Got four minutes total and a mouse that doesn't work.
Firstly, the rumour that I am about to be sacked for blogging too much - too hilarious.
For one, blogging isn't actually yet illegal, although it possibly should be. Secondly, the nature of my job involves standing in a room interacting with people - I think they'd notice if I walked off down the hall, and sat at a bloody computer, thirdly, pffft, good luck getting anyone to do the job even an eighth as well as I do, fourthly, why would some bugger on the internet be the first to know? Chucklesome indeed.

Secondly, Watford's cabbies are lovely.

Thirdly, second date looms. Oh yipes, I may panic enough to not even go.

Fourthly, IT guy is trying to punish me for my lack of an A key by threatening to withhold my laptop for eight weeks from me. How can I change his mind? What do you give the geek who has everything except the influence he craves? He's already got all my photos.

Fifthly, I'm off to Derbyshire this weekend ("no madam, you cannot buy a return to Watford, because your destination is in inner London" - good advertising from the ... erm ... Middlessex borough there), with no money or resources, and a blanket ban from the vehicle recovery company from using their services for a month. If you see a red car broken down on the M1, do wave superciliously.

Sixthly, Big Brother is making me feel cruel. Those looked like panic attacks the bedsit inmates were having on Sunday's show. Are there no psychologists this year simply because they would object?

Seventhly, were I to have any sustained access to the web, this would have bcome my favourite site by now. Fortunately for me, some of it is WAP accessible.

There you go, seven day's worth of blog, in five minutes flat. Ta-daaaaa!

Best Blo'te of the Day So Far (added later): Peeling Wallpaper
"Simple pleasures. One of the baristas at my local Starbucks calls me "hon." She is probably fifteen years younger than me. "Hon" is a word of minimal endearment patented by aging waitresses in diners serving coffee from grimy carafes to truck drivers and high school kids too stoned to go home and face their parents. "Can I take your drink order, hon?" the barista asks me. I want to respond, "I'll have the usual, Flo. A cuppa Joe and a generous helping of your sweet smile." But she wouldn't get it. She's too young and she's nothing like the TV character Flo. She would never admonish me by saying "eat my grits." All I would get is a blank stare and my $3 latte and the satisfaction that I remember some really weird shit from my TV watching youth."

Fuck, I've Bloody Gorn and Done It Now

Topic: LondonLifer


I have to take my laptop to be fixed tomorrow, and I'm not sure when I'm getting it back. I've tried blogging from my work PC, but as I justify rarely taking work home by working intensely without pause from the moment I get there till the moment I leave (early!), experience tells me I can whack out around 200 very ill considered words per two days, if I'm lucky. I don't know when the PC will be fixed (if they find out how many US tv shows I've been downloading imagining, possibly never), so for the next week or two, this is auf wiederschreiben from me. And a brazenly inscrutable stare from them.
That should see off the rest of the readers (what? You haven't noticed the campaign to be offensive? Started way back).

If your life is a gaping void of pfft without me, then have a dekkers at some of the ten Blo'tes of the previous fortnight, or the remarkable stuff on here or over there on the blogroll. They're all strong, opinonated ranters.

Best Blo'te of the Day So Far: Gia
"Cunt really, honestly, is my favourite word. I?ve been trying to use it at least once daily ? more often in polite company ? since I was introduced to Peter Cook and Dudley Moore?s album Come Again as a teenager in the late 80s. I had no feminist reasoning behind it then, I simply loved the word. I loved the reaction it got from people. I loved the fact that this word, those four letters strung together, those four letters that when spoken created that harsh and nasty sound, could make men and women, young and old absolutely disgusted. A word! Wow! It was the moment I realised the incredible power of words."

PS You want to guest blog? (That's me actually begging you, if you didn't realise)
E-mail me your post, (remember to include your URL so you get publicity!) and I'll whack it up here. Suggested topics - spiders, summer, magpies in puddles, driving like a lunatic, creases in your shirt, fat porky bellies, Watford, flip flops, penguins, pre-menstrual shopping choices, the shockingagic thinnifying mirrors in Oasis, body image, Derbyshire, buddhists, pikeys or music. That's all the posts I was going to write.

PPS How much do you bet they won't fix my Letter A problem?

Outdoors

Topic: Casino Avenue

It's been a whopping temperature high of Muggy here today, doing a nice sideline in Stuffy and Humid.

No air con where I work, are you kidding me? If you've seen either my work blog or my moblog, then you've seen the third world state of my office kitchen area; we're not even allowed to purchase fans, and offices generally contain thirty souls, plus hardware. In a darkened, airless room I had to lean over the back of a fearsomely heated monitor to give a presentation today - and then they complained about the handwriting on my discussion notes!
Fuckers were lucky they didn't get a bleared, lumbering monitor impacted in the side of a sweaty red cheek.

Indoors, the heat reached its crest of still, damp and inert; I existed, conserving effort beyond the attempt to stand in poses where the least amount of grubby dark fabric touches overheated skin.
Outside there were irregular drafts of feebly thermal air. The pollution hangs or the pollen drifts, and everybody's eyes are red raw or streaming pain. I've never seen so much pollution allergies - the shelves in the blessedly cool and white chemists are bare of anti histamine products, and most people in the city are on two or three times their RDA.
Lads in South East London with only minorly grey and flaccid pot bellies feel disencumbered, and bare them above garish sweat pants rolled to the knee, chain puffing on a dusty fag as they amble through exhaust fumes. Lacklustre leaden flesh constrasts against the gold of the neck chains, and the faded blue tattoos of a body that works outdoors. Nobody gives the slightest fuck if you think they look like a chav, mate.

The fat lady with the five children on the corner of the estate had hefted out a fleshy armchair to sit in comfort on the baking concrete step and watch the kids water battles. The chair is overpadded, corpulent, new, wrapped in industrial plastic. The thought of that film sticking and tearing away from blotchy swollen legs left me hotter than anything.
I ducked into a designer boutique, desperate to feign indecisive pauses in front of their tall fans. Pre-menstrual purchases glower. Neon pink striped satin jacket, bum-skinning italian jeans I have to peel up over my clammy swollen thighs. In the cool dressing room mirror, inflamed ruby eyes bleared back at me.

