Blogs Ahoy

The Internet. Not just a hunting ground for Paedophiles and a meeting place for budding terrorists, but also the 21st century's greatest media resource.

And I’m plum pleased to announce that you lucky bastards now have not one, but TWO blogs to read when you’re pretending to be working.

Deep from within the guts of Kuala Lumpur comes Osman Ramlan’s BiskutNaga's Jinggez. Finally, Dr Pepper and Bird Flu in one easy to read location.

I know the site is a trustworthy source of information, as I spent three years covered in fake blood and guts at film school with it’s creator. He's a stand up guy.

I went to school with Ozi as well. But that was a decade ago, and my memory of that period is more than a little hazy.

In fact, the only thing I remember from my school days was the band at the High School Prom.

And man, did those guys rock:

SNN News - Mother's Group

Local Mother's Group Angered

A local mother's group was angered today when they realised that nothing they do or say counts for shit.

"You know how you read in the paper of how a song, movie, or social event has angered an irrelevant social demographic? We are one of those groups." Explained Margaret Burnet, a frumpy mother of 3.

"It usually involves us ringing each other up and whining, but if Coronation Street isn't on we may even get off our fat arses and form a picket line"

Things that anger the groups include Rap Music, Horror films, and violent TV shows.

"Nothing gives me a more perverse thrill than angrily protesting a film I HAVEN'T EVEN SEEN!" Says Julie Henderson, 43.

"Let's face it. The best years of my life are over, I'm elbow deep in dirty nappies, watch daytime TV, and get one lousy shag a week from my white collar zombie husband. I'm just one more fish in this dirty grey sea of suburbia. Being angered by such pointless things as flash in the pan rap stars makes me feel ALIVE!"


Mary Burn, 38 added "Stuff World Hunger, who cares about AIDS Awareness, I'm pretty sure I heard Dr Dre say the F-Word yesterday!"

A Local Journalist for The Times had this to say:

"We usually throw in a line like 'Eminem has angered Parent Groups with his lyrics' just to fill up empty space at the bottom of a news article. I didn't know these groups actually existed! That blows my mind!"

UPDATE: It has been made apparent that several Parent’s Groups were angered by this article.

The Neck Up Award

Just got back from six days in Dublin and thought I'd update the site.

Christ, the Monopoly Pub Crawl has topped 3,000 words already and I'm only up to the sixth pub. An epic event like this deserves an appropriate write up, but the shit's starting to look like Homer's Odyssey - I've already spent more effort on this then I did in my entire time at University (providing that drinking games don't count as effort).

It's time for a break, and it's the perfect opportunity to introduce you to this month's Neck Up Award.

"What in Blue Thunder Fuck is a Neck Up Award?!" I can hear you scream, well let me explain you impatient shits.

It is an accolade I'll be giving to a chosen human being I think has deserved the privilege of being told to just plain SHUT THE FUCK UP. It will almost always be a celebrity, and the first one up to the plate is a TV chef.

I've never really seen the point in cooking shows. The only people who have any interest in the dishes on display most certainly don't have the time to dick around with the pause button on the remote as they keep up with the presenter as he boils some thinly sliced Ginger. The ones who do have the time are the jobless stoners and single mums who'd rather pop into KFC than organise some chopped Kokum or a pinch of Melegueta Pepper. It's this Catch 22 that should have rendered these shows obsolete years ago, yet strangely hasn't. However my grief isn't with the medium but rather with one of it's presenters, and more particularly with one comment he made.

For those of you lucky enough not to know, Gordon Ramsey is a British Football Player turned Chef, and like most of the celebrity chefs here in the Old Dart has at least 500 shows to his name. The one in question is titled Gordon Ramsey's Kitchen Nightmares in which Ramsey provides his 'expert' advice and tutelage to struggling chefs and restaurant owners whose kitchen procedures need a desperate overhaul (which I admit isn't so bad an idea for a show).

On an episode last week Ramsey was helping out the kitchen staff on a big re-opening night, offering up his wisdom to the various members of staff. At one point he turned to a young apprentice chef with the sagely advice (and I'm paraphrasing here) to "Take out his anger on the pasta, not on his fellow worker".

Meaning that if the stress gets too much, work harder on your food than resorting to bickering and swearing at those around you. And he said it without a hint of irony nor sarcasm.

I don't really know what else happened after this scene, as the TV refused to work with my foot through it.

I mean, WHAT THE EVERLOVIN' FUCK?!

Gordon Ramsey is an aggressive bully who made himself famous by being the most intimidating prick on TV. Every episode you would tune in and watch him render the staff of his kitchen into blubbering worthless wrecks with a tirade of verbal abuse and name calling. The kitchen would be open nary 10 minutes before the F words would fly, and so would the tears. I've also seen him start up on his customers on more than one occasion. He's such a sadistic antagonizing Shit-Whore that he can't even have a show without the words "hell" or "nightmare" somewhere in the title.

I'm not pissed at the way he treats anybody stupid enough to work with him. I'm often told he is one of the best chefs in the world (though usually by somebody who hasn't come within a continent of his restaurants). It's his fucking hypocrisy that has my nuts in a twist.

