When you think of signs that the apocalypse is at hand, what comes to mind?
Plagues of frogs?
Fish raining from the sky?
Seas of blood?
Or maybe the 4 horsemen riding forth?
Well, maybe, maybe not.

But how about this news - Hooters are opening a branch in the Holy Land.
If that isn't a sure sign of the end of days, then fuck knows what is.

Teaching has begun to look like a viable alternative.

What the fuck was I thinking?

For a small country that gets a lot of weather, we sure are pish at dealing with it.
Scotland has just emerged from a full 40 days and nights of heavy rain. There was, putting it mildly, quite a bit of flooding. Not so much that there was a sudden rise in DIY Ark building and amateur animal husbandry, but it was, you know, a bit wet out.
So much so, a news anchor on Radio Scotland was prompted to ask the following question of the Scottish Environmental Protection Agency bod they happened to be interviewing:

Why has there been so much flooding?

I believe his answer was something along the lines of,

well...*confused pause*...it's been raining quite a lot.

This week too, the nation is virtually paralysed by thick fog in England causing the cancellation of flights in and out of Heathrow Airport. Cue stranded travellers camping out in Airports, clutching Christmas presents and petted lips. And again with the stupid questions. I swear I heard someone on the news say

I know there's nothing they can do about it, because it's down to the weather, but we'd all just like to know how long this will go on for.

Er...until the fucking fog clears up, which as you've already spotted, is well outwith the remit of BAA. Have none of you seen "A Bridge Too Far"? Can no one remember Denholm Elliot's cameo as an RAF Meteorologist trying to explain to Gene Hackman about the unpredictability of fog and it's effect on airborne operations?
My favourite bit, that.
I just heard on the radio on the way home that BA have cancelled all domestic flights in the UK for the next 3 days. This is fog we're talking about, right?
Fog. Fucking fog, a very common metereological feature of these islands?
I haven't seen it, but if this fog is causing so much hassle, it better at least be proper London Towne Fogge from days of yore.
In fact, if you've got a minute, fuck Fogge, it had better be John Carpenter's - The Fog.

BA1132, this is Heathrow Tower. Please be advised, due to thick fog obscuring your approach and a horde of undead pirates brutally slaying all in their path, we have diverted you to Bristol.

Anyway, being, well, stupid, I've come up with a thoroughly ridiculous idea to capitalise on the mess.
Are you a stressed business traveller who just has to get to London, like, now?
Are you in far too much of a hurry or simply too important to take the train?
Never fear. I have plans to set up a brand new concept in commercial air travel.
A new type of high speed air link from Glasgow to the centre of London.
I fly you directly to London and kick you out the fucking door over Hyde Park. I might even give you a parachute!
No fucking about in Heathrow airport, arrive exhilirated and ready to go in the middle of London
Bad weather over London causing problems with flights? No problem! I just fly extra high. Let's just hope you know how to do a HALO jump.

My Lawyer has demanded that I include the following disclaimers:
I can't be held responsible for:
Accidental soiling of self due to the terror of plummeting blindly onto London from 50000 feet.
Misdrops leading to death, injury or capture by the SS (not entirely sure about this bit).
Death or injury due to parachute failure
Death or injury due to lack of parachute.
Death or injury due to not having a fucking clue how to work a parachute.
Death or injury due to being kicked out of the door early because I got fed up listening to you.

AirBag. You'll never fly anything else.

Labels: stupidity, weather

It's been a while, eh?
Below is a list of possible reasons for my absence. See if you can spot the correct one.

1. I was running arms from the Far East into the UK.
2. I was being held against my will as a sex slave by a lost tribe of warrior women.
3. I crash landed my Viper on a Cylon held planet and only just escaped from the sex farm where they were holding me captive.
4. My dog ate all of my daily blog posts since the last one.
5. I uncovered a secret UN plot to overthrow the Government and was incarcerated in a secret sex farm. I am just this minute back.
6. I was high. The whole time.
7. I am a lazy bastard and couldn't be bothered.

You can all blame The Cynic for my sudden reappearance. I noticed a new link to this place on Technorati and it kind of spurred me into action.
Thanks for the link, whoever you are.

