12/24/2002

Lord of the Rings :  Lord of the Rag and Bone more like. How did they get Albert Steptoe to play Gollum?
posted by Garreth at 5:21 AM

12/23/2002

How do you make a bear go woof? :  Not covering him in petrol and throwing a match, no. Like this. More on winners don't do web logs.

And winners certainly don't post lots of photos of their holidays in Gambia like I did. Even if some of the photos are of motorbikes. Can't really say you've travelled in a country unless you've bought an ice cream and hired a vehicle.
posted by Garreth at 1:09 PM

Bubble wrap. :  I was looking for a piece of wire to allow me to break into a house the other day. It was a simple scam - the letter box was deep enough to get your hand into, and the Yale lock was old and shaky. A nudge on the inside door handle would gain me entry to the hallway. I'd tried kicking the door open, but it was sturdier than it looked, and the dealer down the road probably wouldn't have appreciated any extra attention. I just needed a piece of wire, or a stick or something.

I scoured the street. I knew it well, for it was in the street I live in. In fact, it was my house I wanted to break into. I strode instinctively to the corner of the street - there was always a fetid pile of rotting waste there. It had adorned the street corner for many months, and I felt sure that there would be a coathanger or something in the pile. I was surprised to find the pile gone - perhaps a nice man in a council lorry had whisked it away.

I did manage to find a package of bubble wrap though. I was a little disappointed, as it wasn't wrapped in bubble wrap (to protect the bubbles), but instead in flimsy plastic. The urge to jump on it and burst the packaqed bubbles passed. I found a stick. I broke into my house.

I went to work, and checked the internet. I was disappointed to find that this site ranks lower in the search for scantily clad girls than 'gals and guns'. To be fair though, I had never realised that my general sense of anomie could potentially be vanquished with 'the two things that every man wants' - big guns and beautiful guns. I'm off to the firing range.
posted by Garreth at 1:05 PM

The captains of industry of today make the robber barons of the 19th century look like underachievers :  What a great idea - instead of having a conventional urinal, make one out of a mirror in the hall of mirrors. Then, when people (gents) use the gents, they'll have minutes of fun playing with their pink oboes, which will be distorted and turned into pink bassoons, or pink tubas.

When leaving the bar, discover that there is no such mirror in the ladies lavatory. Instead there are video screens. The miracle of closed-circuit television allows the ladies in the ladies to watch the gents in gents and the look of amusements on theri face as they play John Holmes in the mirror.
posted by Garreth at 12:43 PM

12/20/2002

Begging for it :  If anyone has an MP3 of Johnny Cash singing 'Personal Jesus' please let me know. I figure he's probably comfortably off financially, and the less money he has the more gritty and real his songs will be.
posted by Garreth at 9:41 AM

By the way :  I have nothing to do with the treatment of substance abuse at Passages, Malibu. But perhaps I'll go there, and like a burglar picking up new tricks in the slammer, I'll find out new substance abuse tricks. Lately, I've been tinkering with super strength cider. I like it. In about fifteen minutes you can be foaming at the mouth, wailing and gnashing, and giggling hysterically.

If I owned a cider factory, I'd add more anti-emetics though - as there's only so many cans of the sweet and sickly syrup you can drink before you start gagging. The headlines would read, "Anti-vomit formula increases cider sales in the homeless population. Stock soars in depression." Followed by: "Cider CEO implicated in 25 drink related fatalities on the streets of London. 'The customer base could all be dead soon,' says Morgan Stanley who downgrades its rating to sell."

Rather than booze at a alcohol addiction centre, Chuck Palahniuk (Fight club bloke) decribes sex at a sex addict workshop in a very amusing way.