His pigheaded audacity to instruct a wiling student to "not take aggression out on other workers", when he's damn near throwing knives himself.

What a rotten Fuck-Maggot. Screw him, you're better off getting Cooking tips from this guy:

Gordon Ramsey, Celebrity Chef and Hypocritical Prick.

Winner of the inaugural Neck Up Award.

Monopoly Board Pub Crawl part III

After a 25 minute tube journey and a bus ride, Chuck and I found ourselves strolling down Old Kent Road. The pub we are after, The Lord Nelson, was quite far down the street but we knew that the rules stated any pub on the road would do. One of the main dilemmas of pub hunting in London when you are unfamiliar with the territory, is that many businesses have set up shop in abandoned pubs and it's only upon close inspection do you find this out. So the first two hotels we find are actually Travel Agents, and the third is a Dentist. Yes, A fuckin' Dentist.

We eventually got to the Lord Nelson, and to our dismay found that both sets of front doors are locked. By this time it is noon, so we assume that the pub is not open on weekends. Mild anxiety washed over our us, as the concussive fact that we had now managed to fuck up the first two pubs hits like a coat-hanger to a fetus. Was this day long pub crawl going to transpire into 26 consecutive kicks to the nuts?

There was no time for inner reflection, as time was ticking away. We went into a Nearby Off Licence, and babbled our vital need of finding a local pub that HAD to be on this particular road. The bored old man behind the counter pointed at the door and told us a mixture of get out and good luck.

We bolted back out onto Old Kent Road with a new found desperation, strolling past the Lord Nelson. It was at this point Chuck thought he could hear voices, and we then tried what we hadn't the first time round - the side door. It, like the pub, was open. We saddled up to the bar and ordered our two half pints. There was about a dozen old grizzled drunks in the pub. Half of the Barflies looked at us with mocking eyes for not ordering full pints - like the new Cannibals to the tribe who had just asked for Jelly Babies. The other half were lost in thought - lamenting the divorce of their third wife, fretting about the 8 quid they lost on a greyhound race, or whatever it is that these boozy old fucks do on a Saturday afternoon. We downed our beers, noting that we were now an hour behind schedule, and hit the road.

One bus, one tube, and we were at Fenchurch station. The Fen was our new 10 minute home; you'd have to be a pure blood alco if you couldn't wait to leave the train station before having a beer, and we found ourselves fitting in with the rest of the inebriates. The young barmaid spent about two minutes trying to pour us some Bitters. Eventually she had to tell us that the taps weren't working, and asked us our second choice. Another couple of minutes, and the second taps weren't working - third choice? Then the third taps didn't work. I smiled at the barmaid, but beads of desperation started to sprout on my brow and my voice started to waver. We were behind schedule, and had just spent 90% of our allotted time for this pub watching the beers being abandoned mid pour as each keg gave out. The fourth half pints poured like a sweet dream, we slammed them down like a bastard nightmare, and made our way out of the station.

Before hitting the road for Whitechappel we stopped at a Bakery for a couple of pasties. Chuck's was so hot he burnt his tongue, mine was stone cold. Both tasted like dough wrapped dog vomit. But that wasn't the important part, it was texture we were after, and these claggy dough balls had it in spades. For a full day's drinking a decent bulky meal can knock 3 or 4 pints of your drunkenness. A shitty pastry meal beats the world's best salad hands down. You can't build a castle on quicksand.


One of the funky parts about the Monopoly Board game is the amusingly low prices allocated to the locations on the board, and how ridiculously underpriced they are. Except for the case of Whitechapel, which is has been overpriced at 60 quid. What a shithole. Chuck and I beat our way through a row of crappy market stalls, Pirate DVD salespeople and a mildly angry political protest to find the aptly named Blind Beggar. This pub is bit of a historical British Landmark, as it was where Ronnie Kray (of the infamous Kray twins) shot George Cornell. That was in 1966 and I swear the cleaner hasn't been in since then.

We managed to procure our beers with reasonable haste, besides one obvious flaw with the service. The conversation (I shit you not) went like this:

Me: "Excuse me love, there seems to be an ash covered peanut in my beer"

Barmaid: "Shh Don't say it too loud, or everybody will want one!"

Christ. It's the kind of eons old crappy humor you find on rolled up bits of paper inside Christmas crackers, yet strangely amused me in this real life setting. A woman with a sense of houmour even poorer than my own, if she hadn't been 60 years old I would have asked her out (my cut off age is 59).

On the way to the tube station, one of the stall owners jumped out right in front of me and Karate chopped her noisy son in the face. That was cool.

Nothing much to report about the Liverpool Street Station pub Hamilton Hall, except that it's a spacious boozer with the interior built to resemble a library. I don't really see the point of lining the walls of a British pub with book shelves. It's kind of like hanging dildos in a nunnery.

On that note, we conclude part III.


