Lady Luck Is Only A Lady When She's Not A Bitch

(Sorry for the lack of humorously captioned images... I forgot I wouldn't be able to write this over the weekend because of Download Festival. So instead I just pulled something out of my arse during my lunchbreak on thursday... that's part of my commitment to excellence)

Luck is the most powerful force in the universe. Anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant of how the world works or alternatively very lucky. The CEOs of major corporations for example will constantly hold forth on how they got were they are due to an insane amount of hard work. That’s probably true but it completely overlooks the fact that they had the good fortune to be born in a time when their particular talents were linked to such a high financial reward. Were they born in the Medieval period of human existence then they would never have reached the top because that system didn’t allow it. Equally prisons are filled with people who, had they been born four thousand years ago, could’ve have been tribal leaders of great power and importance. I myself believe I would have been more suited to a period either in the past or future where fucking off and exploring was a much more realistic option, basically either actual piracy or space piracy… I think I’d be good at it.

It’s not just about having the good fortune to be born in the right time-frame, it’s about being born in the right place. I’m not speaking about those that have the good fortune to been into an affluent Bel-Air family… or at least be born the nephew of a successful judge who lives in Bel-Air. I’m speaking about the fact the Google guys had the good fortune, not just to be born at a time where their particular brand of genius could be applied but also in the right portion of the planet for them to use those skills. There’s not much of a tech start-up scene in the Congo. Equally those born in the Congo who excel at guerrilla warfare and merciless slaughter are lucky they weren’t born in South-East England where that kind of thing is very much frowned upon.

Then there’s the fact that the most successful people you’ve ever heard of got there because they met the right people. Che Guevara would be nothing if his life hadn’t brought him into contact with Fidel Castro and the same goes for Castro. John Lennon never went into a special centre slapped his hand on the counter and said give me two musical geniuses and a drummer. Instead the universe accidentally threw those three crazy geniuses together and later they met Ringo. Hugh Laurie was one of the highest earning television actors, clocking a million dollars an episode, of the last decade but you’d never of heard of him if he’d not gone to university with Stephen Fry. If Kurt Cobain hadn’t killed himself Dave Grohl would be the drummer from Nirvana and it’s only because of Walt Disney’s wife being in a funny mood that Mortimer Mouse became the infinitely more marketable Mickey.

None of this is to denigrate these people’s achievements. Unless you’re new here you’ll know that I’m big on Darwin, but if his friend had just published his paper without sending him a letter you’d never have heard of him. That’s not to say that Darwin isn’t a genius but genius is nothing without luck. Think about the people in your life. We all know at least one person that should be much more successful than they are and one guy who finds everything easy. There may be real reasons for that, maybe one’s a raging alcoholic and the other only made his business contacts through the furry scene but if different things had happened to each of them early in life they might have swapped vices and therefore lives. I’m not saying that hard-work won’t reward you but just remember a lot of unlucky people worked really heard to make Yahoo the best search engine, a lot of people worked really hard to make flying machines before the Wright Brothers beat them to the punch and a lot of Polish people worked very hard to make a go of it before the Nazis swarmed across the border and destroyed everything they’d worked at.

The world is filled with people who have become rich and successful at things that in logical world have absolutely no right to pay-off look at the people who took crazy long-shots that brought them success. Hell Gabe and Tycho, of Penny Arcade fame, shunned getting real jobs to professionally make immature jokes about computer games and dicks. They have personally warned others off of following in their footsteps because and I quote ‘there is no way this should have worked.’ Every success story is the tale of someone who rolled the dice just right and then made the most of that and a lot of every other story is the people whose roll of the dice went terribly and then they made the most of it. Hell I’m not a professional writer despite the fact that it is literally the only thing I am good at that doesn’t take place in the fictional city of San Andreas. I’m far from alone in this and the plain truth of the matter is that for most of us the universe never gets out of the way long enough to let dream-following become an option.