I need salt to cope with this. My dank, cool basement flat with a freezer full of iced fizzes had never looked so filthily welcoming. I'm sat burning saline into my tongue, blogging my way through vinegar crisps, caviar (an affectation I can't crack), chocolate chip and Marmite cookies. Tempted to lick the rock salt crystals in the salt grinder.

Best Blo'te of the Day So Far: Sashinka
"So I've got this friend, right, and she's going out with some guy, and she really likes him, it's been a couple of months, and then she calls me up in a real state: he forgot to mention he's still living with his girlfriend. What should she do? (Of course, that should be "what should she do, girlfriend?") Obvious to me: no-one wants to be second choice, it's bad for your self-esteem, blah blah blah, these kinda people never change. She loves him. I can't help wondering how much he loves her. I keep schtum."

The Last Chance

Topic: Eurotrash

Be warned: this post will progress from honour, to shame, to the unspeakable. I never promised you tasteful.

This article, 'Honouring the Brave', memorialises the final celebration of fourteen different nations' effort to defeat Hitler in the D-Day landings.

THEY came together for one last walk with old comrades and the ghosts of their brothers who stayed forever young.

They're smaller now these survivors of the Longest Day. Frail, stooped, white-haired and wide-girthed are the great liberators today. They hobble more than march, deep breaths puff out their cheeks and many need a stick, an arm or a chair to fight the ravages of time.

But they still have razor-sharp creases in the trousers and shoes they can see their lined faces in. Their barrel chests still fill with pride at the medals they bear. Medals which set them apart from us lesser men who will never be tested the same. They still attempt a ram-rod back, the chins still jut. They may be slower of foot than they were when they raced from their boats 60 years ago into ferocious German fire but there is still the same determined steel in their stride.

Age cannot wither these legendary veterans of Operation Overlord.

And as the survivors, now in their 80s and 90s, defied the heat of the French sun to officially walk together for the last time in front of the sands of Arromanches, they still looked like the callow young men who landed here to free the world from an awful tyranny.
Read More

It was the first time the German chancellor was invited to the D-Day Landing ceremony, the men who survived are edging eighty now, and there will be no more large scale official ceremony in their honour in their, or our lifetimes.

I post the link not only to pay respect to the men who lost their friends, their family, their health and occasionally their peace of mind in the conflict. I post it also to point out to American readers the scale of heavily loaded references to Bush 'arriving late' - an obvious attack on American involvement in WW2.
[Context: Some time ago, I found myself on Anne's and Cyn's comments, having to explain the extent of anti-Americanism in Europe that stems not from Iraq, but is simply ever present and taken for granted at all levels. I felt real shock at the discovery that Americans weren't aware of this.
I mention this antipathy not to condone it, or to propagate it further - god knows, jingoism is execrable in any form - but because it dawned on me that American bloggers simply did not know about it, and were shocked when detected. Their shock, in turn shocked me.]
This sort of denigration is culturally unremarkable - so much so as to go unnoticed everyday in Europe, and nobody here has been 'invaded'. Essentially, any imperial power creates enemies - but it seems important to me that America lose it's feigned innocence about how the rest of the world perceives them. Nobody's happy with you guys. They never will be. You can't change that. Get over the shock.

Secondly, tomorrow in the UK is the first and last chance to see Venus cross the face of the Sun.
Nobody alive and in England this century will have had or will have again this opportunity. (The last occurrence ws 1882.)
At around half six tomorrow morning (earlier in the north, later in the south, according to the local rag), if you're outside, and you've not lost the art of making pinhole cameras, you can witness another ritual which won't be seen again in this generation. Try to see it with the naked eye, an' your eyes will be stuffed.

Edit: it's ok, I took the unspeakable references to poo out.

Best Blo'te of the Day So Far: Bandhag
"What if, contrary to the popular saying, you can take it with you?
How gutted would you be to get to the Other Side and find that even there you were priced out of the property market and that it was only the pious fuckers who'd sunk all their disposable income into ISAs and bonds instead of pissing it up the wall on booze, drugs and thousands of impulse-purchases that could afford the biggest, fluffiest, whitest clouds and the fanciest gold harps, while you had to share a flimsy Cirrus with your mates and fight over who used up the last of the manna?
Aetheism - you know it makes sense."

Slumped

Now Playing: Intermittent birdsong,
after echoes of planes overhead,
scratching sounds of squirrels,
and the miniature heaves of
Topic: Empty Fridge Light

It's been a really gorgeous weekend, and I've spent it slumped in bed, slumped in the bath, or eating down my kitchen (ie, running out of food, so eating the dregs). I think a week of going out and partying was too severe a shock to my system - I rejected two invites last night, so I could lounge in my dirty flat in my underwear, eating marmite and cous cous.

Last day of my holidays. Still got a runny nose. So it goes.

Best Blo'te of the Day So Far: Stefangeens
"Perhaps I should just start a new genre where I do not actually write a blog but just describe imagined blog entries that I have not written. Noncommittal writing, I would call it, and I would engage in it in the more transient phases of my life, when nothing is really certain or cherished notions are in a state of flux, when writing down thoughts would give them more permanence than they deserve, like putting shacks up on the World Heritage List. And there is something wonderfully Calvinoesque or Borgesian to it all. Maybe I should just post reviews of my imagined rants, pronounce them the work of genius, but report back inexpertly and confused, and depend instead on the imagination of readers to construct something of proper greatness out of them."

How to do a date, Vanessa style:

Topic: Empty Fridge Light


Make sure you're hungover and knackered, from spending the last few days shitfaced.

Say so, it's bound to pep up the conversation. In fact, make it your opening line.

On the way to the date, wreck your car in the middle of a four lane pile up on the North Circular.

