Duh …

Still no sign of life in my brain, I'm afraid.
I think it's a goner.
So no blog post today.

I found this on Natalie Dee's site and it sums up my state of mind perfectly.
Hey ho.

Statistics, Schmatistics

Was that it?

I mean, was that was all the fuss was about?
Oh, well.
Stick it in a box marked "Used Christmases" and kick it under the bed.

Here's a gripe:
I've got my passport application form at last and there's the inevitable section where you have to state your religion …
I just checked the stats for the UK; a frankly unbelievable 71.8% of Brits profess to being "Christian", with only 15.1% giving "none" for their religion.
I wonder how many of the people who fill in "Christian" actually gave a thought to celebrating the birth of Christ on Christmas morning; I wonder how many of them got off their fat asses and went to church instead of sat around opening presents and teaching their children greed and ingratitude.

I'm not talking about the Yanks here; some of them actually DO go to church; I'm talking about the millions of Brits who profess themselves "Christian" in the census but for whom that is the end of the matter.
They go to church for weddings and funerals and vaguely believe in some sort of "spiritual God thing", but that's the extent of their commitment.

Their sole purpose seems to be to make the statistics look like we are a nation of fervent believers and regular churchgoers when in fact Sunday in this country is a day for lazing around in front of the TV and most of our professed "Christians" are no more Christian than I am.
Probably considerably less as at least I still read The Bible and try to make sense of it all; the closest to Jesus most people around here get is watching the fucking da Vinci code.

I've been down to my local church on several occasions; the big festivals where you'd expect the place to be packed out.
The most I've ever seen in there is around twenty people and all of those were elderly.
Which for a church that has a catchment area of over five thousand people gives a much clearer indication of the nation's spirituality than the official statistics.

I'm not knocking any genuine Christians out there, but I'd dearly love to see how the statistics would change it they added a category to official forms that gave you the option under religion of ticking a box marked:
"Yes, I believe in some sort of God … well not "God" actually, but I feel there has to be something out there, you know … er … bigger … something spiritual … otherwise where do you go when you die?"

Sigh …
Sorry I'm waffling. It just ticked me off when I saw that on the form.
As you can probably guess from yesterday lack of a post and today's heap of crap my brain relaxed at Chrismas and has yet to restart. I kicked it with some coffee in the city this morning but there's still nothing happening in there.
Maybe later.

Ho, Ho and Ho Again

A very Merry Christmas to all my lovely Blogville neighbours from Scroogey Old Dive.

I'm afraid I can't give you all nice presents to open so instead please enjoy a couple of my favourite festive things.

And The Runners Up …

Fuck me, it's Christmas Eve!

Wars, famine, economic meltdown, the world is going down the shitter, Jesus has returned, been arrested for being a beardy arabic man and is currently in Gitmo and what are people doing about it?
Bickering about their fucking relatives because it's Christmas.

Well, bugger all that.
Here - for want of any inspiration and because after the past few days of Hell I am spending the day chilling - are a few rejects from this year's competition to become Old Dive's Christmas Card.

So if you didn't like this year's card, choose one of these for your mantelpiece:

As usual, click on them to make them bigger … er

Murillo's "Adoration of the Willie".

Caravaggio's "You should have seen the one that got away! You could have fed five thousand with it!"

An All American Christmas.

And a warning to the girls in my office.

Merry Christmas one and all!

More From The Book Of Dive

1. And it came to pass in those days that there went out a decree from Cæsar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed.
2. (And this taxing was first made when Cyrenius was governor of Syria).
3. And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city.
4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judæa, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)
5. To be taxed with Mary his espoused wife, being great with child.
6. And so it was, that, while they were there, the days were accomplished that she should be delivered.
7. And she brought forth her firstborn son, and wrapped him in swaddling clothes, and laid him in a manger; because there was no room for them in the Inn.
8. For the innkeeper spake thus: "You should have booked. We're always full at Christmas."
9. And verily the inn was filled with the shouting and giggling of weemen, the shrieking harpies of Old Dive's admin department,
10. Who - since last Friday - did spend much of each working day vexing and troubling Old Dive by hitting the bottle during morning coffee break and not stopping until they did fall on their arses.
11. Yea, verily; they were totally shitfaced by noon.
12. And they did play loudly upon their Christmas CDs and did sing heartily and lustily though sadly not in anything resembling a tune.
13. And having drainéd four bottles of red wine, two of white and two of champagne before lunch (there being but six of them) they did drive Old Dive from his office on Friday.
14. And again yesterday.
15. And this morning they have donnéd their silly hats and festooned their bodies in tinsel for the further testing of the patience of Old Dive.
16. And yea, they are giggly and their faces are shiny from wine and chocolate.
17. And glitter.
18. And yea, they do flirt in a manner that would scare the crap out of Bill Clinton.
19. And Old Dive sayeth: "Job had it fucking easy".
20. And Joseph did look in at the window and did exclaim "Holy crap, Mary! Look how these painted strumpets do celebrate the birth of Jesus."
21. And the Holy Family did load up their ass and did get the hell out of Dodge.
22. And the rest of us did head straight for Hell in a handcart.