His description of brinkmanship is also an amusing look at leaving things until the last minute to imbue them with an additional sense of drama. I think that's how I live my life; if something's not exciting enough but quite important (moving house, finishing a piece of work for a new client, getting a mortgage), get intoxicated and then try it - it'll be more fun.

posted by Garreth at 3:58 AM

12/18/2002

When good pets turn bad :  The great thing about not seeing people in several years is that you can change the way you look and turn up in pub toilets and frighten them. A mad stare in the eye accompanied by a jab in the guts normally produces a look on your victim of confusion and fear. "Do I know you?". See Dear Diedre's photo story of what followed. I lit the fire near Canada Water, in case you were worried about the London Eye burning down.
posted by Garreth at 4:11 AM

12/17/2002

White Russians, Black Tuesday :  Monday, wrote Mr. Kipling, the ideal time to sit down and try to drink as much Stella as is humanly possible with some old chums. Under the guise of reminisicing on old times, many strong continental lagers were consumed by two fifths of the attendees in an attempt to gain advantage from an equally shared bar tab. The consequences were as predictable as a rabid scramble at last orders in a Glaswegian pub. After the drama was over, the ride home was less than peaceful, perched as I was on the rear shopping rail of Johnny the Fox's bicycle. The ride home lasted for some side-splitting minutes, as John negotiated the large traffic calming devices on the roads. After many wobbles and near misses with those troublesome stationary vehicles, I caved in to gravity, and decided to wend the rest of my way home on foot.

Today was necessarily brain damaged, and unproductive.

Grey haired man in office: Does anyone have a HP 710?
Ron Malibu: No idea what that is, no
Ghmio: Are there any mathematicians in this office?
RM, pausing: Errr. Maybe. Do you need to do some tricky long division?
Ghmio, looking mortified and perturbed: I need someone with a specific calculator urgently.
RM: Don't we all. Er. Try over there.
Ghmio walks off looking miffed.

RM finds a mobile phone and starts playing with it: Oooh look, a colour phone eveyone, who shall we phone.
Phone: beep beep beep.

Turns out that the Ghmio was John Mayo, ex chief of a large multinational worth about 40 billion dollars. Ha. How impressed was he with me, and the fact that I found his phone and started playing with it? Very, very.

posted by Garreth at 12:39 PM

I wanna do that :  Now normally, I don't go in for all this Christmas cheer nonsense. Free parties and drunken revellers of questionable moral integrity - perhaps, trees and baubels - perhaps not. But santarchy looks great - no one can stop 100 drunk santas....


...Looks like I'm going to have to start my own lodge in London to get some Santa action...

posted by Garreth at 9:45 AM

12/12/2002

Hot Date :  Imagine, me, the thirteenth duke of hammersmith, in the reception of the hotel with all those pool boys. With my reputation.

Having got suitably sedated for the flight home, on which Ramon had assured me would arrive in Hingerland that evening, the hotel staff looked at us with jaw-dropping disbelief. For this heroic duo, having packed their bags, and exploded the last bottle with a firework in their holiday palace, it seemed strange to find that the flight was to be on the following day. Ramon is a muppet.
posted by Garreth at 11:26 AM

Drink and Dial :  In the information age, drink and dial, the process of running up huge phone bills from international calls whose content you can't recall, has become alcopops and typing. But it's not a catchy title. Suggestions, or as Neddy would say, "Comment?"


posted by Garreth at 9:22 AM

Dance little sister :  Phrases bouncing around my bonce from their incessant delivery by our beer swilling, toothless and girl gifting, fishing captain: "Hey you. Call de fis", "Tek it an run.", "Don't want small an cleva fis, want him big an hungry."
posted by Garreth at 9:19 AM

New haircut, new insults :  Now I know you kids like to tease people about their haircuts. But you have to be original. Best insults appearing soon to herald my new barnet:

• Terence Trent D'Arby
• The British Bulldog
• Bo Derek in Ten
• Sean Michaels (from certain angles)
• ...

Return to the Sauce :  In the Gambia, aka the Ganjier, it is not wise to leave one's travelling partner unattended for too long. Invariably on one's return, said partner is spread-eagled unconscious, or surrounded by bumsters, but fortunately, never both at the same time. Yet. It would be a simpler matter to motivate a junkie quadraplegic to become a cheerleader that to raise my half-Spanish, half-mad compadre after finding him surrounded by roaches.