Labels: me

Just lately, I've been plagued by unsettling notions of humanity's insignificance in the universe, the cruel illusion of free will, shadowy figures stalking me just at the edge of my peripheral vision and insects flying up my japseye while I'm having a piss and consuming me from the inside.

I lay the blame squarely, except for the insect up the cock thing, on the rather excellent online horror novels, John Dies At The End and it's sequel, John and Dave and the Temple of X'al'naa''thuthuthu.
Well, I say that but really, it's my own overactive imagination and lack of mental discipline that's to blame, but reading those certainly won't have helped.

The insect flying up the japseye nightmare, incidentally, is one of my own creation, possibly influenced by some of the themes explored withing JDATE.
I'm rather proud of it.

While having a piss the other day, my mind, as tends to happen, started to wander.
A tiny little insect in the urinal bowl reminded me of the urinals in Schiphol Airport, which all have images of flies printed on them, right down in the middle, near the drain. The idea, apparently, is to give guys something to aim at so as to cut down on spillages and therefore the cost of cleaning up after guys pissing all over the place.
Thats kind of a clever idea, but fucking hell, who the fuck did they hand the job of researching that to? How the fuck do you come up with that? What ideas failed to make the cut?

"I tell you, we need to land the Airport contract, it'll be worth a fortune to us. We need to put our best pissing man on it!"
"Actually, do you know Petr, from the Antwerp office? He has some amazing ideas for urinals..."

Or maybe I'm better off not knowing...
Out of every marking they could have chosen for us to aim at: a little target, a goal, a cigarette end or even a pair of tits (hey, some people are into that), they figured out, after all their research, that guys would, all things considered, prefer to flush innocent, harmless flies to an awful, horrific death.
I reckon that provides a tiny little insight into nasty corner of man's soul.

As I pondered the little fly walking up the side of my urinal, fighting the urge to flush it to a piss soaked oblivion, my imagination became haunted by the idea of how fucking shite it would be if one of those Schiphol Airport Piss Flies came to life, shot right up your japseye in mid pee and laid eggs in your bawsack, or started fucking eating you from inside or some damn thing.

That would be, all things considered, a pretty fucking shite thing to happen.
Not the worst, but undeniably shite.
The worst thing that could happen, I reckon, would be fate dealing you the hand she dealt our little friend, the tiny flying insect I nearly pissed on. If you believe in Karma, and why the fuck not, it's not like it makes any less sense than anything else people believe, then that little fly must have done some heavy shit in a previous life.
You'd need to have been fucking Hitler, Stalin or worked in direct telemarketing to get hit with the midge in a urinal deal. Or maybe you just need to hose down the wrong insect when taking a piss.

Labels: horror, madness

Did I mention that I got a black belt in Judo recently?
Oh, I did...right.

Now that I could almost legitimately describe myself as a martial arts expert, Lady Wallace reckons I should be leveraging my talents to make us a little money. This, on the face of it, doesn't seem like a totally unreasonable idea. Being a nerdy obsessive, I do know a breathtakingly sad amount about my chosen hobby.
I think she's got something in mind like a website where I would write about the subject. I'm not so sure, as there's already some great MA websites out there - Bullshido for example.
The obvious drawback there is that I write a lot of bollocks and have the creativity of a damp towel. I guess Lady W must not have ever read this blog or she maybe wouldn't be so quick to suggest that I try to make money out of writing.

So, while I'm not too sure about that particular idea, I do tend to agree that my depressingly encyclopaedic knowledge of ways to hurt, maim and injure unsuspecting muggers is going underutilised. The problem is, ways to turn this obsession/talent into cold, hard cash seem thin on the ground.
I have briefly considered the following:

• Freelance Goon. I wouldn't have the temperament for this. I'm too much of a nice guy. Plus the whole illegality angle.
• Pro Fighter. I'm too old, too shite and too much of a pussy.
  
