Live To Death

Hey everyone. Just thought I'd offer a cheerful reminder that one day you'll die. Don't worry though, so will all the people you don't like, I happily embrace the oncoming freight-train of my own mortality if it means that I can glance over at the adjacent track track and see Chad Kroeger getting squished. Everybody dies. It's the only thing about the world we live in that is completely and totally fair.

One on the left worked for charity, the one on the right was a horrible racist.

That's actually one of my, many, issues with religion. The pedlars of this hokey fiction long ago realised that some people were scared of the inevitable cessation of of their pitiful existence and they provided an alternative. Instead of telling them to just grow the fuck up, which is what they should have done. Without endings, without death, nothing in the big wide universe has the slightest meaning. How much would a book, even the best book ever, suck if it literally never ended? A lot, is the completely factual and properly scientific answer to that question. There is no point to a narrative without a denouement. Eastenders I'm looking at you. You're life is merely the story you tell yourself. All stories whether they are good or bad, have a beginning, a middle and an end. All the best stories are the stories of a life. Harry Potter is the story of the life and times of Lord Voldemort aka Tom Riddle, Star Wars is the story of Darth Vader aka Annakin Skywalker and Star Trek: The Next Generation is all about Data. You can tell because they all *SPOILER ALERT* die at the end. The fact that your life is going to end is how you know you're the star of your own life story.

Some people more so than others.

Death is your right and no-one can, will or should take it away from you. This is something that in my opinion has escaped the attention of the most of the governments of the western world who have spent a long time engaged in one of the most fruitless policy battles in the world. You see, every single lifestyle decision that you can possibly make has the same long-term net result... you die. The government can ban smoking, make you run five miles before breakfast or even make you sleep in a large Tuppaware container to keep you fresh and you will still end up completely fucking dead.

"I don't care how many time you look both ways I'm still coming for you!"

There is only one thing that you can possibly ban that would stop death and that's living. Which weirdly is exactly what it sometimes appears that those in charge of our society are trying to do. You see I do believe that those elected to the highest public offices do have a fundamentally to protect their citizens from those that wish them harm. Boredom is one of the most fundamentally harmful things that can afflict the human soul. This is why I think almost anything that you choose to do to yourself should be completely legal. I'm not saying that we just make life a complete free-for-all, everything should obviously carry honest and complete warnings but if I'm aware of the dangers I should be free to do what-so-ever I choose.

I cannot believe that I found another use for this picture again so soon.

If I want to pour acid in my face while prancing through gauntlet of swinging bricks whilst injecting cocaine into my eyeballs and singing the German National Anthem then I should be completely free to do that as long as no-one else is harmed, because fuck it I'm going to die no matter what I choose to do with my brief time flickering across the surface of this big blue ball. So I should be allowed to fill my time with whatever brief entertainment I can find and not have someone else tell me that I'm not intelligent enough to judge whether or not I actually want to do something. If the government wants to stop me from doing something because they're worried that I'll die then they're engaged in a policy that

eddie <I want to live until I die>

Drunk Mythology

The sacrifices that we made to the eldritch gods in the heart of winter have paid off and they have seen fit to bestow upon us humble mortals the gift of another fertile spring. Or, to put it another significantly less superstitious way, the axial tilt of the planet has once again become favourable to the life-forms inhabiting the Northern Hemisphere... spring has sprung to put it yet another, much clearer, way. Whilst we have the wonderful logical system of science to help us understand this our our ancestors had nothing but there imaginations to rely upon. As a result they came up with some breathtakingly bat-shit mental explanations to 'explain' the worlds natural phenomena. By far my favourite of these narratives is the Greek myth of why we have seasons. As a tribute to the beginning of this fine season I will recount this tale to you now... whilst drunk. I have undertaken the first part of this experiment already. So I will now recount this tale to the best of my somewhat hampered ability.

... lets see how this effects my ability to communicate complex ideas...