But last night was different. I had gone for the daily massage, and topped it off with a new haircut, leaving Ramon alone for a staggering two hours. On my return to the palace we are staying in, I was shocked to find him awake, and in fine fettle, surrounded as he was, by empty beer bottles. All this before we were to go on a "Bar Safari" - a ruse by the tour operator reps to get backhanders from local bar owners in return for dragging pink and red Europeans into their establishments, one after another. Two coaches were provided to allow a "hassle-free" experience when moving between bars, i.e. to keep the bumsters at bay. Hassle eventually came our way from a bumster of a different kind. There was a noticeable colour polarity separating holiday-makers from the local hookers, and despite the crowd of pissheads being fiercely and overtly heterosexual, Ramon managed to get hit on by the only overt homosexual I have seen in Gambia. Ramon then palmed him off in my direction. Not literally, you understand, but rather by saying that I would be interested in talking to him. He had big muscles, but was not really my type, being a bloke and all.

After a bit of staggering between bars and buses, we were missing the attention of the local hasslers, and were plotting on better ways of dealing with touts and hustlers. Suggestions from myself included shouting, "That heroin you sold me last night was shit!", or simply telling them to go away while burning the local currency. Ramon was a little more extreme, suggesting rounding them up and baseball batting them to death, or shooting them. It was probably best that he had worked his way through our stock of fireworks earlier in the evening, or there would have been ugly scenes with large bangers, burning notes, coin schrapnel, and bleeding beggars.

The morning found our palace a little sullied, and Ramon retching noisily in the bathroom between the hours of four and nine. After the cacophonous stomach-emptying had carried on for five hours, I awoke. Just in time for me to get on a quad-bike beach and bush safari, which thankfully did not involve shots in a series of bars, or smoking cheeba with chimps en route. The journey was quite tremendous for working off hangovers - both mine and that of a foul-mouthed Brummie from the bar-crawl, with the thoughtful attachment of a cool-box full of fluids to one of the vehicles. After four hours of dirt and spinning wheels, I realised that I had left Ramon unattended for too long, and returned. Luckily he was still where he was left, prostrate and moaning, half off and half on his bed.

I'm off to check on him now, to make sure he hasn't thrown any explosives into the pool, and if I lose him at the airport later, I hope he doesn't get carted away and destroyed by security staff with a controlled explosion.

posted by Garreth at 9:05 AM

Uncle Nobby, the small rodent fancier :  I saw the news today, and none of you have murdered UB40. I'm going to ask for a refund on my latest book purchases - "Neuro Linguistic Programming for Beginners",and "NLP for Evil Psychotics"

Tired of standing in custard?
posted by Garreth at 8:37 AM

12/10/2002

Our survey says.... :  Top lines that a Gambian bumster might use to weave an exciting sales pitch from:

• Welcum to de Gambia, yu ar welcum in owah cuntree
• Weyah is yuah wife?
• Later we can meet some nice girl. Not like de naughty girl. De naughty girl have many diseases and maggots - she is prostitute from Nigeria. Or Senegal
• Yu welcum
• I love reggae muzik. Cum to de Rasta Garden. Man can skin-up no prahblem
• You smoke de ganja?
• Come home and marry my sister
• I give yu wan luckiy necklace
• My name is Omar Shariff / Lewis Armstrong / Neil Armstrong III / Jimmy Fixer
• Nice to be nice
• You like chase de dragons?
• psssssssst. Jay rule. pssssst

I am most ill when I'm rhyming and stealin :  Got up in de mornin
Wantin some breakfast
Ended up drinking lager all day on a small motor boat that our gap-toothed captain had to hotwire to ellicit movement. After a few casts on our sports fishing mission, we managed to snag a large fish. Despite my childlike wonder at this new sport, I did not fail to be thoroughly surprised when hauling a 12 kilogram captain fish from the Atlantic. I think my exact words were , "F*ck me!", and even the captain danced around with glee at the prospect of enough food for his family of six, and that of his brother.