Spend a few hours looking winsomely pathetic at the side of a virtual motorway, for the delight of eight million blokes in white vans, it'll make you smell delightful.

Don't take anything for your cold or for your hayfever, so then the stink of the traffic can work its way through your allergy list and fight to come out on top.

When your eyes start streaming tears, make sure you don't have time to find a toilet to repair the make up streaming with it.

Snot drooling unbidden out of your nose is so a good look. Don't pack a hanky.

Greet your date with a look of alarm and the words "oh shit". You'll make an instant impression.

Wearing size fourteen flip flops stolen from Havaianas' Brazilian builder is so a good look. No, you don't need to get rid of that dead skin. Make a feature of it by spreading your pinkies up across the railings of the theatre, as if you're a chav at the movies.

You can't do better on a first date than pick the most pretentious show you've ever heard of, then sit there quacking affectedly about Dario Fo, William Burroughs, expressionism. Everybody loves a big head.

Belch loudly during the sad bits.

Remember to say at the interval how much you like Elton John, for that low brow touch.

Show her all your pictures of France. No, a hundred and thirty isn't too many. Don't worry that they're mostly all close ups of Pernod.

After, act masterful and sweep her off in a taxi to a Hoxton niterie where the mullets come thick and fast, and the DJ pratting about makes it too hard to hear what she's saying.

That way she won't notice so much when you go on and on about Big Brother. (Do remember to say 'Oh, no, I don't watch the programme'.)

It's okay if you drop a really stinky fart in the pub, then claim it by dashing out for a protracted toilet break. Sure, she'll think it was that gay guy next to you.

Then take her outside to explain the freemason symbols on the local church and tell her about that summer you spent taking photos of remnants of Jewish communities in the East End. Ward off the dangers of sounding interesting by pointing out that you did in fact forget to take a camera.

Get lost on the way to the tube, like a true local.

When asking directions, your mastery of East End geography will be complete if every time you say 'what up there?', you shoot your pointy arm out into a passersby's eye.

Doing it repeatedly to see if you might be cursed is perhaps not your best move, although you may have in fact been vindicated when your finger connected with an eyeball every single time.

If she invites you back, say 'nahhhh', and proceed to spout on about your million cats. Nothing's sexier.

Best Blo'te of the Day So Far: Reckless Writer

"I don't want to go into the touchy, weight issue territory but I just want to confirm my hypothesis about human behavior. I really wonder why I find fat men excruciatingly adorable but can't say the same thing about fat women? Fat men compensate for their chubbiness by being sweet and humorous. Fat women on the other hand compensate for the extra lipid by throwing their weight around by being arrogant bitches."

Ugh

Topic: Vic Jameson

Ugh. I feel like poo. Reformed biscuit based poo. Yesterday I took the ferry to France. It costs six pounds, cheaper than a London travelcard, but you need to get up at five in the morning to get there, so by eleven, you feel like you've done an entire day on a floating council estate already, and end up drinking. On an empty stomach.

I took humongous hordes of pictures, but by the journey home again, was drunk enough to be forcing people to prance about the train in my underwear, apparently pinching people on the arse, and losing at finger wrestling.
I fell asleep on the last train home, found myself lost in Penge (where does everyone disappear to so fast when they disembark from the last train? It's like cockroaches scuttling for cover - you never see where they go), being kerb crawled by a helpful turkish guy who was most concerned for my welfare, and walking for an indeterminate length of time to find a mini-cab firm. Perhaps that sense of safety and security was what possessed me to sleep with all the windows and curtains open?
Today, I possess, as ever, a face only the cat could love, a stinking cold, a camera full of close ups of French Fairy Figurines and blue rum babas, and my flat looks like there's been an explosion.
Yep, tonight, I have a date. Good timing.
The sharking technique of waiting till I'm drunk then asking out anyone within fifty feet radius proves scattergun but effective.
I got tickets for The Black Rider. So although my prospective datee has gone awful quiet when faced with my incredible taste in venue selection, at least there's a sizeable chance of pensioner nudity from Marianne Faithfull.
Ugh.

Best Blo'te of the Day So Far: Casino Avenue
""Ah, this is the one we've been waiting for," said one of the little gang of bus fans outside. It's like a smaller, unrevamped version of the Routemaster, all wooden floors and springy seats. We set off up the Bow Road, a couple of mums-and-kids got on, past the church (as Steve Norris' campaign bus passed us) and up the Blackwall Tunnel approach road for a short distance as usual. Left at Old Ford, straight on... "Wrong way!" Oops. These all being run by enthusiasts, and the 8 being a tricky route, something had to go wrong... a quick bit of reversing, and back on course. Going on a bus going backwards seemed to make the kids' day."

BBheebeegeebee

Now Playing: BB live feeds (SHUT UP Michelle)

Topic: Yidaho

Famous blogger Mike suggested an obsessively BB influenced post:

I've been getting into the unfortunate habit of leaving a full screen Big Brother web feed on, with the volume down low as I sleep, or if I leave the house. Till I realised I've already pissed all my neighbours off by shouting half naked in the car park at stupid times of the morning on a weekday.

It has a weird effect - you start to get irritated by the housemates as if you actually have to share bed space with them, and it makes the Channel 4 show bizarrely distorted.

Given how often they mute the feeds to replace anything tasty they want saved for the TV show, you become convinced your house is haunted by birdsong at times.

Last night, I was drifting off to the weird accompaniment of

• Cameras zooming into extreme, pore opening close up of Daniel's nostril as he stares into space.
• Ahmed's scary dark open eyes on the night vision camera as he lies in his bed 'asleep'.
• Stuart rubbing the fake tan into his entire upper body in the den at 1am, his eyes closed, heavy sighs, and rather too much attention paid to the nip area (I counted twelve nip applications before I felt too pervy to keep watching).
• Another hour of Daniel sipping tea in the cold night garden, alone with his thoughts, while in the background, Kitten's animated indoor discussions (IQ level: "Brighton's brilliant, innit?") went completely ignored.