Right so the Ancient Greeks entire mythology can only be described as so nut-tighteningly awesome that the only thing you can logically compare it to is the Marvel Comics universe. If you've ever played God of War a.k.a Kratos Fucks With The Gods Shit, then you'll know how the Ancient Greeks were like fuckin' awesome at myth... they were the Batman of making shit-up. These are the guys who invented Science, Intelligent Discourse and Democracy and had no problem with firing logic, restraint and common sense into the heart of the bastard sun in order to make up a good story. The Greek story of the seasons goes a little something like this.

... tree. Look I add the pictures last, and I'm smashed.

Hades, the younger brother of Zeus and Poseidon and apparently the whipping-bitch of the family, was ruler of the Underworld, a job he got tricked into due to the aforementioned bitch-whipping. He was lonely because goth-chicks hadn't been invented then and the whole lord of the realm of the dead thing was a massive turn off for everyone else... I don't know maybe they don't have showers in the Underworld. Also he only got to meet dead people. Then one day he met Persephone, now I can't remember if she was in the Underworld of if Hades was wandering around the mortal realm because both options are equally ridiculous, anyway Hades fell completely in love with her kidnapped her back to his kingdom. Faster than you could say 'Stockholm Syndrome' the two were married and in love.

Yes. This is my go to image for Stockholm Syndrome.

Meanwhile Persephone's mum, who was called Demeter, realised her daughter was missing and threw a total bitch-fit. Now Demeter was the goddess of life, flowers, crops and basically all the shit that grows out of the ground, as such she's a goddess we can totally get onside with... Go Team Demeter! Demeter spent fucking ages hunting for Persephone with no luck what so ever. On a side-note if someone I cared about went missing and I knew the person who was in charge of all of the dead people I'd probably give him a fucking bell... you know, just to check. Actually on another side-note Hades was Demeter's brother and therefore Persephone's uncle... you crazy Greek bastards.

Even I have some limits... and I'm going to use a Fritzl picture later.

So anyway Demeter starts making like Rick Castle and asking all the god's where in the name of themselves has Persephone gone... during this time Hades wasn't seen by anyone either, just saying they weren't a smart bunch of dieties. After a few months of searching, which is a few months longer than it takes the X-Men to find Sabretooth, seriously is there not a Greek of knowing where the fuck shit is? Finally someone managed to put 2 and 2 together, I don't know the god of maths or some shit, and realised that Hades had kidnapped Persephone. I'm guessing that at this point someone knocked on Hades' door and he stood snickering until Persephone asked if he wanted another sandwich or a blow-job. Look the girl married her kidnapper, that means she was crazy and crazy girls are great in the sack.

So Demeter went to Persephone's dad, Zeus, to ask him to intervene... if you're not following, Demeter and Zeus are brother and sister, I was going to say you couldn't make this shit up but then I remembered that someone obviously did. Zeus showing all the fatherly concern of Josef Fritzl replied by going 'pfft'.

Warned you.

Demeter bitch-fitted a bitch-fit so bad it nearly killed the earth. She went on strike, and refused to any of her godding until Zeus got her daughter back. This was the first winter, so no-one was even slightly prepared to deal with it in any way shape or form. Somehow Hades managed to ignore the massive pile of frozen dead-guys that were turning up at his door. Which just goes to show how much shit a lonely guy can ignore when he's got a hot chick hanging off his cock. After sometime Zeus, presumably getting tire of all the prayers being variations of 'so-cold, so-cold, so, very, very cold' gave in and finally intervened and organised some sort of sit-down.

"Look, I want to fuck your daughter senseless for at least a third of the year."

So all the interested parties, excepting of course all the freezing humans, whose opinions count for very little in these situations, got together and in the first ever case of shared custody agreed that Persephone would spend four months of the year slutting it up for Hades and the rest of the year hanging out with her mother... because apparently those are the only options available to the mythological Greeks. Seriously this entire story is fucking mental. Unfortunately Demeter, being something of a mental, can't deal with this and throws a four month long hissy-fit once a year, that we have to put up with and that's why we have winter.

Even Gods can be really shit at negotiating.