Happy Christmas, Rich

This one's for our Rich, who picked up on the extreme dodginess of yesterday's last photo.
To go with that photo, here's a Christmas song (yes, you heard; curmudgeonly Old Dive is posting a Christmas song) from more innocent days.

Do listen to all of this. It starts a bit crappily but after the first minute you'll begin to see what made this a kiddies' favourite back in the days when songs about … er … pædophilia could be happily sung around the playground.
Play it to your own kids on Christmas morning. The little tykes will merrily sing it all day long.

Happy Christmas, Blogville!

Hey, it's the twenty-first of smegging December already!

I've just finished my annual Christmas card run so I thought now would be as good a time as any to deliver yours, too.
Plus of course, a lot of you bugger off over the holidays and have fun with your friends and families instead of staying home alone and moaning about having no life, like all good bloggers should.

So …
Happy Christmas to all in Blogville, with love from Old Dive.

Click on it, print it off and put it on your mantelpiece to offend your relatives.

And here are my previous two years' Christmas cards in case anyone missed them or wants to be offended all over again.

Christmas 2006

Christmas, 2007

Plus this … I just love this.

Ho, ho, ho …

Filler Post With Real Hair

Phil and Dive went Christmas shopping this morning.
Holy crap! It was festive Hell!
I used up all my swearwords on other people so all I have left now (other than a shitload of presents to wrap) is a couple of signs that tickled us and that Phil snapped with his cameraphone.

We love it when Health and Safety legislation goes to ridiculous extremes.
This was Marks and Spencer being very silly indeed.

Don't you just love the word "fecund"?
And you can just imagine your loved ones unwrapping this on Christmas morning:
"Wow! You got me some real hair! Just what I've always wanted!
And it's PINK!"

As this is a filler post I shall fill it up with more classic stupid signage we've spotted.

After the last two "collectibles" posts, this seems apt.
"Stuff your own collectible animal".
Hmm … bestiality and kapok; a fine combination.

This was Boots, selling booze in the baby food aisle.
The sign at the top of the photo explains a lot about our kids today.

Tasty!
If ever you're caught short in John Lewis and you're peckish, too, you can kill two birds with one stone.
Eww!

Christmas shopping.
Nuff said …

Lemony, Love, Loss And A Werepig

Holy frijole, that SkyMall catalogue is such fun. I shall be revisiting it before long (probably during the holidays when I will have the time to scan crap).

Our own English crapfest catalogues (the bewilderingly kitsch Argos gift catalogue and the WTF-fest Innovations catalogue - thanks for the reminder, Lynn) are almost as bad and I shall endeavour to get hold of copies to reassure our Colonial Cousins that they are not alone in their inexplicable yen for tasteless tackiness.

The "collectible" trash in SkyMall reminded me of a dear friend who once got bitten by the "collectible" bug.
Well not just bitten but comprehensively savaged …

So … Are you sitting comfortably?
If not, arm yourself with a cup of coffee and a nice biscuit and settle in for a true yet tedious tale of love and loss among the SkyMall people.

Once upon a time there lived in Norwich a girl called Lemony.
Lemony was my secretary for several years; a sweet, pretty girl, very good at her job, great fun to have around the office, made a good cup of coffee, filed like a dæmon and indeed was quite normal in almost every respect.
Talk to her for any length of time, however, and it became apparent that something was missing in there.

Lemony had lived all her life with her oddball mother in a house full of feathery screeching, psittacosis and birdshit (made even more maddening by being located right under the flightpath at the end of the airport runway) but was now spreading her own wings at last in her late twenties and had bought herself a nice little house.
When I popped round to see it, what was missing in Lemony became apparent; she possessed not one scintilla of a real life outside of her deranged batshit-for-brains mother and the dreary office.
Much to my dismay, however, she soon found a purpose in life … she began to collect "collectible heirlooms".