After yesterday's outing in which our boat netted 120 juvenile fish, I had thought I had got over the revulsion factor. Don't get me wrong, I love fishing. The sitting, the drifting, the maggots. But yesterday we were pulling up baby fish faster than our faux Jamaican host could shout, "One foe de laydeez!", I thought it pretty grim for local fish stocks. Sandwiches were deployed against tourist bellies at around midday. During our lunchbreak, the fish under the water had it easy. Those drowning in the bucket around which we sat eating sardine sandwiches didn't have it so easy.

However, today, when we landed our monster 12 kg fish, there was no quarter either. "Can we kill it?",
"No, only de barracuda, cos dey bite people."
"Yes, but can't we put this one out of it's misery?"
"Only de barracuda"
"Oh."

The captain decided that out of sight was out of mind, even if we could hear the monster fish flapping around as it drowned below deck. But it wasn't until I pulled up an angel fish, and incorrectly identified it as a butterfly fish, that my mind spun back to my marine conservation days. Luckily, any feeling of environmental destruction soon came to an end in the next seven bottles of Jul Brew. This is Gambia's answer to beer. It even wins 'best lager to be brewed and distributed in a state monopoly' prizes here in Gambia, but strangely enough, not every year.

You can take the fish out of the sea, but you can't take the sea away from Gambia.
posted by Garreth at 3:25 PM

Kill UB40 :  Apparently, UB40 should be gassed. Most people can only name one band which is named after a rule or law which is worth listening to. Generally, it's not UB40, which may or may not be named after an unemployment benefit form in the UK. (If it is, they should start claiming the royalties from the sad tossers who buy their dubious covers, and stop taxing the UK's hard grafters)

Front 242 might be named after something to do with a UN declaration that invading people is bad. I heard some wrinkly old geezer talking about peas and 242 and resolution 1441 blah blah blah. So maybe there is a band named after a form / rule / paragraph in the karma sutra that is worth listening to. But it ain't You Be Farting Forty.

That chin-out, eyes-closed-in-crooning-reverie tosser that fronts said band should be first against the wall come the day of the glorious revolution. "Red, red whine" my arse. The only useful thing about said band is to point out feckless Reggae phonies, who will whiffle away to the boings of a crap cover band and declare that UB40 are "cool as a cucumber and sound as a quid innit?". Even I know that UB40 are the ultimate cover band phonies themselves. Shooting is too good for them.
posted by Garreth at 3:09 PM

12/09/2002

Rasta Garden :  "I hate Reggae"
"OK they not arlweyz play reggay muzik. All types ah muzik"
"And I don't want to smoke any Ganja. It's illegal and against my religion."
"Not arl spliffin deyah. Some gud drummin too."
The Reggae Garden seems to be Gambian for a debauched night out, but as yet, the fearless duo have resisted its 'in the middle of nowhere, taxi ride away from sense and sensibility' appeal....
posted by Garreth at 3:55 PM

12/08/2002

And dey rub us in bamboo oil :  'When we are born, we are same same colour as you. Then our muddahs rub in bamboo cream, make us strong, and de bones, and the skin turn black.'

My arse. I was basically buttered by a large handed lady on the beach this afternoon, after trying to raise my travelling partner's anti by entering into the 5th massage of the day. Claiming to perform massage, butter was slapped over all of my sunburnt skin. Not until the unctuous lady grabbed my sandy feet did the true nature of the massage become clear. I was to be rubbed down like a heavily painted door with a sandy working fluid . Skin was rent from my surface by strong blasts of coarse abrasion.
posted by Garreth at 6:01 PM

Anti bumster slang :  If an ear-to-ear smiling tourist with fresh from the jumbo bleached white skin is to pass a fully locked-on bumster and dissuade them from prolonged nonsense-preaching they must simply follow the following rules:

• Never try to reason or use logical trains of thought in discussion with a bumster - reason never prevails as much as repitition in a low tone
• String together random sorties of words. To keep it refreshing, try to move between noun, verb and adjective at a good pace
• Smile goggle-eyed at them and blow raspberries at them
• Tell them that your old banana (European bachelorette on the make with an African partner) has run off with your strawberry (Your hunky studmuffin ginger haired demi-god)

Bumsters :  And in Gambia they are called bumsters. A good word to know in international street-personnel scrabble. Or hangman. With imaginative names like Lewis Armstrong (sic) 'cos ahm playin the trumpet', but with second names such as 'Jimmy Fixer, because I'm allays fixin tings.' they can reliably single out ginger deloriens and foist local goods and services onto them.

First off, the bumsters, bumboys and bottomburps festooned illicit drugs on us. We were offered grass, and the opportunity to chase de dragon with our new rastafarali-gee friends.

No disrespect for the bleary-eyed bumalares, but their patter was a bit thin. I'm quite happy to agree that people on holiday need only a few very simple choices to grant them their own individual path to paradise, but to leave out chocolate ice-cream bars as one of the stepping stones is a heresy. I know when I'm on holiday when I've got a Magnum chocolate ice cream bar in my hand. But some people appear to need a lousy tape recorder with the ill-fated half scratched to death Bob Marley tape.

Go away you skanky bleeders, try some less cliched musac, and let us figure out for ourselves where we are. And the path to self-enlightenment does not always have to involve 'Buffalo soldyas'.
posted by Garreth at 5:35 PM

And there are two tiers :  Some people take for granted their social sphere in the west. Oh the fervour of the zealot. You take it for granted that most of the people who you interact with socially are from a similar socio-economic background. Let's face it boys and girls, many of us have ever lived hand-to-mouth with the people in our own countries who scam on the street and live by their wits. Luckily, when you come to a country like Gambia, most of the people you meet waiting outside hotels for us tourist sweet meat aren't likely to have studied clay modelling under the influence of peyote for three years at the tax-payer's expense to get them in their unrivalled position of weighty debt.
posted by Garreth at 5:26 PM

Top tips for visitors :  to Gambia from London. The flight will take approximately six hours. Under no circumstance should you go out the night before said flight and inadvertantly ending closing bars having rounds of random rum-based shooters. Followed by a curry in which the menu itself yields instructions telling the unwary diner to steer clear of this 'satanically hot curry'. Much ado about nothing on the plane, and one can land at ease with one's innards in Gambia.
posted by Garreth at 5:21 PM

12/04/2002

The only side-effect of a heavy weekend... :  ..is that your brain ceases to function. One night of throwing any shot down your neck that you can order at the bar before they get back with the next one equals leaving your key in the locker when you go off for three hours.
posted by Garreth at 11:55 AM

12/03/2002

I'm just Jenny from the block :  Mortgages in London? Buy a house from someone with money that isn't yours? In fact the bank owns your new house. And it's not really worth all that much. And they'll take it back from you if you can't keep them in their second holiday home and their mistresses in theirs.

Instead of just getting interest-free credit on a credit card, and using it to buy jewellery and then fleeing the country and selling it to a man in Switzerland and changing your name, buy a house with someone else's money. Get it insured and blow the f*cker up. It'll stimulate the economy - biulders will be employed to build, someone will be filing your paperwork, and so on. And if you plan it right, you might even make enough profit to buy that jewellery yourself.
posted by Garreth at 1:06 PM

Lips and Arseholes :  Hot dog sales must be directly proportional to beer sales in some way. It must be a mixture of chemicals, like alcohol and cocaine, which is far more addictive than either in isolation. One thing I find odd about these studies is where do the scientists get these rats and monkeys who are hooked on cocaine, and where do the rats and monkeys get their drugs from in the first place? Strangely enough, I have several theories about drug-distribution networks that generally mean I expect every taxi-driver, hot-dog seller and ski-rep to be able to provide illicit narcotics to all and sundry. Maybe it's renegade zoo-keepers who get these monkeys hooked as they travel from cage to cage.