Old Kent Road - Lord Nelson
12:21 to 12:30
Fenchurch Street Station - The Fen
13:06 to 13:16
Whitechapel - Blind Beggar
13:42 to 13:47
Liverpool Street Station - Hamilton Hall
14:14 to 14:22

Tally so far

10 Beers

Average time spent in pubs: 7.6 minutes

5 pubs down 21 to go

Monopoly Board Pub Crawl Part II

9am Saturday the 25th of February. M-Day. I awaken in the same manner I had been all that week - coughing and spluttering. The British Winter had taken a big steaming turd on my health, and I had been sick all week with the flu. Though I was in the later stages of the virus and on the comeback trail, I was still feeling very ropey. But it couldn't be helped, if the crawl was going to be done it had to be today.

You see the Monopoly pub crawl is like getting a tatoo or having a threesome. A lot of people talk about it, but few get around to actually doing it.

Unfortunately, I didn't have the luxury of putting this on the "back burner". There was a chance that I had only four weeks left in London, and my crawl partner Chuck was only free that weekend.

So I dragged myself out of bed, grabbed a tissue and blew a Porn Star's carpet worth of mucous out my nose, showered and got dressed. Then I took 2 flu tablets, a Vitmain C tablet, 2 glasses of orange juice, stuffed my pockets with several print outs of directions and schedules and made my way to the first location - Marylebone Station.

I had arranged to meet Chuck at Marylebone at 10:45am. I had the bright idea that if we started at Marylebone, then took the Bakerloo line to Old Kent Road we could knock out the furthest Northern and Southern destinations in one fell swoop. One slight flaw in my plan - the Station's pub did not open until noon on weekends. We were going to have to find the next closest pub.

Chuck got himself a couple of bacon sandwiches at a local cafe. I declined having already eaten 2 cheeseburgers at the previous station (fuck Morgan Spurlock, if you're going to drink your body weight in booze you need some greasy blotting paper in your guts).

We found a substitute pub (The Globe) around the corner from the station and got our first drinks of the day. Chuck had the educated idea of drinking Bitters (in this case Courage Best Bitter) as it would be less gassy then spending a full day on Lager. We sat across from each other, wondering who looked the worst. Me with my flu, Chuck with a stinking hangover and 3 hours sleep, the battle wounds of a London Friday night work drinks session. We finished our half pints of Bitter and took notice of our surroundings.

It was barely 11:30am and already the pub was starting to fill up. We had forgotten to take in account that the 6 Nations was on this weekend, and that every second pub we were going to try and race through would be packed to the rafters with boozy rugby fans. Precious minutes were going to be lost fighting our way to the bars.

Searching for the new pub had lost us valueable time. It was the first stop and already we were half an hour behind schedule. Throw in 100 miles of travel, One English winter, one Flu, one hangover and several bathtubs worth of booze and we were looking at one fucking long day indeed.


Marylebone Station - The Globe
11:23 to 11:29

Tally so far:

2 Beers

1 pub down 25 to go.

Next: Old Kent Road and Beyond...

Monopoly Board Pub Crawl part I

They call it the Monopoly Board Pub Crawl - 26 pubs spread over one of the world's busiest cities. It's not so much A pub crawl, as THE pub crawl and there was no way I was going to leave London without trying this epic bitch. This write up will no doubt be a lengthy read, so I'll break it up into multiple parts. Before I provide the transcripts of our drunken adventure, let's get better acquainted with this Bad Girl of boozery.

HISTORY

The Monopoly Board Game was brought out in 1935 by the Parker Brothers Toy Company. In it's 65 year history it has become the most popular board game in the world, and has been played by over 500 million people. Of those half a billion, it is estimated that there is roughly 8 people who could actually be bothered finishing the games they started.

The resulting pub crawl became infamous after it was referenced on the British SciFi comedy Red Dwarf, in which David Lister tried the crawl on his 25th birthday.

THE RULES

There are 22 locations and 4 train stations on the board, a pub at each must be visited. If there is no pub on the specific road, then the closest one possible.

One standard drink (half pint, spirit, shot) must be consumed at each pub.

THE ROUTE

There are two ways to do the Monopoly Route:

1. In Order

It's possible to complete the crawl in the order it appears on the game board. Kudos to the guys on this site, who managed to do it back in 2001.

The problem with a pub crawl of this size is that there is a fine line between fun and hard work, and this no doubt crosses it. The whole day is spent going back and forth on public transport, with only a minimal time allowed to spend in each pub.

Time taken to get to last pub: 11 hours 10 minutes
Average time in pub: 6.96 minutes


2. The Alternate Route

If the thought of riding public transport across the city all day doesn't appeal to you (as it sure as fuck didn't to us), then it is probably better to find yourself a different route. There are dozens of recorded Monopoly routes on the web, and we decided to follow this one. The guys did this on a Wenesday in 2002 (Mighty Accolades to the boys for taking a day off work purely to participate in a pub crawl), and made excellent time, finsishing with almost 3 hours to spare. Also, the public transport required is completed in the first third of the journey, so the rest of the day can be spent strolling from pub to pub in a drunken stupor.

Time to get to last pub: 9 hours 11 minutes
Average time in pub: 11.4 minutes


Next: The Monopoly Journey begins...