If you want to watch the uncensored web feeds, you need to sign up here - it costs about #4.20 a month by the time they charge you.
If you want to watch without all the assorted onscreen crap of realplayer, then Craig Pickles' BBviewer has been a nice simple bit of design for a few years now. You still need realplayer installed for it to work, but it's a much simpler interface, no adverts, and should they offer more than one camera stream, you can watch different feeds simultaneously.
If you're into betting on the show (not with money, but you can win a T shirt...), then Fantasy Big Brother is about to start - email Eddie before June 3rd to take part.
If you want to go to a BB eviction night, sign up here.
Alternatively, perhaps you just want to peruse some computer generated diagrams that reveal nominating patterns - and therefore spot which factions are forming before anyone else at the watercooler? Check out Igblan.
Finally, if you want to laugh at the contestants, the spectacular movie poster spoofs done by blogging's very own Yidaho have been meming the tabs for years now.

Yesterday, Ahmed was pissing me off - he let Jason and Victor wind him up, then toddled around the house doing their bidding, winding up Marco. Stuart was pissing me off - just for his naivety, by day's end - but for his manipulativeness earlier, in winding up Kitten and setting her off.

Kitten seems universally hated on lesbian messageboards - who needs a psycho lunatic like that representing their demographic onscreen? - but also appreciated - we need the mad ones to stay in, if we don't want some dull wanker like Cameron to win again. I read somewhere last year the cities with the highest density of gay inhabitants:

The highest gay populations in the UK are: 1 Brighton and Hove; 2 London; 3 Manchester; 4 Blackpool; 5 Bournemouth; 6 Cambridge; 7 Nottingham; 8 Bristol; 9 Oxford; 10 Lewes, East Sussex. Source

Add the BB house to that list.

My favourite stupid quotes so far (I've resisted the temptation to quote Emma, as she's growing on me):
Michelle Am a thrill seeker me
Victor Like what?
Michelle Whatever, anything
Victor What like Bunjee jumps?
Michelle Noah, ah doant like heights.

Best Blo'te of the Day So Far: Madame Finistere
"Sometimes I completely forget the reason why I'm not calling you when I feel like it, or sending you a birthday present, or writing you a pretentious e-mail trying to display my so-called literary capacities and trying to make you laugh. I forget why I'm neither responding to nor deleting your cellphone messages.
The reason is love.
I try to tell myself that as long as I do not forget this, you will be ok."

Screaming Searches

Topic: Belle de Jour


Latest Searchengine Queries

30 May, Sun, 02:00:06 little twat
30 May, Sun, 08:18:19 time seeping vanilla bean in liquid
30 May, Sun, 09:11:40 Sarsparilla
30 May, Sun, 12:24:29 vanessa's blog
30 May, Sun, 15:24:09 bst starbucks beverage
30 May, Sun, 17:32:41 helen mirren's birthdate
30 May, Sun, 17:40:49 costa coffee mushroom bethnal
30 May, Sun, 18:02:06 sarsparilla
30 May, Sun, 18:47:52 alcoholic bevarage cat piss
31 May, Mon, 00:46:25 rod stewart + epping green
31 May, Mon, 01:51:14 Ophelia dahl
31 May, Mon, 02:40:40 "Ancient Taxi" serial
31 May, Mon, 03:44:24 "no voice"+"totally gone"
31 May, Mon, 12:05:30 lidl in london,catford
31 May, Mon, 17:13:02 helen mirren's big tits
31 May, Mon, 18:54:48 "scent of a woman" +essays +ethics
01 Jun, Tue, 04:05:22 "ophelia dahl"
01 Jun, Tue, 07:43:23 enema sex pictures
01 Jun, Tue, 11:48:12 I want to be vanessa's boyfriend
01 Jun, Tue, 12:11:14 vanilla
01 Jun, Tue, 16:48:40 evil dead a fistful of broomstick walk through

Best Blo'te of the Day So Far: Lost in Hype
"Obviously she'd been there before. Obviously she was smarter than me.
Then in the space of a second the following happened:
1. I realised where I recognised the girl from.
2. I remembered her face from her book.
3. I remembered her photo in City Life.
4. I remembered her voice from a radio interview.
5. I remembered her smile from a TV interview.
6. I knew that the girl was Gwendoline Riley.
7. I remembered that I actually had her first book, 'Cold Water', in my Technics bag.
8. I considered talking to her.
9. I remembered another interview with her where the journalist called her a 'sourpuss'
10. I considered asking her for help with the terrifying Easy-Internet ticket machine from hell.
11. I considered some sort of lame 'oh hello aren't you Gwendoline Riley?' sort of greeting.
And then, finally, 12. I completely bottled it, imagining that I would probably sound like some sort of deranged stalker, incapable of working the ticket machine, and Gwendoline would quote a line from a Russian classic at me and I would be forced to retreat to the Disney store and find solace with a life-sized Tigger."