The simple truth of the universe is to hope that if and when your luck changes you bet as big as you can… unfortunately you usually won’t know if it had changed until just afterwards.

eddie <good luck and god speed>

God Hates... A Lot Actually

So I was having a little trouble sleeping the other night, this tends to happen when I get crushed under the weight of my own intellect, so I went for a little midnight stroll through the back-streets of Wessex. This is usually a fairly uneventful jaunt and this one looked to be following the same boring and predictable pattern. I was pondering some of the more puzzling aspects of quantum physics, i.e. all of it, having given up on the much more taxing problem of women, bitches be crazy, sometime earlier. You can imagine my surprise when, upon rounding a corner, I found myself in one of the many crack alleys that the area boasts, that's not the surprising part, and found myself looking straight into the face of god.

“What are you doing here?” God barked. I have to admit the question took me somewhat by surprise as God has always seemed fairly omniscient in our previous meetings. I quickly surveyed the scene and saw that both God and Jesus were standing in front of a flip chart. Jesus gave me a glance and the little half wave he sometimes does before turning back to the chart and scrawling 'Flood New Orleans Again'

“What are you guys up to?” I asked, as it seemed like the most pertinent question giving the circumstances.

“Just working out new ways to punish America” Jesus replied without turning.

“Oh. Because of the gays?” I asked. God pivoted on the spot all afire with the incandescent rage of the Old Testament.

“FUCK OFF! I am sick and tired of every single fucking punishment I visit on that fetid empire being blamed on the faggots. Of course I hate the faggots they are a filthy, but fuck me is that far down the list.” God was shaking with rage. “I gave them a fucking list of rules and I mentioned the faggots once but every single time I give a baby AIDS or get a soldier shot in the face everyone assumes it's because I'm hating on the queers.” At this point god turned and shot an ineffectual kick at the flip chart. “Do you want the list?”

All I could do was nod dumbly whilst I shot Jesus a sympathetic look, parents can be so embarrassing. “KEEP HOLY THE FUCKING SABBATH is it that fucking hard to shut Walmart for one day of the pissing week. THOUGH SHALT NOT KILL yet the fuck-monkeys have two wars and the death penalty. There are tons of fucking tattoo parlours all over the fucking place.” I gave him a blank look “Leviticus 19:28, Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks upon yourself. I am the Lord. So while we're on the subject fuck fucking coroners the ghoulish mother-fuckers. Except Quincy I fucking love Quincy. Leviticus 19:27 Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard... how many of the fat bastards do you see obeying that one?” I ran a finger through my ringlets as I tried to think of a notable yank with facial hair to match my own.

“Well most rabbis...”

“Fuck those Jew cunts.” Jesus interjected forcefully. “Nail me to a bit of fucking wood... dick-heads.”

“Wasn't that technically the Romans?” I asked trying to calm the situation down a little bit.

“Meen't meh memememe me momans?” Jesus replied incredibly sarcastically.

“Jesus Christ, there's no need to be like that” I snapped back at the messiah, who by the way is only like five foot three and something of a little bitch. Jesus hung his head in shame.

“BLASPHEMY!” God shouted at me whilst pointing.

“No it's not. I was saying his actual name to him.” I replied.

“OK but those cunt-thumpers blaspheme to high heaven. Mel Gibson released a film that made millions of dollars trading off of the death of my son!” God was shaking with rage. “They fornicate, they watch pornography, they eat the wrong animals and they wear clothing made from more than one fabric. They allow their women to talk back to them and fail to stone adulterers. They eat pork and they don't keep woman locked away whilst they are menstruating... don't they realize they are unclean. I will raise there country to the ground and each and everyone of my hypocrite followers will spend the entire time saying I'm punishing them for not making the gays miserable enough. Cunts.”

It was at this point I made my excuses and quickly left because despite having a few good points God is one crazy diety.

eddie <another late night walk ruined by a ranting diety> 

Calm Down... Cocks

So the CDC has recently released a statement saying that there is, currently, no zombie outbreak in the mainland United States, side-note: I told you so, which leads me to ask a serious question. When did people in charge of important things start taking our bullshit seriously? Speaking as a self styled expert on the undead menace, I've watched the right films and read the right books, I don't want to live in a world where the CDC has to release a statement like this every time the internet engages in some form of ridiculousness. For those that don't know the Centers For Disease Control are the branch of the US infrastructure responsible for stopping horrific outbreaks from ravaging the american populace. These are the people who in addition to stopping outbreaks of things like ebola, bubonic plague and all manner of horrible diseases from killing tens of thousands of people every time there is a case in a built up area also have to be prepared for a biological attack launched by a terrorist group. So I am understandably pissed off that they've released this statement.

