You’re Shitting Me Shatner

There’s a lot of conjecture over how actor William Shatner got started. Here’s a version of events, an early meeting between Shatner and his agent:

‘Hi Will, sit yourself down. Great news. Whaddya know? Gotcha a lead role. This guy in space. He’s a captain right? Takes his crew off to this planet, that planet. Shit kicks off. You know these aliens got it in fer ya.’

‘Wow! Hey, I can’t tell ya… This, this captain…’

‘Kirk. His name’s Captain Kirk.’

‘This Captain Kirk. Any love interests?’

‘You kidding. One episode you boink this alien broad with three foreheads. Another one, she got eyes where her nose should be.’

‘Ah, I was thinking more of some romance with members of the crew? You know, call it a fetish, call it what you will, but I kinda got a thing for ladies with less foreheads, eyes above the nose.’

‘Hey, trust me everything else is in the right place with these alien girls. And some. Disfigured but cute. Know what I’m saying? What about your stage name? Didya bring me a list?’

Shatner passes his agent a sheet of paper.

‘William Shatner – that’s your real name. You kiddin’ me? What’s this? – John Shithead, Bob Crapper, James Shitmerself... I thought we agreed we were gonna try for something that didn’t make people think of shit?’

‘Well, I figured we’d be safe – no-one else woulda chosen them.’

Is that why ya come up with this name?’

‘Which?’

‘One with the double-barrelled surname – sounds like a union of a Chinese and a Scottish parent.’

‘Remind me.’

‘Willie Wang-Kerr.’

Track of the Week

Dead Man Tripping

Let’s take a look at the motherly advice: tie up your shoelaces – you don’t want to trip and break your neck. If in reply you happen to say that you won’t tie them and imply that you do want to break your neck, she’ll have some other advice tucked up her sleeve. Don’t come running to me with your paraplegia, she’ll say, or your quadriplegia, she might add, if she’s looking at the bigger picture.

Where do mothers get their body of evidence? Are the odds so very much stacked against the haphazard lacer? And if so, why don’t shoelace packets contain a Government Health Warning? ‘Wearing untied shoelaces may result in a broken neck’ would be a helpful message. And if that message doesn’t get through? Why not step up the message like they do on cigarette packets – run a photo on the shoelace packet of someone with a severely drooping head?

Why do we see on the high street an absence of the one-stop shop for footwear advice shirking neck-breakers selling under one roof shoelaces and wheelchairs? Why don’t those insurance companies offering damages for accidents, like Claims Direct, offer lower premiums for slip-on wearers?

Do we need to drive the message further? Australian mothers might try this: ‘Don’t wear your thongs (flip flops) without slipping your big toe one side of the toe-splitting bit of plastic thing strap and the toe next to it the other side of it. You don’t want to…’ – you get the idea.

Executioners could save themselves rope and time-consuming gallows construction activities by giving the condemned shoes with the shoelaces left untied, the words of the black-capped judge ringing in their ears: ‘You will walk around the prison yard until you trip up and break your neck until you are dead.’

Can't Cook Won't Cook - A Chilling Legacy

Until the onset of the Arab Spring, few of us had wondered what had happened to the TV chef, Kevin Woodford, presenter of Can't Cook, Won't Cook. On the show, co-presenter, Ainsley Harriot frequently asked 'What is he like?' Take a second look at the photographs below and see for yourself - he's become President Assad of Syria.

They look alike, sure, you might say, but where is the hard evidence? Kevin Woodford followed closely the fortunes of his good friend, Ainsley Harriot when he went on to host Ready, Steady, Cook. And President Assad is promising to change the electoral system... to choose a red tomato or a green pepper.

Track of the Week

The Logic of Moobs

Nobody knew what a ‘moob’ was until just recently. A ‘man boob’ is to give it its full expression. Rubens, it seems, airbrushed the moob out of history. For, if we study the paintings of Rubens, sure we see his trademark Rubenesque women dripping lard all over the shop, but take another look at the men. Muscular, sculpted, moob-less, flat-chested, at best with tits like a couple of fried eggs.

But now we are acquainted with the moob, we are able now to see how the logic in naming it can be further exploited. In this, the age of obesity, we see pre-adolescent boys sporting laddish bazookas, or  ‘bboobs’ – boy boobs. And, if we look hard enough we may see a rare pair of ‘fmoobs’. Fmoobs are then boobs owned by women which look more like man boobs.