Verboten

Topic: Looby

Do Not:
Go to Bellini anymore, it's gotten crap, and the service is awful. Clue to waiters: if you 'lose track' of where the customer is sitting, you're not really paying attention, are you?
Do Not:
Get pissed and lie down in the rain in Soho Square. Your soaking wet jeans aren't going to be funny five hours from now, when you're still trying to get home.
Do Not:
Run into the car park by your house at 4am in your t-shirt and knickers screaming directions into a mobile phone that isn't yours. Not only is it less pretty than your addled drunken mind imagines, but your neighbours hate you now.
Do Not:
Pretend that Urban Outfitters used to be on the King's Road, only now they only just moved it to High St Ken, nobody will believe you at all, and you just look stupid when you cling to the story that you fondly imagine makes your 'U' grade in Geography less apparent.
Do Not:
Buy those jeans you can't afford in FCUK just because they're the first pair of trews in that shop that ever fit you. If you can't afford the jeans, then you certainly can't afford the pink strappy sandals that you will feel could only ever go with them. And five pairs of blue jeans is enough, if all you're going to do is lie down pissed in the rain in Soho Square, surely.
Do Not:
Walk in the countryside on non-maintained woodland without real paths looking for wild deer if you haven't bothered wearing socks today. You're not immune to nettle stings just because you're no longer six, you know, it's not like school bullies or rhubarb crumble.
Do Not:
Get pissed and shout at your ex in public. Just don't, even if it sounds like a really really satisfying idea right now, by 8pm tonight you'll regret it already. Ditto making up lies about her. No joy, vengeance-boy.
Do Not:
Fuck up the next date. You done good not to go home with her already. Don't piss it away.
Do Not:
Go on the internetweb at 6am when you're out of your tree. You're only going to be rude to people and regret it the next morning when you find all the bread is mouldy and there's no solace in the world.
Do Not:
Forget that if it looked ugly in the changing room mirror, it doesn't look any less ugly after six vodkas in Revolution, no matter how foxy you suddenly feel.
Do Not:
Go to Revolution again. Gary Crowley isn't really the DJ.

Best Blo'te of the Day So Far: Die Puny Humans
"A hyperlinked Sparkline would make webpages like superdense, fractal, layered, zoomable resources, and make the top-level of each topic look vital and organic like a terrarium of squirming data.
The next step would be to see Sparklines in the street, not just delivering data, but harvesting it - being it.
Crawling up lamposts as electricity consumption spikes during the ad-break of Coronation Street. Or infesting the wounds of a pigeon flattened by a delivery truck, updating the national epidemiological database and the air pollution record for that borough based upon trace metal readings in the carcass..."

txt msg frm ntrnt wrdo

Topic: LondonLifer


In the long and thumb numbing process of transferring old numbers to a new phone, it occurs to me that I should validate someof them by testing them. First ginger attempt at this procedure is Cheese, an ex girlfriend.

Message sent by user: Vanessa
Recipient: Sarah C M +44795!962*9!
Sent: 11:25:42 30.05.2004
Text: This still your mobile number, sarah? Love Vanessa

Sender: Sarah C M +44795!962*9!
Recipient: Vanessa
Sent: 11:37:15 30.05.2004
Text: who the fuk r u -- wat u want s this a jk

Message sent by user: Vanessa
Recipient: Sarah C M +44795!962*9!
Sent: 11:49:05 30.05.2004
Text: Erm, just checking this is still your number, cos I haven't seen you in 5 years. Vxx.

Sender: Sarah C M +44795!962*9!
Recipient: Vanessa
Received: 19:21:17 30.05.2004
Sent: Who in fucks name r u txt bk

Sender: Sarah C M +44795!962*9!
Recipient: Vanessa
Received: 08:26:39 31.05.2004
Sent: Wat u V txt bk

What do you reckon? You think my ex, a schoolteacher, a Literature graduate, is fucking with my mind by spelling like a moron?
You think this is a complete stranger, and the start of a long and beautiful relationship?
I so want to txt bk reply.

Best Blo'te of the Day So Far: Bastitch
"I don't give a fuck whether or not you give a fuck. You know why? I don't need to you validate my existence. I can only hope that the feeling is mutual. But honestly, I don't give a fuck. Fuck a blog."

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powered by bravenet.com i say, "FUCK!" The Weblog Review

Topic: Hurtling to Obscurity
I'm afraid there's going to be a lot of Big Brother on here, now. I'll try to keep it to a minimum, but the addiction remains. I was going to try to be discreet about it, but fuck it, it's my blog. Feel free to bugger off till five weeks from now, when they'll all be so soporific that I'll have stopped watching the web feeds and exclaiming 'bet they don't show that on the channel 4 programme!', and I'll have nothing left to say.

Most manic wanker: Kitten the apparently mental lezza from Brighton who just got voted by all the other inmates to spend ten weeks with no clothes. She has to borrow all items of clothing, toothbrushes, soap, everything. And she's one bloody nowty, bristly, megalomaniacal obstructive person, being nice to random females for ten weeks is going to be difficult for her.

My vote for winner: Victor!

Best Blo'te of the Day So Far: Boyhowdy
"Willow, what should daddy write on the computer?

(silence)

Willow?

(silence)

Should I write...Willow is sick?"

Good Things

Topic: Casino Avenue


A few weeks ago, travelling across country with Suprnova and Circe, I noticed that when things break, other people get frustrated. Since October, so many things have broken so many times for me (moving house, finalising my queer divorceage, breaking car, phone, head, heating, computer, etc), that I realised I've finally managed to develop the fatalism about Bad Things that all Buddhists strive for.

Well, sort of. I dunno if 'of course it broke everything breaks' is entirely as enlightened as it should be.

Anyway, this weekend, the six month curse of everything always going wrong lifted temporarily. It was such a shock, I realised the fatalism had become permanent - I actually never expect anything to go right any more.

• I rang my mobile company about the mike on my phone not working, and they sent me a new one, free of charge, right away. You can ring me now!


• It's a bank holiday weekend, and I have 4 days off work.


• I found the missing rubber tip that goes under the A key - wedged it back in with spit (and cat hair), then slammed the key in hard on top. It's permanently depressed, but now if I smash it with my pinky, I get a letter A! Yay!


• Big Brother this year has started, and it's entirely gay people. Well okay, there's one or two straight people in there, but you can tell they're beleaguered already. Okay, this in itself would only please a weirdo like me, but they're also loud, argumentative gay people, thus ensuring more fights than last year. Good good (and Victor to win).

Best Blo'te of the day so far: SarahSpace:
"I could get drunk, but that is rather mundane. I could go get a tattoo on my lower back to complete my slut look. I could take my ?one day I will buy a house? savings and spend the day at Churchill Downs. It must feel exhilarating to say ?$10,000 on 4 to win in the 6th and . . .? Really, I am never going to buy a house. I could take a sabbatical and spend the summer following the Professional Bull Riders circuit around the county. I could just fuck it all and finally join that convent. I don?t know. I am open to suggestions."