It made me put me murder face on.

You're probably wondering why it would bother me. I mean one of there guys just sent out an e-mail or something, right? Well actually there is no way the CDC would release a statement like that unless they'd actually checked. No really. Everyone who works at the CDC has seen the same films as us. Have you ever seen a denial given by an authority figure who didn't at least check which didn't come back to bite him the... well on this occasion face I suppose. I'm not saying that the CDC set up a lab and pissed away a whole bunch of money on this, in all probability they rang the coroner of record and had a very brief conversation.

“Dude. Zombies?”

“Fuck no!”

“K Thanks”

That is absolutely all that would be required. The reason that this pisses me off is that even that tiny amount of effort, fuck it even releasing a gorram statement is to much time for a supposedly serious person working in a genuinely important job to devote to something so fucking stupid.

Pictured: Fucking Stupid.

Let me explain I spend a fair bit of my spare time preparing for zombageddon, I also resolutely refuse to accept that dragons have never existed. These are both major parts of the bizarre pop-culture collage that makes me the fascinating chap I am. They are also the parts of me that get completely and totally shut down on the rare occasions where I have to be a fucking grown-up. Thanks to the fact a large part of the internet has developed into a playground I rarely have to behave that way but it's fucking worrying to find out that the grown-ups are taking our games seriously.

"I don't know why Mr Dinosaur can't fix the economy... I'll call the president"

Chuck Norris exists in two very separate forms. There is the real Chuck Norris who is at best an above average action star who's only real claim to fame is getting his chest hair ripped off by Bruce Lee. Then there is the internet Chuck Norris a towering behemoth of a god-man who shits tanks. As long as those two forms remain separate all is good. If however the US Army felt that they needed to release an official statement explaining why they weren't using Chuck Norris to end the afghan conflict I think that we'd all feel justified in telling them to fuck off back to work.

Fuck Chuck Norris.

I'm concerned that this is just one part of a growing trend. The ridiculously photogenic guy has been interviewed on nationaltelevision. Why? Because the internet is the most important invention in the history of human communication. Unfortunately this means that some people have made the mistake of believing that the communication that happens on it must therefore be important. It is not. Just as it has been since time immemorial the majority of human communication is at best noise and at worst word-faeces. The only thing that has changed is visibility. In the past if me and my friends wanted to spend six hours discussing, in minute detail, every single available problem we have with Skyrim, which we have done, no-one else would have to here it. Now those conversations happen online which puts it just a few keystrokes away from everyone else on earth. This does not make those conversations important.

Pictured: Unimportant Opinions

I'm certain that as a key component of the social interactions that make life worth living these conversations are absolutely vital but in the same way that I don't feel it necessary or even wanted that the president release official comment on what Tracy did to Darren in the pub last night I don't need the fucking CDC to tell me that there isn't a zombie outbreak.

eddie <plus it ruins the fun>

Impartial

So I've decided that I want to punch Jeremy Hunt right in the dick. I've decided that not only is this something that I want but it is also something that is completely right and proper. I'm not a complete bastard, which incidentally is what I want written on my tombstone, so I feel it is only fair to set up an independent committee to determine whether or not I should punch Jeremy Hunt right in the dick. In addition to this the committee will be tasked with deciding the exact force with which Hunt should be punched in the dick. Obviously that will only be an issue should the committee agree with my view that Jeremy Hunt definitely needs to be punched right in the dick. In the interests of complete impartiality I will of course make sure that the decision is made by a completely impartial group, the final decision will of course rest with the head of the committee which will of course be me.

Not looking good for you, is it Jezza?