So, in conclusion, we have to tolerate cold, darkness and death to sate the libido of the God of Death and the Afterlife. Actually now I write that sentence out it actually doesn't sound like as bad an idea as it did in my head. I mean the guy commands the armies of hell and shit... Let's keep him chilled the fuck out. So yeah that's why the Ancient Greeks thought we had seasons. It's also the reason why if I was in fact religious I would totally choose the paganism and pray to the Greek Pantheon. I hope you enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed drinking it.

eddie <why do we build the wall? we build the wall to keep us free>

This Connected World

There is a small chance that you may have noticed that I can be a tiny bit negative, cynical some might even say. I try to keep my writing on the lighter side but occasionally I'll say that someone needs to be thrown face first into a belt-sander for the betterment of all mankind and people tend to notice that as a sign of both a slightly negative outlook and an unbalanced mental situation. So every now and then I like to take a moment and reflect on the positive aspects of reality, sometimes this requires me to spend an ice age searching through the world... well the internet, I'm not going outside. However every now and then recent circumstances just fill me with wonder and appreciation for the world and time I have the good fortune to live in. This is usually the result of me finding myself at the nexus of several complimentary events and it happened recently.

Yes... that is what a nexus looks like, keep an eye out for them.

It's easy for us to take the internet for granted. To forget that the systems we use every day are only possible because the human race as a whole decided to coat the surface of the space-born ovate spheroid that we find ourselves living upon with a vast net of cables. Then by another cosmic fluke someone realised that these cables, originally used to electronically transmit voice (by a method no-one has ever managed to adequately explain to me), could instead be used transmit data. Shortly after that came a man called Tim Burners Lee invented the world wide web and to put it mildly BOOM! Within a few decades the world as we know it was completely transformed, we now live in a world of hyper-connectivity that was scarce imaginable a generation ago.

"Of course back then we still had Woolworths."

What prompted this sudden appreciation? Well, two TV shows and an album. Allow to explain. One of the TV shows is the frankly astounding NBC comedy show Community. I'm something of a late comer to what is, frankly, the funniest TV show of the last ten years but I'm beyond in love with it. I haven't felt this way about a TV show in a long time and it's rekindled a part of my geeky, geeky psyche that I thought had died with the cancellation of Firefly. Not only would I never have heard of this show without the internet but, due to the frankly ridiculous regionalised business model used by television networks, I'd never have even had the opportunity to watch it. You see the fact that I'm more than willing to turf over a few quid for each episode of this comedy masterclass, I'm not actually allowed to because I don't live in the United States. Fortunately I get to watch my favourite thing in the world due to the fact that some lovely chap across the Atlantic views it as a sacred duty that he owes his fellow man to record the show and put it up on the internet then after a few simple taps and a brief wait I get to watch it.

"White people at the front, ethnics at the back" - Someone at NBC, presumably.

One of the other shows I've recently added to my viewing roster is a fantastic televisual treat from New Zealand called the Almighty Johnsons a fantastic tale of Norse Gods living among our Kiwi cousins. Have you any idea how unlikely it is for me to encounter a show from New Zealand without the internet... That would literally never, ever happen. As it is I get to fill my looky-peepers with televisual greatness all due to the wonderfully connected world that we have the pleasure of living in.

It's as ridiculous and fun as it sounds.

The final part of the triumvirate that brought home how lucky we are to live in this time, in this place, is the album Hadestown by Anais Mitchell. I read about this album in an online article some time ago and filed away in the back of my skulls mind-closet for future use. I recently ran low on musical listening material so I decided to give it a sampling. After hopping on to YouTube to listen to a few tracks, I found myself intrigued, beguiled and a wee bit smitten. I did a bit of research on the ole' wikipedia, Hadestown is, as it transpires, a concept album based around a retelling of the greek myth of Orpheus, but set in the old west. Within, twenty minutes of first listening to it I had a copy of it on my phone.

Listen to this album... it's awesome.

So as much as we might complain and bemoan the world we find ourselves in, and as obviously wrong as some things about it, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that we live in truly remarkable times.

eddie <we build the wall to keep us free>  

Fame! I'm Afraid It's Terminal

It has come to my attention that in my position as an internet god I should be doing more to better the lives of you my loyal fans. As such today's article is more of a public service announcement about a delicate public health issue. There is a sexually transmitted disease that has spent the last few decades ravaging a small sector of the world's population. It started back in the early 80s and since then it's spread rampantly leaving behind it a trail of destruction, it has ruined lives, decimated our culture and come to define a generation. I'm talking of course about fame.