Won't Someone Please Think of the Children?

Now Playing: 'God Only Knows', thanks to Grumble, Grumble's latest post

Thanks to Tristan for noticing this snippet of modern jackboot intolerance steadily spreading across the western world:

Nineteen year old Kevin Beebe of Jefferson, Ohio was recently arrested for creating a musical rap cd and distributing it at his local High School in an effort to promote his music and target his appropriate audience of high school students. He placed 10 cd's on car windshields, choosing cars that looked like the owner might be interested in that type of music. Kevin included his e-mail address on each cd so people would know how to get a hold of him if they were interested in his music.

According to local police a couple of students who listened to the music, became scared because they "felt the lyrics" were threatening. The local police Chief admitted in an interview that he never listens to rap music and the school's superintendent stated in a television interview, "we do not see this as poetry, and we certainly do not recognize this as music".

Now Kevin faces a four charge felony trial after his indictment last Thursday by an Ashtabula County grand jury. Kevin was indicted on two counts of inducing a public panic, both fourth-degree felonies, and two counts of aggravated menacing, both first-degree misdemeanors. If convicted on all charges, Kevin could be sentenced to a maximum 3 = years in prison and a $20,000 fine. The indictment alleged that the music, which Beebe admits recording, contains threatening lyrics and references to a Columbine-style massacre at the high school. Chief Assistant Prosecutor Ariana E. Tarighati said, "All we have to prove is significant public alarm. And the community was alarmed," she said. "These kids (who heard the CDs) were scared."

Beebe's attorney, Timothy Kurcharski, said Beebe's reason for going to the high school was about promotion, not destruction. Kucharski said Beebe had First Amendment rights to free speech and never caused any panic.

According to many people following the case, the local police chief and the school superintendent have very much contradicted themselves throughout this entire ordeal. The local police chief, who would later call the lyrics a "very serious Columbine threat, allowed the students to come back to school the following day after he listened to the lyrics, without notifying the parents or searching student (or their possessions) upon entering school grounds.

The words Columbine were used once in the CD as was the word "principals".

The police chief claimed the lyric threatened his life. The "threatening lyrics went like this, "Chief Febel tried to catch me, but he's too fat. He's got a donut hole for a trigger, how about that".

For four days, the local police chief did not try to locate Kevin through his e-mail address, nor did they go and knock on Kevin's grandmother's apartment (located directly across from the High School) where he was seen after he placed the cd's on the windshields.

After four days of intense media coverage throughout the state of Ohio and into Pennsylvania, the local police finally called in the Ashtabula County Sheriff's department because the community was becoming extremely upset with how the school superintendent and the local police chief had been handling the case.

The Sheriff's department almost immediately located Kevin through his e-mail address. The Sheriff's Department would later tell people that they had a lot of sympathy for Kevin because they knew that he was just trying to promote his music, that the local police chief botched this from the very beginning and that this should never have happened, and that if he had intended this as a threat, he would not have included his e-mail address on each cd.

However, the sheriff's also noted that the police were concerned that during a community meeting with 300 screaming parents (upset at the local police), that some parents were so out of control, that they were worried that some might try to file a lawsuit against the police for potentially endangering the students lives because they did not notify the parents (thus giving them the choice to leave their student home from school). In this meeting, the local police Chief stated several times that he let the students come back to school (including his own daughter) because he believed there was NO threat and that they were safe. Yet the next day they arraigned Kevin on 2 felony counts.

Sources: News Herald (Northeast Ohio), Hip Hop Corner NetNews 5 (Ohio), WJET, Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Best Blo'te of the Day So Far: Exhibit 5a
"All I gotta say is that it's just great, GREAT that we're depicted as obsessive compulsive computer geeks who would rather blog than do anything. Lemme tell you something, there are lots of things I'd rather be doing else. Like, sex for example. Much more fun than blogging.
Shut up, I have so DONE IT before.
You don't know her.
She lives in Canada."

Sme LPHbet, fewer vowels

Topic: LondonLifer

My mn cts got into my lptop n they rippe up the keyborsxx. I trie putting the letters bck in the right pl\ce, but I'm relly not sure bout the "z" nd the "xxxszzxxxxxxxxxxx", which doubles up rndomly when it slides under the "s" nd jms the thing up.
The letter "d" does work, but rrely, the cpitl "I" opens lod of windows, but worst of ll, I've lost my letter " ".

You cn't even see wht dmn letter I've lost, becuse it's just not here.

I ws peeing my pnts lredy fter I got memo from Dozy IT guy, sying he wnted the lptop bck to virus check it. Oh fuck, I hve to delete ll the downloded progrmme, tv hows, movies, ll the emils, the dmn BLOGS, not to mention bout 5,000 digitl pictues tht I've never bothered to print out.
Now I hve to give it him for his once yerly check over, without dmn keybord.

If you get n mil from me with ny letter " "s in it, think yourself very bloody privileged. It tkes me hlf lifetime to go bck nd copy nd pste the letter " " in everywhere. There's no fucking wy on erth nyone's getting cpitl.

It wouldn't be so bd if I were clled Julie or something.

Best Blo'te of the dy so fr: Heyrdupesi
"I was sitting on a bus last night on my way over to Umbrella's when an old drunk approched me. Hello beautiful. I was not in the mood to be polite so I gave him a *who the fuck are you* kind of look and then looked out the window. He got the message, staggered off and sat in the seat behind me. I may be a sad old bastard but I still have an eye for the ladies he then said and opened a can of beer."

You Doan' Know Me

Topic: Belle de Jour


Taken almost verbatim from comments to Lemonpillows here, and a discussion in Missuh's comments:

The process of saying things on a blog, and thus, actually 'saying' them to almost everybody indiscriminately has rendered me awfully, in fact horribly, open IRL. There's barely nothing left I won't tell people I've just met, these days.

