ears which give her the impression of having just been welted on the back of the nut with a shovel.

The Daily Spleen - Here to stay

Here it is folks. The best way to preserve my sanity. What is it in life that REALLY gets your goat? What or who in life makes you want to stick your foot through the TV screen everytime you see or hear something about them? I know what does it for me, and now it is your turn to hear it.

Some years ago my wife and I decided to have a Room 101 party, based on the BBC TV show where various celebs come on and condemn things they hate to the mythical Room 101 - never to be seen again. My wife told me I was such a grumpy old man that I could never choose just four things (our limit for the night). And she was perfectly correct of course. I could have gone on listing for a fortnight. No one was safe from my wrath! As the party wore on and all our guests were listing their pet hates, more and more things kept occurring to me. Places, people, songs, films, you name it - I could find something I hated and wanted rid of - and now at last I have the blog site where I can do this. And no one can stop me... Well, apart from the obvious solicitors and other legal gits. But please come back over the next few weeks. Take a look. Read my rants. Let me know if you agree, or don't.

It could be interesting.