• Open a Gym. A gym for Boxing, Kickboxing, MMA, BJJ, Judo and the like, with a ring, mats, bags and all that stuff. An expensive idea, which may work, but probably wouldn't. Gyms go bust constantly. Would be nice, but difficult.
• Kickboxing/MMA Show Promoter. I have no idea where on earth I would begin.
• Fight Scene Coordinator for TV or Stage. This idea seemed to have legs until I researched it a bit and found out that the Fight Coordinator/Stunt game is a virtual closed shop. And you need fucking acting training. Truth be told, I only really fancied this as it seemed to give me an opportunity to smack some luvvies around without fear of legal consequence.

  Luvvie - "Are you sure that you should be choking him unconscious just now?"
  Me - "Do you want authenticity or no?"
  Luvvie - "Well, yes, but this isn't a fight scene. He's supposed to be talking to his Wife."

• Self Defence Expert/Instructor - Take it from me, the Self Defence game is an absolute racket. 99.9% of the reams of books and hours of video available on the subject is a load of exploitative crap. The best advice you will ever receive on the matter can be summed up by the following - Keep away from dodgy areas/situations/people, don't let your ego get the better of you and it is never, ever, too late to run away.
• Breast Inspector - well, you've got to try.
• Fuck all that martial arts shite and actually try actually spending some of effort I put into training on developing my career....I'm sorry. That is possibly the most stupidly offensive idea ever.
  

So, creative ideas for monetizing my encyclopaedic knowledge of exotic violence are respectfully requested.

Labels: judo, karate, martial arts, training

It is entirely possible that I am, in fact, awesome.
Why?
Because I qualified for my black belt in Judo this weekend, which means I have a black belt grade in two different martial arts - Karate and Judo.
Not that I actually practice Karate any more, but still, two black belts is pretty damn good, eh?

When I was at school, there was this wee dobber that used to talk a load of pish about martial arts. Like his story about a Drumchapel Ninja killing a guy by chucking a pub ashtray at him, like a shuriken. Or black belts having to register with the Police.
Well fuck me, if he wasn't partly right about something. The Council have been in touch, as it turns out that I apparently need to fill out and submit form N1NJ/A - "Registration of Hands and/or Feet as Dangerous Weapons". They say that failure to do so in a timely manner will result in the revocation of any outstanding licenses that permit me to practice, plus the likely brutal murder of my Coach by the Dept of Martial Arts Movie Cliches.

So, yesterday was spent on a high, to say the least. There is nothing like spending an entire Sunday morning fighting, and beating, complete strangers to release the old endorphins.
A tiny sliver of unwelcome reality started to assert itself as the afternoon drew on, though. It began to dawn on me on the way home that no matter how great I felt right at that moment, no matter how strong or how invincible, I was due back at work as normal on Monday morning as a small cog in a big machine and those oh-so-vital user admin requests, customer emails, fault reports and service outage notifications were going to be no substitute at all for the endorphin high courtesy of several hours of full contact fighting.

True enough, I was back at work as usual this morning.
1 hour later I was so pissed off and bored with the usual Monday morning crap that I actually considered stripping to the waist in the canteen, oiling up and issuing an open challenge to everyone in the building to take me on in a best of 3 falls all in Wrestling match.
Sanity prevailed, however.
I made do with knocking fuck out of all the smokers round the back of the smoking shelter at lunchtime.

That was the first I ever heard of shadowed Dunoon. Any reference to a town not shown on common maps or listed in recent guidebooks would have interested me, and the old man's odd manner of allusion roused something like real curiosity. A town able to inspire such dislike in it its neighbors, I thought, must be at least rather unusual, and worthy of a tourist's attention. Time permitting, I would stop off there and so I asked the man to tell me something about it. He was very deliberate, and spoke with an air of feeling slightly superior to what he said.

"Dunoon? Well, it's a queer kind of a town down at the mouth of the Clyde. Used to be almost a city - quite a port after the War - but all gone to pieces in the last thirty years or so.

"More empty houses than there are people, I guess, and no business to speak of except shoplifting and cigarette smuggling. Everybody trades mostly either here or in Gourock or Greenock. Once they had quite a few mills, but nothing's left now except one Buckfast refinery running on the leanest kind of part time.