Suprnovr, someone I've known all my life commented in passing the other day that we "never talk about anything real", and I had to differ: pointing out that there aren't any great secrets left for me; anything I'd secretly wanted her to know, I've already said.
There isn't any deep held darkness left in my soul that needs unburdening, and that's largely thanks to the blog.
The blog and coming out, anyway.
It makes you see how silly the idea of 'privacy' is. What's there you can say that everybody else isn't also worried about or secretly fearing?

I did used to be like that - open, generous with my truths - some years ago, but events and situations made me become a lot more circumspect. It feels good to have lost it. It feels more like me to have lost it.

I dunno if it was actually coming out, years ago that did it, that first forced me to be myself in front of people whose judgement I truly feared. I had been teetering on this precipice of never speaking to my family again, out of fear that they'd disapprove (they couldn't have been more supportive), and a comment from Suprnovr forced me forward out of the stasis of hiding behind inscrutability: "if telling someone who you really are is enough to make you never speak to them again, then the issue is not really about who you are, is it? It's about the fact that you have no relationship at all with them."

I try very hard to show everyone as much of me as possible these days. I have to admit the blog has had an influence on that, and one of the reasons I started it was to gain more openness in my life, after a period where I found myself lying and hiding from *everybody*. It wasn't nice, and I felt more unsupported than I ever had before. After a year of that, of ignoring people who cared about me, for my own spurious reasons, I worry constantly that my friends needed and still need years and years of coaxing to feel that I trust and need them. As Krystal mentioned once, I had made it more than difficult to feel you were getting to know me.

It doesn't help that I was so incredibly nasty and cutting to people back when I was on the run from myself. I read things I wrote two years ago, and I don't even know the person who wrote them. Anyone with so little self awareness as to not even see the unhappiness and dissatisfaction that lay behind the snidey quips and cutting asides must have been either truly stupid, or really definitely on the lam from themselves.
Yeah, that was me then. Who knows if it's any better now?

It wasn't just those two years, though - as a teenager I had prided myself on being 'different' on being someone else to every other figure I had any relationship with. Nobody could pin me down. I thought.
It didn't help that I was always the kid at every school (eight! count 'em!) who was new, who came from somewhere else, who didn't hear so well, who had a funny accent, who everybody thought was queer.
One of my earliest memories is of feeling no-one knew me - kneeling in dirt in a wood, my knees damp, scratched and hurting, my hands smeared, a sharp stick in my right fist, stabbing the left palm angrily, till it cut, trying to make myself remember. Hissing to myself "it is the fifth of April, nineteen seventy seven, my name is Vanessa *******, I am seven years old and for as long as I can remember I have always hated my parents. They don't know me." The tears and the snot and the hissing and the blood and the dirt are all mixed up in my memory with the smell of the woods, the feeling of forgotten seven year old injustice that prompted it - but it worked. I remember.

I look back at the person I was, the adult, the teenager, the child - all the way through it, the person who hid parts of myself, and I wonder: did I know what I was hiding it for?
I mean, if there was a reason, a person, a thing, to gain access to all these hidden parts of myself, then that's ... well, that's a reason, maybe. Although I'd question how fair it is if it's *one* person. (How d'you know they can carry that load? And you want them to carry it forever?)

For me, there wasn't a reason - I just didn't want people to pin me down. But why? What would happen to me if they *did* pin me down? What would curl up and die if people knew who I was inside?

It reminds me of that Onion mock shock headline: "Mom finds son's blog!" - the killer was in the subheading: "Knows Him Better".
Why in heck is that something we're taught to avoid?

Is it some weird hangover of adolescence? Dammit, I wish I could smash a lot of my wrongheaded theories from adolescence - knowing what the worst thing in the world is, babies ruin your life, you already know everything, most other people are really stupid, your family must never know you better, there's a group of insiders who are really cool, nobody understands you, you are intrinsically good, it's not your fault - all of them are lies, and if our society didn't damn well encourage us to act adolescent until our late fifties these days, we'd be embarrassed to defend these points of view as adults by now.

Coming out to my family helped me, because it made me confront some of these issues, in passing. Issues like: How is it bad for my family to know me better? They can still select what they want to know, and reject what they don't. What, they don't live in the world?
If my family are hurt, and reject me, then I'll outgrow it, they'll outgrow it, and we'll mend it. If I hide from people, then what the hell shitty sort of a thin relationship do I really have with them? Don't I trust them or something?

I asked Duch, a friend of 14 year's standing, what she had thought during those two whole years when I wasn't communicating with her (not anything meaningful, anyway). What had she assumed was going on with me when the well of self-revelation and sharing ran dry?
"You just seemed like you were having a really good time."
That line scared the hell out of me - it taught me that my defences are *good*. Too good. If I need help, I have to ask for it. Why? Because I built too good a wall.
People won't question why you won't let them in. They're human, and they'll assume you don't need them.
But you do.

Anyway, I'm starting to rant, but this is a topic that touches on where I live at the moment: if I'm going to be true to myself, not lie to myself, then I owe it to others to be open.

If I'm less than open, there's something there that I fear.

And I need to know that thing, I need to analyse what it is. That's the way things are around here right now.


Hope this makes some damn sense without the key.

Search

Topic: Hurtling to Obscurity

I ask you, how could any one blog fulful all these requirements?

vanessa
fucking iraq terrors head download videos
kinky lingerie uk
Ophelia Dahl
katie price tongue
muscle dyke goddess
penguin-suited friends
vanessa's blog
gynaecologist restoring virginity in the uk
vanessa
full-lipped
ooa livejournal
knickers blog sex

I feel so inadequate.