I know that some of you might be confused by this so let me just make this absolutely clear. Whilst the committee has been set up by someone who thinks that Jeremy Hunt needs to be punched right in the dick, me, and the decision will be made by someone who thinks that Jeremy Hunt needs to punched right in the dick, again me, but I will be impartial. So now I've said that I will definitely be impartial that's an end of the matter isn't it. So let's get on with punching Jeremy Hunt right in the di... Sorry deciding whether or not to punch Jeremy Hunt right in the dick. I mean I'm definitely, definitely, definitely impartial. I may have spent most of this article up to this point saying how I believe that Jeremy Hunt definitely deserves a punch right in the dick and that I would very much like to be the one to do it but I also said I would be impartial. Are you calling me a liar?

What did you think I looked like?

How dare you? That's fucking disgraceful, that's like saying that Jeremy Hunt is a liar for saying he'd be impartial well he was deciding whether or not Rupert Murdoch should be allowed to seize control of the nations news media in order to establish the worlds first privatised propaganda machine.

“Do you want to run the country? News Corp can make it happen. For the low, low price of the continued increase of our share price we will print the headlines that you want.”

Don't believe me. Look for the Sun's coverage of the Leveson Enquiry. Oh hold there isn't any. That's the nations biggest newspaper not covering the nations biggest news story. The main reason that people with fully functioning brains were against allowing, well know business-man and fairytale villain, Rupert Murdoch seize control of the nations media, in a way more in line with a Banana Republic than a first world nation, is that we were concerned he would manipulate information flow to his own nefarious ends. So when we hear that the person responsible for deciding whether or not this insanely egregious mishandling of a major nations news media has already decided that it should be allowed and has been firing off chummy e-mails and texts to the Murdochs it's understandable that we might be concerned. However Jeremy Hunt has said that he was completely impartial. That is apparently good enough for the man who runs our country.

I think it's this guy... I'll be honest I don't pay much attention

From this we can conclude that David Cameron is either fundamentally corrupt or such a simpleton that it's a shock he can dress himself in the morning. However the precedent has been set we're taking people at their word now. So when I promise that I will be impartial when deciding whether or not to punch Jeremy Hunt right in the dick that's a cast-iron, copper-bottomed guarantee that you can take to the bank. Obviously I'm not a government minister like Jeremy Hunt so obviously my word carries significantly more weight. I mean I don't have a history of being a lying scumbag. So here I am all set up to be impartial and shit so we're going to have our first meeting now.

12 Seconds Later

So we've decided that it's actually crucial that I punch him right in the dick as soon as possible... for like the economy and shit. We also agreed that I should do it hard enough to break the fucker in half. That's the completely impartial decision that we reached. There is absolutely no reason for anyone to question the process here either I mean it's not like we just rubber stamped the decision we'd already made... that would be unethical. I mean I said I was impartial loads of times, what more do you people want?

eddie <while writing this i accidentally said jeremy cunt twelve times>

God Save The Queen

So for those of you who don't know there's a woman in the UK who is about to celebrate 60 years in the same job her name is Elizabeth and she happens to be Queen. As is usual in the typical medieval village, a George ARR Martin, or one of the worlds leading developed nations, apparently, there is to be a public holiday. Unlike the average medieval village the money for this entire affair is coming straight out of the public coffers. Now obviously back when medieval lords were having parties to celebrate there time at the top of monkey tree they were spending money that they had gathered from the public. Money that they had, and this is very important, they actually earned.

If you don't think Tyrion Lannister deserves to be rich you're an idiot.

Now I'm not going to say that the average medieval lord didn't have a significantly better life than the average serf however they existed in a system where they inherited not just money and lands but also all of the actual work involved in running a kingdom, solving disputes and so forth. I'm not going to pretend that some of them didn't give the slightest nano-fuck but they were encouraged to do so by the simple truth that a more peaceful land was a more profitable. The point I'm making here is that they had great power and, as I'm certain you're aware, with great power comes great responsibility that's as true for feudalism as it is for radioactive spider-bites. I'm not saying that ye olde lords deserved their comparatively vast wealth, they deserved it about as much as a modern day investment bankers. While we may all utterly despise the method by which these folk earned their money we can all agree that it is, sadly, their money. So when a medieval lord gets all the smallfolk into the courtyard rolls out load of mead and rosts a couple of boar it's very much him throwing the party. That's not what's happening for the Diamond Jubilee.