"Noo, are ye gonnae buy a Big Issue or are ye gonnae get tae fuck and stop annoyin me?

With profound apologies to H.P. Lovecraft, as the above was ripped mercilessly from his short story "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" to make a clumsy point about the Scottish town of Dunoon on the Cowal Peninsula.

Thats 4 times I've had to travel to Dunoon in the last 2 weeks, and the atmosphere in the place gets weirder every time. It's only about 30 miles in a straight line there from Glasgow, but given the sea lochs and fuckin great river in the way, it’s a bit of a hassle to get to. The quickest route is by driving to Gourock and catching the Western Ferry to Dunoon. Reasonably easy, but it can take 90 minutes to 2 hours to make the trip. Mind you, to get there overland, you need to take a huge detour and end up driving something like 70 miles through some pretty serious West Highland countryside.
So despite only being 30 miles from the centre of Glasgow, Dunoon feels pretty fucking remote. All it would take is some stormy weather to cut off the road and interrupt the ferries and you'd be stuck there.
With wooded hills looming over it, one road in and out, the reliance on river ferries, the general air of decay and it's infamous soapstone carving of Dagon in the town square, it would make a fucking great location for a horror story. Unfortunately, that story has already been written and was called "The Shadow Over Innsmouth".

Bastard.

There's a vague, undefinable air of unreality going on. It’s quiet, dead quiet. You can see civilisation, almost touch it, with Gourock being just over the river, but it might as well be on the other side of the moon.
Fuck sake, I think I must be the only person in the history of the written word to describe Gourock as “civilisation”. That is how rattled I am.
Consider, where else in Britain could you expect to hear stories of US Naval vessels threatening to fire on civilian passenger ferries?

Seriously.

During a recent exercise, some over sensitive US vessel threatened to sink the Kilcreggan to Dunoon ferry for getting too close.
That ship has issues.
I know US vessels have been attacked in friendly waters before, USS Cole for example, but for fuck sake, that was because it was parked in Aden, not cruising off fucking Helensburgh.

Master of understatement that he is, the Captain of the Kenilworth said:

"If you've got a big battleship loaded with guns bearing down on you and threatening to shoot, it's quite scary."

No fucking shit.
That said, the cunt driving the ferry needs his ticket revoked for letting the side down in shocking style by his response to the US ship's radioed warning:

"Unidentified vessel approaching on my starboard side, please identify yourself. If you fail to do so, we will open fire on you with live ammunition."

The perfect response, in keeping with Clyde naval tradition, would of course have been, simply,

"Come ahead ya cunt"

rather than the more likely

"ohfucknodon'tfuckinshootI'lldowhateveryouwantjustdon'tkillmeeeeee!"

Understandable, but still disappointing, I mean, what was the USS Intimacy Issues actually going to do? Sink a passenger ferry in the middle of that notorious maritime flashpoint, the Firth of Clyde?
Not being a Naval man, I don't really know how that would go down, exactly, but I get the sneaking suspicion the guy that issued that order would have some explaining to do.

However, it's not just Innsmouth, sorry Dunoon that gives me the willies, that whole area of Argyll makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. I’m not entirely sure why.
Maybe it's the scenery, the typical weather or it’s relative emptiness compared to the nearby central belt, or a combination of all those things.
Could be.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's the fact that the area is home to possibly the greatest concentration of nuclear explosive power in western Europe, with Faslane Naval Base on the Gare Loch being home to our Trident submarine fleet and Coulport on Loch Long being the storage facility for Trident's nuclear warheads. For added nuclear fun, up to relatively recently there was also a US Polaris submarine base in the wonderfully named Holy Loch.
Put another way, the detonation of all that megatonnage would provide enough heat, by conservative estimates, that the women in my office would stop complaining about the cold and allow me to open the window a few inches.
So, the proximity of all that hardware tends to focus my mind a little bit. The thought of all the reciprocal Soviet megatonnage pointing the other way, i.e. at me, tends to focus it intensely enough to cut glass with.
Kind of hard to appreciate the wonderful view when your minds eye keeps picturing everything for miles around vanishing instantly in a hellish nuclear firestorm.