As any of you who have me added on Facebook will know, I’m a strong opponent of this reasonably new craze of being a fan of every-fucking-thing on the aforementioned social network.

You’ve all seen the like. “Joe Swanson became a fan of ‘when i talk to you i don’t know what it is but i can’t help but smile’”. “Kelly Winters became a fan of ‘i used to play crash bandicoot on the ps1!’. “Terry Willoughby became a fan of some banal bullshit everyone does/did and has absolutely no reason to be a fan of.”

Is this really what the world of social networking has been reduced to? What’s clearly happened here is that Facebook, bless its little digital socks, has brought people together who quite often lost touch for a damn good reason, and now that everyone’s exhausted the tenuous links of conversation, they’re desperately branching out into the world to find new friends who share their interests. Unfortunately though, they don’t have any interests. So you get this pile of wank happening. And before anyone claims that it’s none of my business what people do on Facebook, let us remember that there’s now, for some reason, a live feed which tells us EVERYTHING PEOPLE ARE DOING. So yes, it is my business, because I’m the one that has to hear about it.

The most recent of these piss-annoying group things however, is the swathe of groups demanding a ‘dislike’ button. What do people think will change in their lives if they’re granted a dislike button? Shockingly, you can’t ACTUALLY use it to, for example, vote. Although I’m sure the majority of such people would only use it to vote on whether Jedward or… hang on… well, the other one, has the stupidest fucking haircut ever to besmirch the nation’s television transmitters.

However, and as usual, this is a however so massive that if anyone corrects/disproves it, it will collapse and create a singularity powerful enough to destroy the entire universe, there is technically one positive to the hypothetical dislike button.

Nick Griffin has recently joined Facebook.

His profile, which can be viewed here, is, as that might suggest, viewable by all. Now, the new privacy settings on Facebook, which carry it ever further in its quest to be ever more like the paragon of social networky goodness, my good friend twitter, state that status updates will be viewable by everyone rather than just friends, unless the settings are specifically changed. Being a public figure, it seems likely that he would want to keep his updates pretty public also. So, either he can weather a battering of hundreds of sane people and members of unite alike, or he can withdraw his updates making them secret, rendering him with less public eye exposure.

Either way seems positive to me, to be honest.

I still hate all those “fan of” things though.

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Now, long time readers of my columns will probably be well aware of my… is disdain too weak a word? Maybe outright hatred would be better… of the BNP. I don’t just think people shouldn’t vote for them, I think that the entire party should be banned and made illegal along with any other political party that promotes specific segregation of certain groups of people from a country. And no, I don’t care that this would be against freedom of speech. There are, in point of fact, few things I care less about.

However, there’s already an almost inexhaustible supply of “bloggers” (I hate that expression) waxing lyrical about how terrible the BNP is and how people should vote for pointless pansy-assed parties like the greens and so on and so forth, so what I thought I’d do instead is to write something about one of their policies that I find particularly hilarious.

According to the Big Nipple Party’s website, which can be viewed here, they do actually have some policies other than the ejection of all people with skin darker than “Almost Oyster” on the Dulux colour chart. If you click on the “environment” section of the policies tab, you’ll see the top item, which is a little silly. Apparently the party will invoke “the removal of unsightly overhead power lines from beauty spots and their burial underground.” I have one or two problems with this.

Uncharacteristically, I’ve done a little research into this matter.

The total length of the national grid network, comprising the high, medium and low voltage grids, is about 16,497 miles, or 26,550 kilometres in Roman Catholic. Now obviously that entire distance isn’t ‘beauty spot’, but you have to agree, that’s a FUCKING long way. A fucking long way that would have to be dug up, have tunnels lowered into the resulting trenches by massive cranes which would have to get there first, be filled in with whatever was available, and then have the necessary number of cables needed to transmit the massive amount of electricity we’re talking about fed through them. Oh and then I suppose there’d be the issue of disconnecting the above ground cabling, removing it, and then demolishing and taking away the pylons. To me, this seems like a bit of a silly pipe dream.

I haven’t been able to find any figures as to how much the national grid cost to install back when it was completed in 1938, so, in order to make the Bunion Norbert Party look silly, I’m going to make up a number. The original national grid, when completed in 1938, cost just shy of £840 billion (that’s a British billion, just to keep them happy) to install, which is, in today’s money, about £12.2 trillion, which is almost 15 times this country’s entire national debt.