Track of the Week

The Monarchy – Not Your Usual Benefit Claimants

The British monarchy sets itself apart from other benefit claimants. They are quite principled about not being seen as a tax burden. In fact they pay their taxes… out of the extra taxes we raise to provide them with an income. Further, they don’t jam up the queues outside the post office Monday mornings waiting to cash in their Giro cheques. How many on benefits bother opening civic centres or smashing bottles of champagne to launch ships or raise a finger to go on state visits to the Bahamas?

There are now cases where three generations of a family claim benefits from the state. But that’s nothing. The Royal Family has been doing it for over 900 years.

Setting yourself apart requires a lot of effort. We should, therefore, look to help out where we can. For instance, the Government could make it easier for the Royals to fill out their claim forms.

Add for instance a Question 16 – Are you related to William the Conqueror?

If you tick the Yes box you continue to fill in details on your monarchical status; if No go to Question 34 and answer the usual questions they would ask of a commoner.

And on the first page where you have to write your title, why does the form give so few options (Mr, Mrs, Dr etc) when it could include ‘Queen of England and its Dominions’? Where it says ‘Do you have a partner?’, replace this question with ‘Do you have a consort?’

And how about Housing Benefit? Why not offer more guidance with the questions about your living space to read: ‘How many rooms are there in the building?’ (living rooms, bedrooms, mews, servant quarters, sentry boxes)? ‘How many homes do you own? (Owning several castles may not affect your entitlement)’.

The History of the Mouse Double Click… from the Future

The double click on the computer mouse is used today to do things like highlight one word in a Word document, or open up a file. But some day in the future this operation will be replaced by something like a voice-activated command. ‘Highlight that word’ or ‘No, not that one, I said highlight that other word’ we will say. Or, ‘Open up that file’. It’s quite possible we won’t be very polite to our computers. Some people, for instance, might treat them like shit. Unless we bother giving computers feelings. Then we might not want to prevail upon them so much. ‘Do you mind highlighting…?’ we might begin. Whatever the case, double clicking our computer mouse will be something future generations will look back as barbaric.

‘Granddad, tell us how you had to double click your mouse’, a grandchild will plead when we take them upon our knee for a bit of nostalgia.

‘You couldn’t just double click. Oh, no. The second click had to follow the first in quick succession.  And if you didn’t do it fast enough…’

‘Yes, granddad, yes. What happened then? Tell us. Tell us…’

‘Are you sure you want to know?’

 ‘You would end up doing two single clicks.’

‘Many years ago – more than I can bear to think of now’, you will say, delving deeper: ‘We had to learn how to move the mouse around to move the cursor’.

‘Grandad, granddad, what’s a cursor?’ a grandchild will clammer.

‘The first time I ever used a mouse’, you will say, ‘I would move it and the cursor would disappear off the edge of the screen.’

And then you will say: ‘Back in those days, you would feel like you couldn’t move your cursor any further running your mouse along a mousepad as far as it would go, little realising that you could just pick up your mouse, put it back down again without the cursor going all the way back to where it had started because you had let go’.

Another grandchild, having never heard the story before may well ask in all innocence: ‘Granddad, why have you got one finger that is slightly bigger than the rest of your fingers?’

‘From double clicking’, you will say betraying a pained expression, trying to push your slightly bigger double-clicking finger under the others to conceal it. This, in the future, will be considered a massive disfigurement. Everyone else will be genetically nice. The grandchildren, for their part, will hold a steadfast look into your face, unable to face peering at your fingers.

Editor's Choice

Rocketman raises some good points in relation to the blog 'The Tours de France and Breaking the Cycle (in a good way)'. An interesting observation on horse racing fans wearing jockey shirts to race meetings much as (fat) blokes wearing replica football shirts. Please refer to the article below and do join in the discussion or feel free to take it in another direction.

The Tours de France and Breaking the Cycle (in a good way)

Cyclists on the Tour de France race stand to wear a yellow jersey if they’ve clocked up the lowest aggregate time over the stages. Problem is yellow doesn’t go with much. Stick on your jersey with a pair of blue jeans to go out for the night, for instance, and you run the risk of looking something like your dad on holiday dressing smart for dinner.