There was some spirited debate over most worthless
celebrity... Kim Kardashian edged out Paris Hilton

Fame is one of the most virulent STDs that exists. Those that work in Music, Entertainment and the Arts have been the most effected. Most of these people have the good fortune to be wealthy, talented or successful enough to generate an income that allows them to fight the symptoms of this disease. Unfortunately over the last ten years this has started to spread to the outside this small community and into the wider world. Whilst those with talents and abilities that merit the kind of attention this condition requires can find it easy to manage even they sometimes succumb to this horrible disease. Those without the resources to fight the condition can find it a living hell.

Symptoms Include (but are not limited to):

Attention Craving.

A Lack Of Perspective.

Excessive And Tumorous Ego Growth.

Loss of Dignity.

Poor Priority Management.

Film Crews.

Frequent Lack Of Clothing.

Over Exposure.

Stupidity.

Sex Tapes

Sense of Humour Loss

Fame is not only transmitted sexually but can also be passed down from parents to children. Some have the good fortune to merely be carriers, but the disease can return a generation later, in cases like this it's known as Hilton's Syndrome. So please if you think someone might be famous please take precautions before sleeping with them, check it's not being filmed. If you do sleep with someone famous and find yourself filled with an overwhelming urge to jettison your dignity into the heart of the sun by selling your story to a newspaper, you may have caught fame.

This man is believed to be the Typhoid Mary of fame

Most people who have fame allow the disease to develop beyond the early stages, when it is still possible to cure the disease. As such it is important to keep an eye on your friends, if you think that one of your friends may be suffering from fame there are a few ways that you can help. Slap them. Insult them. Do what ever you can to bring them back down to earth as quickly as possible. If that doesn't work then just shoot them... It's kinder in the long run.

eddie <now you know... and knowing is half the battle>

The Deadliest Game Of All

It'll come as little surprise to my regular readers that I am regularly inundated by requests for advice from my readers. There are several tricky problems that are broached with some frequency, what's the best way to hide my money/guns/drugs/prison-wife? I've caught one of the bastards what now? Why are you following me? However there is one question that I get asked more than any of those. What should you do if you find yourself being hunted for sport? Now I've avoided answering this question as I haven't had the necessary first hand experience. Until now.

"The game is afoot"

My experience began, as these things so often do, in a seedy bar in Thailand. I'd been drinking with a few business partners. We were celebrating a successful smuggling run across the border. My first piece of advice would in fact be, don't run drugs across the Thai border. We've all been screwed over by Thai drug-runners so I'm not to go into the details of that. Let's just say that on this occasion I woke up in a large enclosure with three others. Given the predilections of Thai smugglers this was actually better than I would've expected.

TWICE! This has happened to me bastard twice!

I avoided talking to my fellow captives. My second piece of advice would be the less you get to know the others in your group the easier it will be to sacrifice them for your own personal gain later on. After spending an hour or so prowling the enclosure I discovered little hope of escape. It was at this point that an Alan Rickman arrived in a crisp white suit and announced that we were here to be hunted for sport. One of the others in the group took this opportunity to sob like a little bitch, he began begging for freedom, mentioned a wife and children back home and was promptly shot in the face. So third piece of advice would be, don't be that guy. These people are looking for he best game, the more you appear to be a viable sporting option the longer you'll survive. We were each given a map showing the island we were on, it's always an island, and the location of a boat that was our only hope of safety. I've since done more research into these kind of affairs and the maps are universally bull-shit.

That doesn't even look like a real boat... and the x is in land, what is this shit.

I made the decision straight off the bat to treat the map as suspect... because if I was hunting men for sport I'd totally lie to them like that. So after spending some time giving the appearance of playing along with the ruse I doubled back towards the starting compound. Always take a moment to consider how the hunting operation is being run. In this case I assumed that these guys did indeed have another way off of the island. Also remember that as soon as you manage to take down the first pursuer you are armed and capable of turning the tables on your foes. In my case I have the good fortune to have been used in several genetic experiments to create the ultimate warrior. I'd recommend trying to make sure that you've had that done to you, failing that you will have to rely on wit, luck and the ability to crack of smooth one-liners.