To be honest, I can’t see it working.

Not to worry though, cause the Bendy Nihilist Party has about as much chance of getting into government as I would. If I was dead. And decomposed. And didn’t stand in the election.

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Before I start this column, I’d like to point out that I’m very well aware that this site used to operate, albeit very poorly, a “man list” in which we celebrated the manly achievements of various people who we considered worthy.

I would now like to point out that in doing so, we were subscribing to what I consider to be the most pathetic and emasculating practice that modern life can currently throw at us.

Along with the unending stream of people saying “FTW” about things that are (occasionally) interesting or funny, I’d be very shocked if you haven’t come across one of these ‘man points’ style Facebook groups or websites. For fucking shame.

For those of you who have been spared these obscene aberrations to mankind, allow me to explain. Man points work on the basis that acts of so-called manly behaviour deserve recognition and reward. For example, the larger of the groups on Facebook state that some things which will get you points include climbing a mountain, which is worth 100 points, drinking Stella Artois, which is worth 10 points, “melting stuff”, which is worth 3 points, and, weirdly, completing a Rocky marathon, which I assume means watching all the Rocky films back to back, which gets you an astonishing 50 points.

Other groups offer points for things like using power tools and having a noisy job, and still others remove points for acts they consider not to be becoming of “real men”, which include wearing clothes that are too small, using painkillers, going to the doctor, crying, apologising, and washing your bedsheets more than once a year.

I’m going to launch a two-pronged attack at this, starting with the removal of points side of it.

Ok, so basically what we’re talking about here is being punished for being reasonable. Some twat has probably taken it upon himself to never take painkillers for fear that he’ll be thought less of. Not washing your bedsheets however, is an excellent idea if your main hobby apart from being a massive arsehole is convincing women who find massive arseholery attractive to come back to your place, and then having her dissolve as soon as she sits on your bed.

This leads me, in a neat little segue, to my next point.

How the fuck much of a GIRL do you have to be to think that manly acts deserve rewards? Let’s recontextualise this situation for a moment. Suppose that instead of manly acts, we want to reward something else, say… I don’t know… making your girlfriend a cup of tea. (I realise this is a bad reference as I’d say about 97% of the people who believe man points are a good idea are chronically single sofa masturbators, but whatever). Then suppose that instead of points, you’re getting a gold star on a chart. There’s no actual reward or anything, just gold stickers on a wallchart that will probably be thrown away within a couple of months. Do you know what’s happened there? That’s right. You’ve become her bitch. You’re making teas left right and centre just to prove that you can, and so you can have some stickers.

But that’s not quite what this is, because being manly is not like making tea or finally managing to satisfy a girl in bed. Nobody really wants you to be manly, because it’s generally quite annoying, and involves a lot of shouting, which means you can’t be taken anywhere nice.

You know what this whole manly thing is? It’s the last gasp of masculinity, being drawn out by the ventilator that is modern popular culture. Back in 1950, nobody would have thought that being in a fight, drinking lager (which is girl’s beer anyway) or climbing a mountain was worthy of recognition. They were manly, sure, but only in that they were things done by men. But over the last few years, the position of ‘real man’ has been called up to the stand and is taking a kicking from every which way. TV constantly reminds us how useless men are. All men are badly dressed, out of style, out of touch, shallow, insensitive bastards who are bad listeners. But because women in the media keep reminding us that this is a man’s world and that women need to be strong, regardless of the fact that this hasn’t been a man’s world since about 1983, makes it alright to constantly peddle this new and insidious form of sexism. It’s no coincidence that all the so-called ‘nice men’ in TV are inevitably the ones who are described as ugly in the show but are blatantly so attractive it’s a wonder their more pan-faced brothers haven’t cut their pretty faces with kitchen utensils.

The man points initiative was probably started by Germaine Greer or somebody. It’s a massive ‘that’s nice dear’ to men everywhere, and sadly many have been scooped up by the relentless maw of quasi-masculinity.

Oh and by the way, one of the things on the list of manly shit you can get points for is “going on the-biomatrix.net”. That’s a bodybuilding website. So let me say this: visit my site, and lose all your man points. ‘Cause I don’t fucking want your sort here.

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Ok, I’m well aware that certain aspects of this subject were reasonably well covered and mocked in the last series of “That Mitchell And Webb Look”, but I’d like to take a crack at it.