Another problem is that all you have in terms of luggage space on a bike is a saddlebag, perhaps the smallest personal item storage system available save for the little pocket inside your jeans pocket to stick not all, but a proportion, of your change. The saddlebag offers just enough room for a spare pair of pants (trunks not boxers). Perhaps you could look into fitting a bigger saddle so you can reasonably argue for a comparatively larger saddle bag? A bench-type seat would allow a saddle bag big enough to drape one of those zip-up bags you stick your dry cleaning in (and attached sideways onto the frame, give the rider more berth when it comes to bunching up with a lot of falling off riders (sometimes onto cobblestones).

In theory, or otherwise, I (the author of this piece) would win all the races so I wouldn’t have to bother keeping track of my times. It just makes things easier on the maths (you know, you have to think: now I came second last time, what was my time again? Was it a worse time than that Italian bloke who came second today but first yesterday?). Then I would give the yellow jersey to the last-placed rider, somebody who’s probably trying to keep up on something like a Raleigh Chopper. This is an act comparable in the feeding-ducks-in-a park world where you try to chuck the stale bread at the cute runty one that’s too lame competing in the feeding frenzy. I would say to that cyclist, go out tonight have a good time, live it up, you know impress the birds with your garish pullover and oh, do you think I could swap you? Your top goes better with these jeans. What do you think? And you’re the one going out that night wherever all the cyclists have rocked up at the end of the last stage wearing the least sweaty upper garment because the Chopper bloke was the least exerted.

Track of the Week

Fire Drills and the Hitler Moustache

It has long been a fear of the author to be mistaken accidentally for a Nazi having been forced to break off from shaving in response to a fire alarm and gather outside his residence with the other tenants from his building. It’s a relatively niche phobia, but it stems from my shaving routine which is to shave the ‘handles’ first before moving onto the bit under the nose (a process that could be technically termed ‘filtrum depilation’). Dropping everything at that point in time would result therefore in the sporting of an inadvertent Hitler moustache.

If anything else, it does make you think on the conspiracy theory side of things. Did Hitler actually meet his maker in that bunker in Berlin in 1945? Of course, what could have happened is that some common or garden Nazi, not actually Adolf, was doing a bit of hunkering down the bunker business of his own. ‘Berlin’s falling’, he thinks, although he’s underground so how he would know that is anyone’s guess. Perhaps stuff is falling down into his bunker or he just got into conversation with another Nazi who had previously spent some time in the falling down bits at ground level. They could be talking and he says to our Nazi ‘I really hate other races’ and then mentions the Brandenburg Gates looking out of shape. ‘Berlin’s falling’, thinks our Nazi again (this time more informed), ‘but that doesn’t mean that we have to relax on the male grooming’.

Off he goes for a shave. He gets so far, but the bunker starts getting overrun with Soviet troops. The game’s up. And what’s to say he didn’t cop out like Hitler was supposed to have? – shooting himself while his bird chose the cyanide snifter route? And what’s to say she didn’t bear more than a little resemblance to Eva Braun? After all, those Nazis all look the same to me.

Fake Tan Dust

There is a lot of debate about whether someboy has a tan or a fake tan. And mostly when that person is bronzed around the time of the Winter Solstice (December 21^st) when spotting the sun is more usually restricted to people glimpsing its two-minute bob above the horizon at Stonehenge.

Of course you could say you tan very easily. You have very sensitive skin. In fact, your family has a long and unenviable tradition of avoiding rickets. A family of rickets-dodgers. And further, you might have a job that keeps you exposed to what you regard as the fierce winter sun, like Stonehenge druid.

The fake tanner has another card up his sleeve. He might attribute a nutty complexion to a skiing holiday and authenticate his claim by leaving white sunglasses circles round his eyes. Or, if he’s feeling like a complete head smear, he could say he does have a skiing tan, but filled in the circles round the eyes, just to make himself more plausible.

Fake tan should really be called ‘fake fake tan’ because it’s a fake tan that doesn’t look like a tan. Though, two negatives make a positive so fake fake tan is actually a tan. We’ve come full circle. So that’s why people get confused. Of course, we can always tell if somebody is wearing fake tan if that person is not house-proud. Because dust is dead skin cells, so all their surfaces, the bookshelves, the sideboards etc. will have a fine dusting of orange. We can even go round their house at night and not switch the lights on in order to catch them out. And there you will see the faint outline of the furniture, luminous like those glowing skeletons you could buy as a kid and work in a darkened room. It all works on the same principle as playing with orange golf balls in the snow, or of lint showing up embarrassingly white on your black jumper at a disco.