Pictured: Princess Anne

We, a country so impoverished that we're having to sell our national health service to the Prime Ministers chums, are paying a vast sum of moolah to throw a party for the richest woman in the world. She has done exactly fuck all to earn this position and all we are celebrating is that the rest of us have stopped anyone or anything from killing her. So why the fuck isn't she footing the bill for her party. The bitch could easily afford to purchase every single mother-fucker in this country a pint of their choosing but instead she doesn't do a fucking thing and we through her family their second huge party of the last two years. Some people reading this are already rolling out the old tourism argument.

It's really this retarded.

That argument, for those who have had the good fortune of not arguing with twats, states that the royal family is good for tourism so we should obviously keep the fuckers around. Turning one of our counties into a vast paedophile haven would be good for tourism but no-one thinks that's a good idea. OK that might be a bit extreme but if the only argument you have for paying for an entirely family of wasters to go shake hands with people is that it's good for tourism well then you have to be in favour of replacing it with anything that would be better for tourism. So let's get rid of the royals and turn there lands into a series of Harry Potter theme parks. Balmoral is in Scotland that could be Hogwarts and Buckingham Palace could be converted into Diagon Alley, Nocturn Alley and Gringotts. That'd be way better for tourism wouldn't it?

Obviously.

The thing is that I'm not actually massively against the royal family. I view them in the same way I view the BBC, I pay a relatively small fee year on year for the privilege of being entertained by the BBC. Equally I pay a small fee every year for the simple pleasure of watching Prince Philip being a hilarious wanker. The royals are the equivalent of owning a dancing bear, unfortunately to make the bear dance for my amusement we have to keep it a cage better than any of our homes. The issue I have is that in the relationship between us, the peasants, and the royals, the royals are very much the beneficiaries. As such they should be the ones who throw the fucking party.

Like this but bigger.

The Queen is the richest woman in the world and still gets a substantial pay out from the tax payer every year, for sixty long bastard years, she can easily afford to by every man, woman and child in Britain a beer... possibly even two. If she did that then I would have absolutely no problem celebrating the hell out of her frikkin' jubilee.

eddie <sixty years and no promotion she must be shit at her job>

Not A Real Post

Today's main post is below this one... yep just down there, yep where you're looking now. No down there.. frakking idiot. However I wanted to jump in and say the shortlisted entrants from the Future of Copyright Competition are now available in ebook form, including my own entry. I highly recommend giving it a download and a read... it's free and stuff and a lot of the entries are better than the crap I shunt out thrice weekly.

Move Along Nothing To See Here!

This being the internet, unless of course you’re reading one of the printed copies of this I fling my zeppelin whilst laughing at paupers, the news that a man in Miami had been apprehended in the act of attacking another man would’ve quickly faded to obscurity. However the news that a man was shot six times after being discovered devouring another man's face began all manner of zombie based theorising.. Obviously like most fans of the zombie genre… no ones a fan of the creatures themselves, they are pitiful shambling monsters… I have devoted an unhealthy amount of my life speculating, hypothesising and fantasising about the inevitable zomb-o-calypse. Being something of self-styled zombie expert I feel an overwhelming need to step into this discussion but not in the way you may expect. This is definitely not an outbreak.

Calm down it's not that shocking a conclusion... You know what I'm not
going to pretend that this picture is related, it's fucking funny though

One of the most important things the zombie-obsessed among us must learn is that there are a lot of things that at first glance seem to be zombies that you will got to prison for shooting. These include costumed party-goers, people making low-budget horror films and drunks that have lost bets. It is key therefore that you develop a keen ability to detect what is and isn’t zombie otherwise you wind up in prison trying to determine what is and isn’t rapist. So without further delay let me run you through the reasoning behind my belief that this case is not the moment we’ve been preparing for.

So... keep preparing... I guess.