I'm more of a 'yipee-kay-ay' kind of guy than a 'get to the chopper'

Remember your attackers are expecting you to be on the run so keep your head down and try to pick off as many of the goons as possible without being detected. Once you've activated the end game it's advisable to try and kill off any henchmen in order of the amount of screen-time they've had. You will at some stage be forced into combat with the 'worlds greatest hunters'... you will not escape these fights uninjured, but each one you take care of should have a bigger gun than the last so your overall killing potential will remain undiminished. There will come a point were you have to decide whether or not to fight and kill the Alan Rickman or just try to escape, it's important to realise that what your actually deciding is whether to fight Alan Rickman in a cage or whilst hanging from the underside of a helicopter. So play to your own strengths on that one.

I have a masters in hanging from the bottom of these, and I
wrote my thesis on firing  a machine gun at the same time

Escaping the island is your last challenge. There are various ways to go about this and again it's a matter of personal style. In my case I escaped on a jet-ski whilst firing a harpoon gun at the last remaining henchmen. If you can organise an explosion at this point I'd recommend it. I actually managed to also acquire a bikini clad floozy for this final section of my adventure. I don't know how much of this advice will be of use to you but if you're good at thinking on your feet and handy with a machete there's no reason why you can't turn being hunted for sport into a fun and profitable experience... Does anyone want to buy a jet-ski.

Some slight hench-manning.

eddie <not even the weirdest part of my week>

Kiss Me I'm Shit-Faced!

I'm happy to report that, despite my best efforts, I've survived another St Patrick's Day. I have some Irish mixed into my DNA so I felt somewhat justified in engaging in this particular declaration of war on my internal organs. If you are wondering it's 25% Irish, 25% English, 50% Unknown, so if you wish to refute my claims to being the last son of Krypton you'll need to do some serious research. So I have some vague right to celebrate international drinking day. I cannot say the same of many others I met on my drunken, Romford based stumblings. Now I'm not about to jump on the 'how dare you misappropriate a national holiday' band-wagon. St Patrick's Day is a fine and dandy excuse for you to go and pickle your insides. In fact if you ask people worldwide what the little cluster of islands off of the northern coast of Europe is famous for they'll probably list three things, an insatiable appetite for world domination, being nifty in a fight and drinking. Although now I come to think about it the last one probably explains the first two.

"You fucking want some, you slag!"

We've been at the forefront of getting utterly wasted since you could buy a pint of gin on the streets of London for a penny a pint, and it was cleaner than the water. I think it says a huge amount us as a people that most of us read that sentence and were wishing that we could still by gin for that price. The greatest war-time leader we ever had was Winston Churchill, an he beat Hitler whilst pissed. So unless your hurting from the lack of a Global Germanic Empire we can all agree that booze has got a huge tick in the plus column. Unfortunately over the last twenty years successive governments have lacked both the balls and the brains to realise that different cultures have different norms and instead of judging the populace by their own boozy standards have been trying to force us to live up to the completely unrealistic standards of the European Union.

Some countries don't view this picture as a challenge.

The E.U defines a drinking binge as four pints. For anyone outside the UK and Ireland, everyone reading that here just went 'pfft'. Four pints wouldn't get me even remotely pissed. I've managed to do that amount in an hour before. I'd say that four pints represents, to most Brits, about half a session. We're a society of people who can use the phrase 'I don't want to get drunk tonight' whilst walking into a pub. I'll have three because they're there. The point I'm trying to make here is that as a society we drink more than in other countries. Is it healthy, of course not, is it wrong, of course it isn't. However you can't got a week in this country without reading another tabloid rag railing against the dangers of 'Booze Britain'. Which invariably leads to some government toss-piece... sorry mouth-piece, coming out with a new ridiculous and unworkable idea to reduce the countries alcohol dependence. Let's pretend for one minute that I agree that there is a problem, then that problem is simple

Britain is an alcoholic.