It’s becoming a more and more common thing to see things like this. Police cars, adverts, political messages, everything is being done with a grin, a thumbs up and the legend ‘in your community’. Excuse my mocking editorial laugh.

Ever since the government started being shit and afraid of commitment, they’ve been running adverts like this. Or is it the other way round? I forget.

As Opposed To "Government Services All Over The Fucking Place"

The problem with this whole thing is… well. I think it’s fairly obvious. The people who make the adverts are, for want of a better word, shit. They’re trying to make everybody look friendly, including those who aren’t. For example, let’s have a look at this marvellous juxtaposition. On the left is the Metropolitan Police’s car livery and mission statement, and on the right is an example of the Met’s jolly policemen working for a safer London.

The thing is, none of these adverts/claims even nearly define the person, people or thing they’re allegedly representing. I once saw a sign on the back of a bus that read “serving your neighbourhood”. Given that it’s a bus, I’d say that it’s probably going to go through quite a few neighbourhoods. Speaking of buses, there’s also one in my town with a statement on the side “connecting Hemsworth”. IT’S A FUCKING BUS FOR FUCKING HEMSWORTH! WHAT THE FUCK ELSE WOULD IT BE DOING? A LITTLE LIGHT FUCKING EMBROIDERY???

But I digress. Basically, stop doing this shit, it’s really fucking annoying.

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While doing the washing up the other night, I was listening to the closing minutes of Radio 4’s news discussion programme PM. The last five minutes or so were committed to an interview with a man named Ivor Ingall, who was not a very happy man at all.

As it turned out, Ivor Ingall had featured quite heavily in the news over the previous year, since it turned out that he was the slightly mental artisan responsible for Sir Peter Viggers MP’s now infamous “duck island”.

For those not familiar with the story, it became apparent during the media/politics clusterfuck of the year, the MP expenses scandal, that Sir Peter Viggers, conservative MP for Gosport, had claimed for the cost of a floating duck island on his parliamentary expenses, prompting those of a sandal wearing disposition to shout a lot and furrow their brows so much that it became unclear where their forehead ended and their ridiculous chullo hats began, and those of us of a more reasonable nature to laugh quite a lot at the fact that Viggers, 71, had felt that his ducks needed a sheltered island.

But then comes Mr. Ingall. He has been claiming on PM and also in a letter to the Telegraph, (excellent form for someone entangled in a conservative crisis), that because of the news media’s coverage of Viggers and his ostentatious pond decoration, people no longer want to buy his “garden follies”.

Oh dear.

RIGHT. If you’re going to complain about something like that, be prepared to reap the whirlwind. “Heytesbury Bird Pavilions”, the company that Ingall either owns or works for or something like that, I don’t really care which, fortunately isn’t QUITE as old fashioned as Ingall himself, and as such operates a fairly concise website, which can be found here, and offers a nicely easy to read price list. The duck island in question is called, according to the price list, the “Stockholm”, and is described thus: “This is based on an 18^th century building reconstructed at Skansen, the Stockholm museum of buildings. 56” high and 32 ½” square. £2,200.00 (+VAT)”. Also available are other ridiculous piles of chipboard that look about as well made as your average crazy golf obstacle priced at around about the £2,000 mark. I was also very cheered to see that the photo used to illustrate the Stockholm was exactly the same image as that used in the news coverage.

But I feel I’m digressing. Basically, the problem with this is that Ingall has only been granted this interview because he’s a fairly well spoken person who isn’t going to get carried away and start swearing on air. The interview, which can be heard here listens like an advert for Heytesbury. He moans that while all publicity is good publicity, that’s it’s there for the wrong reasons. He also misquotes Warhol and states that everyone has their “fifteen minutes of glory”. He then goes on to make possibly the most detestable statement I’ve heard in quite a long time. “This is an opportunity for the everyday man in the street to have a folly in his garden.”

OH YOU MASSIVE TWAT. Honestly I’ve not heard an interview in a long time with anyone who is so obviously just an enormous fucking wanker. People like this just shouldn’t be interviewed because they’re very clearly totally socially unaware. First off, most people can’t afford a bird-oriented folly in their garden if they cost at least £1900. Secondly, most people don’t NEED one of those things because they don’t have a bunch of effete ducks who are afraid of bad weather, and thirdly, regardless of what you might think, most people have got more taste than to go and stick one of these fucking abominations in their garden.

Inniskilling Castle, apparently..

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