For want of anything to do one dreary Sunday afternoon Lemony fell victim to one of those awful Franklin Mint ads and "invested" half a week's wages in a "collectible" plate … basically a dinner plate with a picture of a cat on it, excitingly "created by a world famous collectible artist" who nobody had ever heard of.

Nice …
"That's very pretty, Lemony, but I do think it was a little expensive for a dinner plate with a picture of a cat on it."

Against my cynical advice that wasting her money on these things would not pay her pension, sweet yet empty little Lemony started on a spending spree, plundering her savings account and filling her sweet yet empty little house with hundreds of these appalling, ugly, cheap and trashy "heirloom investments".
She - with more than a little help from Franklin Mint - convinced herself that these worthless pieces of crap would gain exponentially - indeed miraculously - in value and that in a few years she would be able to prove me wrong and pay off her mortgage by selling a few to slavering fellow collectors.

What made all of this even harder to watch was that Lemony somehow managed to find a kindred spirit in one of Elaine's cast-off Marks (Elaine from the tax office spent several years serial-dating guys called Mark, to whom she referred as Mark 1, Mark 2, Mark 3, etc. This was not a conscious decision to start with but after the first three she decided to roll with it and kept going up to Mark 7).

Anyhoo … Mark 4 and Lemony hit it off straight away. She came in to the office floating on a cloud of cheap perfume and googly-eyed bliss.
Lemony in love was quite a sight.
Perhaps - I thought foolishly - now she actually has a life she will stop wasting her money on this crap.
Hey ho …

A brief aside:
Mark 4, although a pretty nice guy in most other respects, was in fact a werepig.
Outside of a full moon, werepigs are a lot easier to spot than werewolves - and mercifully less dangerous; simply place a finger under your nose and lift it up so your nostrils face forward.

Werepig.

You know the word "retrousé"? Well, use it as a euphemism if you want, but there's no hiding from the fact that it's a werepig.
You probably know some yourselves. You chat away to them at the water cooler but you can't remember a word they've said as your attention is drawn wholly to the contents of their nose which they are pointing straight at you.
Pray they don't sneeze.
Anyhoo, werepigs are perfectly normal for most of the month but the day after a full moon they wake up naked in your vegetable patch having rooted up all your carrots and trashed your kitchen looking for your truffle oil.

And Lemony was dating one …
Pretty soon one thing led - as it does with tedious inevitability - to another and I found myself helping Mark 4 to move in to Lemony's house one Saturday.
The cause of their mutual attraction soon became clear as we opened his boxes: to the house full of "collector plates" was added several dozen "collectible reproduction antique firearms" (made of plastic) and a quite awe-inspiring quantity of Star Trek, Star Wars and Doctor Who memorabilia and figurines.
It was a match made in "collectible" Heaven!

We started playing a rather cruel game at work.
We got hold of a copy of our own version of SkyMall, the Argos Gift Catalogue and went through it, placing bets on which of the monstrously crappy kitsch items Lemony and her werepig would choose to grace their home.
One of the things we picked was a quite hideous white porcelain "sculpture" (straight out of a mould) of a pair of praying hands. They had a little gap between them and you were supposed to put your TV remote in there.

Boy, did we hit the jackpot with that one! There on the coffee table in front of Lemony's sofa were three (you heard) of these monstrosities, each holding a remote for their TV, video and "home entertainment centre".

Anyhoo, within a worryingly few weeks Lemony and the Mark 4 werepig were marrried and we waved them off on their honeymoon; a two week coach tour of Germany and Austria during which they learned that they had nothing in common outside of collecting "collectibles" and by the end of the second day they could not stand to be in the same room together, let alone jammed against one another on a coach.

They grimly stuck it out for the whole two weeks as neither of them had been abroad before and they didn't want to waste the holiday, but as soon as they got home the Mark 4 werepig was ejected from Lemony's house together with his plastic "collectible reproduction antique firearms" and his nutjob hoard of sci-fi trash.

Lemony - much to her credit - took stock of her life and reined in her "collectible" collecting, boxing the whole shebang up and shoving it all in the attic.
Once the mutually agreed interspecies divorce came through she sold up (redeeming her collection at less than a hundredth of what she had paid for it - each of her "investments" revealed to be worth slightly less than a second hand dinner plate) and moved to the southern colonies where she appears - from the occasional email - to be leading a normal life as a slightly batty but sweet expat Englishwoman.