First of the attacker was a naked individual. This is a key bit of evidence in allowing us to build a picture of whether this was zombie or not. Naked tells us that our zombie, if he were, would have turned in bed. This is actually the most likely place fro the infection to take hold. If you were out jogging and got bit you’d try to ignore it at first… what with America’s healthcare system... If you then started to feel some what under the weather you would head to the best place to recover from all sickness. Bed. So a man goes to sleep and the zombie awakes all pain and hunger filled with an insatiable lust for flesh. If he was located in a tower block, which is statistically likely in a built up city like Miami we are looking at a situation where he managed to find the stairs and leave the building without meeting a single other viable meal. Before you say he could’ve taken the lift, thus minimising his chances of meeting a potential snack, how would he have used the buttons… no the lift is only an option should someone have been in it or called it, either way you’re looking at a lift for of dead people. Of course we could be looking at the lone escapee from some form of secret underground facility. That notion is of course utterly preposterous. You wouldn’t build something like that in Miami you’d build it in butt-fuck-nowhere, Ohio.

The middle-of-butt-fuck-nowhere... and there's still a fucking hipster

The next issue is that this chap was gunned down whilst snacking on the face of a homeless man, who it is reported is recovering in hospital… not rapidly deteriorating into a shuffling corpse. On balance it is unlikely that this homeless man has become infected and therefore, given what we know about the viral source of the zombie-condition that his assailant was one of the walking-dead. There is also the fact the ‘zombie’ was shot dead by the police. This is almost enough evidence that our perp is not a zombie on its own. You see a competent police officer is trained to fire bullets into the kill column. This is a fancy term for the torso. It’s an easier target than the head with almost equal effectiveness whilst simultaneously resulting in fewer fatalities. The central concept being a man you shot in the chest is only slightly more likely to return fire than a man who has been shot in the head but a man who has been shot in the chest is incredibly more likely to not die. As to the number of shots fired, six in total, some view this as evidence of some form of zombism. It’s much more likely that the officer in question fired one shot, which had not effect due to either severe psychological problems or sever drugs, at that point he would fired off the remaining five shots in rapid succession. The odds that a police officer cracked off a head shot on a man whose face was right next to his victim isn’t just unlikely it relies on the cop being Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon. It just wouldn’t happen and if it did it would be in the report.

Only from the first three Lethal Weapons though... the good ones.

The final points that indicate that this is not stage one of an ongoing outbreak are two simple facts, one is location and two is coverage. A real outbreak would be accompanied by so many cover-ups and propaganda campaigns that the surviving historians would never even hope to pin-down the beginning of it all. It’s also not going to happen in a built up metropolitan area, the first reports will start to stream in from vast swathes sparsely populated countryside. As I’ve often stated I have no desire in pointing out problems so I’m going to run through the warning signs you should be looking for.

1. Aborted news-cycles: If you start to hear stories about epidemics spreading that’s OK… if those stories suddenly dry-up then things are getting suppressed and trouble has started.
2. Excessive Force: If the National Guard are called in to deal with some form of riot it can be excessive force, or it could be a reasonable response to a threat that you’re unaware of.
3. Quarantine: Keep a close eye on airport closures, should a rural area have its airspace closed up for non-weather related reasons it could be a faulty radar tower… or it could be an attempt at containment.
4. Unusual Individual Behaviour: The Johnson’s seemed in a bit of a hurry to get away on that camping trip didn’t they? There will always be people ‘in the know’ the sensible ones among these will usually flee. Maybe it’s time to take that holiday.
5. ‘A Spate Of Similar Attacks’: This is the key phrase to look out for. Check the similar attacks are they the work of one person or are they the work of several unrelated ghouls.
6. Killing Sprees: I’m not talking about high-school massacres or unhinged postal workers I’m talking about the sweet teenage girl who snaps and kills her entire family… did she snap or did she step-up to the plate and do what needed to be done?
7. World Leaders: The minute someone on the world stage fails to turn up to something really important you know shits about to hit the fan if Joe Biden rocks up to the G8 just head to the hills as quickly and discreetly as possible.

I hope that helps put your mind at rest I’m not saying anyone of these events should have you grabbing a baseball bat but they are the starting points for the investigations that will ultimately save you from a slow and painful death… or worse.

eddie <constant vigilance>