I've read Fast Food Nation, and when given big letters and lots of repetition in large font, I can figure out what to think. Interestingly enough, the book talks about the chain-mail gloves that workers in meat-packing factories get to protect themselves from knives which the workers 'often don't have time to sharpen'. It doesn't say anything about people in London with stanley knives. Maybe someone should write a book about people carving their hands to pieces in urban settings to help educate over-educated, under-sensed DIY enthusiasts.

One thing I did take from the book was that companies like McDougals actually get the best beef due to their purchasing power, and everyone buying burgers for home consumption is actually getting the bits of faeces that the over-worked meat packers don't manage to stop falling from the skins onto the carcasses as they whizz past. Probably too busy cooking sirloins in the knife sterilisers to do that.

None of this is relevant to your standard sausage though, which is invariably made of lips and arseholes. But they are addictive, not that I'd claim, under normal circumstances, to being an expert sausage-eater, salami muncher, or sausage jockey.
posted by Garreth at 12:49 PM

I get this itch after three months, that no amount of medicated talc can take away :  My latest theory is related to the fact that I have rarely lived anywhere longer than two years. As a student in England, I travelled up and down motorways every few months - migrating between college and maternal home. I have been in London for around three months now, and have had enough. Anyone got any top tips for Central American travel or voluntary work somewhere?
posted by Garreth at 12:45 PM

12/02/2002

Getting wood :  I had seen the one true way, the light, a vision. Building things, a.k.a DIY a.k.a middle-aged suburbia. Unfortunately for the rain forests of Brazil, chopping down trees and making them into furniture is very addictive. This is a lesson best learned when living on an island bereft of furniture but equipped with its own jungle, full of trees.

Like a junky moving to temazapan, my latest fix was always going to be a disappointment. London life makes it evident when you have hacked down a tree and dragged it home. People look at you strangely. The London branch of the tree police has a much smaller patch than counterpart branches in Brazil. You are more likely to be caught if you hack down a London tree, and more likely to damage someone when it falls. You are much less likely to be arrested for destroying London trees if you buy planks of wood from a local timber merchant. Not quite as satisfying as getting wood yourself, but less risky.

It is strangely satisfying to build something for your home. It gives the illusion of doing something permanent, making your mark on the world. Which is absolute nonsense if you think about it for more than 15 seconds, or if you ever do any DIY in the home. You don't even get an autograph from the last person whose DIY you are destroying to shoehorn your own in.

But a steady diet of video games and DIY had kept me from the demon drink for 32 days. Which you might misguidedly think would be good for one's health. Absolutely not. Without a Black and Decker Workmate, I was reduced to island methods of securing bits of wood while I sawed them into pieces. These techniques involve balancing bits of wood to be sawed on other bits of wood, your least favourite knee and the occasional unlucky thumb. Unlike metal tools on tropical islands, British tools aren't necessarily blunt. A combination of sharp saws, precarious balancing and limited skill almost lost my thumb and forefinger.

Blood spurting left and right after an over-enthusiastic stroke, I discovered I had no medical aids, such as a bandaid. Nevertheless, with masking tape holding my fingers together I continued to make progress fitting a wooden floor. Until I stuck a Stanley knife through the masking tape and into my knuckle. The next days gavce me a very swollen knuckle, and made the other staple of not drinking - video games - quite painful.

Drinking is far better for your health. I restarted on a heady diet of K cider a few days later, and realised that wood glue was very useful for sticking fingers back together, and finished the flooring. But the booze had an amazing effect - I could think again, and had great ideas (of which gluing fingers toegether was just one example). Like a newly turned religious zealot, I denounced my previous pastime of DIY, and saw it for the sham that it was. It wasn't going to make me immortal or permanently etched onto the universe. But booze however....
posted by Garreth at 11:20 AM

We remove the obstacles that cause adults to abandon hope. : 
posted by Garreth at 8:12 AM