Make of this sorry tale what you will, but I advise you to never buy anything advertised as "collectible" or "heirloom" and to stay the fuck away from werepigs.

This has been a public service broadcast.

Culture Schlock

Tis the season to wallow in greed and genefluct at the feet of Mammon and so it's time once again to indulge in a raucous chortle at the expense of the culturally challenged at Christmas.

I had heard rumour - from Robyn and Katie - that these things existed, but until Amanda returned from a recent trip to the US I had - like Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster and an edible American cheese - doubted their existence.

"I saw this and thought of you" she said as she handed me a copy of that Holy Grail of tacky kitsch crapola …

The Sky Mall catalogue!
Yay!

Ah, me … Be still my beating heart.
The whole office gathered round and we spent a productive half hour laughing our breakfasts out of our noses at the essentials of an American Christmas.
Boy, howdy!
This is the pinnacle; the very height of high camp trash.
In fact you can't get much higher than 39,000 feet above the Bible Belt, which is where Amanda tracked this thing down.
And which is about as close as any sane person wants to get to Middle America.

Here then, for your puerile entertainment is a small selection of Christmas presents you never knew you didn't want.
Celebrate the birth of Jesus the American way … Step with me into a wonderland of cheesy horror …

First (and worst) up: The Thomas Kinkade "Animated Holiday Tree".

Please, PLEASE, click on these and read the blurb for each item; it is funnier by far than anything I could write about them.

Until Robyn pointed me in his direction a couple of years back I had never heard of Thomas Kinkade.
What I saw on Google Image Search made me want to tear down my collection of paintings and prints from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to burn my collection of modern art and replace it all with … er …
Actually, I would rather rip my eyes out of their sockets than look at any more of Thomas Kinkade's alleged "art".
This is only one of a dozen such kitsch monstrosities in the catalogue. They left me reeling with nausea.
And there are other "collectible artists" in there, too. Maybe we shall return one day and frighten ourselves some more …
But for now:

Woohoo! An animated k.d. lang!
Er …
I love the fact that this has motion sensors in it and will regale passers-by with a "famous Elvis remark".
I always felt there was something missing from my recording studio and now I know that this is not it.

Oh, merciful Heavens!
"No tree branches to get in the line of sight as your guests view up to 120 of your prettiest ornaments!"
Holy fuck!
Okay, fess up … Who has one of these?

If your neighbour gets in first this year with a lifesize illuminated Nativity Scene, simply plough 'em into the lawn with this … um … well actually words fail me.
"It's fourteen feet long! Eat that, Holy Family!"

The American penchant for festive lawn decorations has long bemused me. Over here in Blighty this kind of thing is reserved exclusively for our version of trailer trash, the Chav family.

I can just see these appearing on Essex council estates among the burnt-out cars and abandoned pushchairs.

Ah, now we're talking!

"Thanks to Time Mug you can have a clever alternative to glancing at your watch during long meetings."
Meet "The World's First And Only 100% Dishwasher Safe, Time-Telling Drinkware."
This is truly what the modern Christmas is all about.
Bugger peace on Earth and goodwill to all men; forget celebrating the birth of Christ, let's just get shitfaced, snog workmates and give one another non-presents like this.
Sigh …
Time to point out - as I do every year - that an anagram of "Christmas Day" is "Mad, Scary Shit".

Hey! Trust!
The foundation stone of any lasting relationship.
Let's blow it out of the water with this paranoid piece of shit.
Show your loved ones just how much respect you have for them by secretly tracking their movements.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha! Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
Click on this one and read it … Oh, PLEASE read it!

Fucking, fuckity fuck.
"Fact!" - Pseudoscience gets madder and sadder every day.

Er …

I truly love this catalogue!
"Bring laid-back comfort to your favourite sporting events …"
Holy crap! This would look great in the grandstand at a rugby match.
Be the laughing stock of your friends and anyone else passing by.
String yourself up like a fat, beer-swilling puppet from the back of a truck.

I'll stop today with this …
Again, words fail me.

And I've not even touched on the awful things in the catalogue for children and pets!
This is too rich a gold mine of mirth for one post.
We shall return another day to point and laugh at those of little brain who actually buy this shit.

In the meantime, I am placing my orders, so look out!