Best Blo'te of the day so far: Eurotrash.
"The reason we Europeans don't like your accent (apart from you southerners, we love that one) is that you sound like you are talking out of your noses to us. All we hear is a kind of twangy WAAA WAAA WAAAAAA WAAAA WAAAA WAAAA WAAAAAAA thing, which has the same effect as scraping a fork down a plate to our ears. Afrikaaner South Africans aren't much better, I'm afraid, as all we hear when they speak is coughing. Much like the Dutch."

whisper - I broke the blog

All weekend she tried to break the blog. All weekend she struggled with it, shaking the bars, rattling the windows, hammering on the floor and using loose keyboard buttons to prise the electric doors apart.
Finally, she relinquished the task, and fell defeated against the liquid crystal screen, her forehead resting limply against the links bar.

I don't believe it, she whispered. An imperceptible shimmer. This can't be all there is. There's got to be a way out. Louder, now. I don't believe it. I just don't believe it.
A flicker across the blog, a current disturbed from its usual path became a fuzzy disturbance at the foot of the screen.
I don't believe it, she repeated, fixing her mind on all that was outside the blog, that was beyond, that she could get to if only it would open and let her out. I *don't* believe it.
An insistent buzzing sound marked the fuzzing signal's progress, creeping up over the screen. It crackled over her legs, her crumpled pyjamas, buzzed as it began to race distortingly over her hunched, crouched, blogging form.
She felt the interruption in the signal, and an idea lit deep beneath her dull blogged eyes. I don't believe it. I don't believe it.
A feedback whine as the edges of the room pixellated and rendered her life in 256 colours. The whine traversed the blog in the form of a sharp white visible crackle, painful as it crossed her intent face, still blogging.
I don't believe it.
The static made every fibre ache with its metallic roar as a wave of electrons engulfed her, and the room crackled and popped in the storm that spread from the four corners of the blog, and hemmed her ever further into the square in the centre, a thumbnail white cube, steadily diminishing, a zzzzip sound vanishing into the centre distance, leaving ....

.... silence ....

I broke the blog, she whispers. I broke it. Here in the blue screen of death, was freedom. Here in the ether was potential, possibility, more than just the IRC realm or Tron-like figures of her nightmares.
Carefully she flexes a leg, an arm. Long periods crouched at the blog have made such movements seem strange, unnaturally loose.
Gaining sureness in the void, she lifts her head to the current, listens to the voltage hum.
Unnaturally loose.
Unconstricted.

I don't believe it, she whispers. Imperceptibly, a flicker.
Somewhere deep in the bios, a line of static fuzz.

I don't believe it.

Apologies to John Wyndham

Why Journos are Toss, a continuing saga

Topic: Lactose Incompetent

Headlines from the front page only of Sunday's paper:

Wise before the event Posh slums it in secret The birth of the teenage dream The dark heart of America Why wronged fathers are right Shock for teenage drinkers Iraquis lose right to sue troops When we were young Michael Moore and me New mystery of Conan Doyle Does Iraq have a future? Riches to rags The sage of cricket The complications of passion for the over-60s Cocaine deaths double as price crashes Sara Payne opens up about her murdered daughter Military win immunity pledge

I'd rather read blogs than that lot.

Moments from the Weekend

Topic: BillyWorld

Three much cherished ex-pats revisited Blighty this weekend, so it was busy, seeing them and seeing everyone else as well. I'm like a mole blinking in the sunlight when I go out, right now, so it was nice, but exhausting, particularly with a stinking cold borne of walking to work in an extremely skimpy t shirt and jeans on the rainiest day since Easter.

Moment: rushing past The Clink, trying to find an anonymous wine bar, my German was just resilient enough to overhear the bored campy tour guide directing his party of pensioners along the less salubrious banks of the Thames. Pausing in a dark cobbled tunnel by the old skeleton in a steel cage above the Clink, he stretched his arms wide, and declaimed imperiously: "Old. Cold. Lovely."

Moment: an argument I stirred once upon a time resurfaced to bite me on the bum. I was handed an old email from several years back. It was bitchy and nasty and the writer of the email was plainly too stupid to see that they were unhappy with their life. It was pointlessly offensively troublesome in content. It was written by me. I might as well commit genocide now, my karma's shot to fuck.

Moment: instructing a waiter in a garden cafe to Bring More Stuff, I noticed that the reason I was having to be so fucking insistent was there in his toffee coloured steady eyes. They didn't change focus at all, not when he said yes, not when he said no, not when he listened, not when he ignored. Bloody waiters, mashed off their heads to cope with the boredom. Wonder if Jennifer Aniston was like that once?

Moment: Arriving at a frou frou wine bar with fingers so cold they'd gone a waxy dead looking yellow, Melons insisted on vigorously rubbing them between her palms until they were entirely shocked pink spots, and the feeling returned. Turning to Lettuce, I made the second stupidest remark of the evening, just as it went rather quiet. "That's the most sex I've had all year."
Seeing the widened eyes, realising it wasn't the most, erm, inviting comment to make to someone warming your fingers up, and hoping to laugh it off, I dug the hole miles deeper.
"Oh don't worry, by next week the most sex I'll have will be holding onto a safety pole on the tube."

Moment: Talking to an old university friend of an ex of theirs - 'yes he's addicted to your blog'. Different day, different bar, talking to an old friend about an old ex of an old university friend, and his ex - 'yes, he was in stitches over what you wrote about x's fit about y on your blog'. Strange. Yet I haven't spoken to one of these people for ten years, and the other I've only said hello to and made party chat to in the past five or so. Very strange feeling.

Moment: The moblog is making me a public nuisance.

And I blame Rose Madder for telling me I should shove the camera into people's faces without fear of their reprisals. I can't bloody walk anywhere without dropping to one knee to capture the sun on the dog turd glistening by the wayside. The poor bloody three fellas trying to eat their Sunday breakfast in peace in a Walthamstow deli this morning suffered around an hour of me trying to quell hangover shakiness to take something in focus of their snarfing.

Best Blo'te of the Day so far: CGP

"I understand that it is necessary to have a penny, because it is the smallest unit of currency, but why-oh-why a coin that represents two of the smallest unit? It's useless as I have yet to find a price that ends in .98 and, worst of all, the two pence coin is huge. As the second most valueless coin, it's also the third biggest"