If we accept this as true then it seems fairly obvious that we need to treat Britain in the same way that we would treat any other alcoholic. I'm going to be completely up front here I don't know any alcoholics, well I don't know any recovering alcoholics... they don't tend to hang out in the same bars as I do. So I don't know the exact ins-and-outs of how one treats the condition, but I do know one thing, you don't do it by just hiding the booze. You have to identify the underlying reasons behind why that person/nation drinks. So the various ideas to limit the ability of Brits to access our favourite anaesthetic are all doomed to fail. Instead you need work out why it is that we drink.

"There isn't a box for 'to suppress the urge to kill'"

Why on earth do we drink more than our European 'have more public holidays, work shorter weeks and shorter days' cousins... Fuck me that's a difficult one to answer isn't it. It's almost as if we feel an overwhelming urge to squeeze in a whole load of living into our spare time because we have the least in Europe. Unfortunately fixing those inequalities would only improve the quality of life of everyone in the country wouldn't make anyone a single penny, in fact it may well result in some people losing a little bit of money so there's no way we're going to address that issue.

I'd really like to know how many of these I'm worth.

I've no problem with the government not giving to shits about the general public, but I'd rather they not pretend that do. If they want me to stop drinking then that's fine I'll play along and we'll make this country a better place. If on the other hand they want me to work my arse off then they better not take away my fucking boozamahol.

eddie <still not too drunk to write>

As Good As Nuie

Every now and again it's nice to be reminded that the world still has the capacity to be surprising. You might think that you've got a handle on the ins-and-outs of the way the world works and then you get blind-sided by something that makes you question what you think you know. This happened to me recently. It started simply enough with a post over at my favourite time-sink 9gag.com, I was trawling through the deeper reaches of the vote page when I stumbled across a picture of this...

I'd say 'Shut up and take my money' but I'm not sure that works for currency.

Yes, that is Pikachu on a coin. A coin with Pikachu on it. I'm going to give you a moment to settle yourself down. You cool? Good. That's a pretty wicked picture isn't it. What are you guessing? Photoshop? Obscure Merchandise? Fan Art? It's got to be one of those three... it's not as if there's a country somewhere in the world that is bitchin' awesome enough to have minted a pikachu coin, or is there?

Actual Place... not actual size.

Yes there totally fuckin' is. Allow me to introduce you to your new favourite country. Nuie (pronounced new-ay) is a tiny pacific island nation measuring only 100 square miles in size and it's by far and away the most awesome country I've ever heard of. That pikachu coin is one of a series that had bulbasaur, charmander and squirtle on them as well, unfortunately they no longer have that coin... because the changed over to STAR WARS MONEY!!!

LEGAL MOTHERFUCKIN' TENDER BITCHES!!!

What if I was to tell you that these little factoids I've been hitting you with weren't even close to being the coolest things about this awesome little country. It's the worlds first wi-fi nation. The entire nation is coated in free wi-fi. I don't know what the people of Nuie use the internet for when they couldn't possibly find anything in the world more awesome than the country they were lucky enough to be born in.

Imagine being in a little row boat while drinking rum out of a pineapple.

Yes that is a picture of the beautiful coastline of this island paradise. So I'm now guessing that they use all that free wi-fi to upload pictures like that to the internet while updating there status to things like 'Suck it bitches I'm in paradise!'. Although I'd kind of hope that being in place like that would really take the edge off of the urge to post dickish things on facebook. So what else does this place have to offer? I hear you cry, because I've got a new extension for chrome that lets me do that. Well for starters the coastline, i.e. most of the country, is riddled with an extensive network of underwater caves that you could scuba around.

WANT

The place is also nursing waters for humpback whales, so from June to October you can hop on a boat and go to see baby whales. All of this while nestled in the lovely tropics with cliff-top cafes and beach-front bars... as yet I've not managed to find out any information on exactly how one immigrates there or even what kind of shit you need to do to get there but a lot of it's governance comes from New Zealand... as do it's flights so I can combine that trip to do the Lord of the Rings tour.

eddie <already planning the trip>