Chuggers

Have I mentioned before just how much I loathe chuggers - you know the "charity muggers" who accost you in the street demanding a direct debit mandate with menaces?

By Fafnir's tail I hate these people so very, very much, almost as much as politicians, the McCanns and the Jehovas Witnesses who knocked on the door last sunday morning when me and Mrs Dracunculus were mid-shag. I used to contribute to Amnesty International until I got accosted by one of their chuggers and realised just how much of my cash was not going to get some poor bastard who had said "Hey, this government sucks" out of jail but to some cunt with a clipboard and a mound of direct debit forms so they could pay for their fucking beer whilst taking a year out.

Now normally I can plan my route from office to station avoiding the obstacle course of earnest clipboard wielding kiwis and aussies trying to pry a few baubles from the horde. However for various reasons today I had to leave work early and take a trip down Chugger Alley.

The charity de-jour was the NCH. Now I don't much like charities at the best of times but I have a particular black spot in my heart for childrens charities ever since the NSPCC started running those glycerin-in-they-eyes-so-it-makes-the-sprog-look-like-he's-crying ads on every channel one Christmas Day and now every time one of their number gets up and starts to spout on about censoring the interweb I have to go and immolate one of next door's brood.

I also have a cold.

Rhinovirus + Childrens Charity + Chugger = One Very Grumpy Dragon.

I don't suppose having Rammstein on at full volume on the ipod-u-like was helping me into a warm and cuddly frame of mind eithier.

So when permatanned aussie neighbours extra Nolene stood right in my path, spread her arms wide into the Jesus-being-nailed-to-a-plank pose and intoned "I'm an obstacle" she got both nostrils set to "crispy"

"I'm sorry. You have obviously mistaken me for someone who gives a fuck. Now get out of my fucking way."

The look on her pathetic little stunned face made my week.

I was so happy that Chuggers 2 and 3 merely escaped with a cheery "Go fuck a goat will you" and "Piss off" respectively.

At the sound of the woman being stoned, Mecca Standard Time will be...

It's always hilarious when religious people try to use science to back up their claims to the existence of their particular brand of sky pixie but this is the first time I've seen the Muslims crawl out from under their rock only to make themselves look more backward than we thought they were in the first place.

Muslim scientists and clerics have called for the adoption of Mecca time to replace GMT, arguing that the Saudi city is the true centre of the Earth.

Right. Well if you were to cut out a model of the UK and find the place where that model would balance you find that its somewhere just outside Blackburn, Lancashire. However I don't see anyone proposing the town famous for having lots of holes and a really cheap shoe shop to be made capital of Great Britain.

So what piece of scientific wisdom have they come up with to bolster the claim of Mecca Standard Time?

One geologist argued that unlike other longitudes, Mecca's was in perfect alignment to magnetic north.

Errr.. where did this guy do his training. First thing they taught us when I did Geology (University of Lancaster, class of '86, I graduated Draco Cum Laude) was the Earth's magnetic poles move about and that "magnetic north" is different depending on where you are, it even flips round so north becomes south every so often. Ali Al Bottyburp, muslim scientist extraordinare, can't even claim that it lines up at Mecca because a quick shufty over at the US Geological Service shows that the magnetic deviation at 21°25′00″N 39°49′00″E happens to be 2.6 degrees. Here's a nice map if you want to have a look yourself.

But what's science when you can wilfully ignore history.

He said the English had imposed GMT on the rest of the world by force when Britain was a big colonial power, and it was about time that changed.

Not really. We were a pretty important maritime power but not particularly colonial at the time and I think you'll find that the world adopted the zero meridian at Greenwich because the Brits just happened to be the first to discover a reliable method of working out longditude during sea voyages. Either way most people call it "UTC" from the French for "Universal Co-ordinated Time" now.

I think it's high time we put to bed this myth of the muslim world being great scientists who discovered astronomy, chemistry and the like. They didn't. At best they managed to preserve Greek learning and just plundered the rest from places like India.

And as to adopting Mecca Standard Time, when you lot can present me with a Geologists that is acually capable of passing a GCSE science exam then I will listen to you, and will still tell you to fuck off.

They call her Slapper, Slapper, Faster than Ligtning

Sorry everyone. I've been away having fun making the lives of sundry West African gentlemen something of a nightmare, plus doing the Christians a favour (first time for everything) by turning the life of a fake "Evengelist" in India who preys on gullable Xtians (there is another kind?) for charitable donations into ass casserole - that one is still going on, he's off on what scambaiters call a "safari" next week the 1200 miles to Delhi thinking he's going to get a $20,000 compensation cheque.

Anyway that's what I've been doing instead of commenting on the latest inanity by the McCann circus and having a right old laugh at the Shannon Matthews saga. But I miss spilling my vitriol about around here so I'm back to set fire to things, always assuming I get paid as the employer of this little green dragon appears to be skint. Maybe Sir Fred will be at the front door this morning rattling a tin, "Buddy can you spare a twenty billion quid in liquidity funding?"

Typical though. Nothing really happening in the news to get wound up about. Dead MP - that's a good thing, Mugabe - yawn. Only really interesting thing is this... two pissheads go dolphin fondling and get fined. OK so how does this work? I've been swimming with a dolphin, that one in Dingle bay in Ireland called Fungus or something and let me tell you a dolphin in the sea has absolutely fuck all to fear from a couple of humans in the same element, even if said humans are a pair of pissed up morlocks from Folkestone. When you get up close and personal dolphins are bloody huge and exceptionally manoeuverable and you know that if Flipper didn't want you there it could fuck you up a treat in seconds and there would be bugger all you could do about it. All what is all this arse about "Oh it was distressed because it swam towards them" about? In my experience with animals if they are distressed or upset they move away from you.

Mind you, read between the lines of the report...

Pipe fitter Jukes, from Castle Hill Avenue, Folkestone said he had stroked its belly.

...

Mr Offord said there had been a number of discrepancies between what Buck and Jukes had told police when they were questioned initially and their evidence in court.

...

Wasn't there a guy up in Northumberland a while back who was up in court for trying to start a mermaid breeding programme with a friendly dolphin? I think these guys were having a go at that.

Dolphins... they're all asing for it you know.

I still want my centaur

Oh what joy. I figured the sky pixie's fanclub would not take the creation of animal human hybrids (blogged about here)lying down and indeed they did not, throwing their wafers and incense burners out of the pram over the weekend they celebrate the nailing of their deity to a plank. And true to form Bottler Brown caves in to the religious lobby because half his fucking cabinet is made up of left footers and would make for a few embarrassing headlines when the house divided and they went through the wrong door.

I am a torn dragon as I do not know which set of bastards to set fire to first. First the wankers in the pulpits spouting bollocks about shit they could not, blinded by their fairy stories as they are, possibly even begin to understand - a cure for alzheimers disease, no you don't want that, it would offend god, you just sit there and fucking drool. Second their placemen in parliament who are answerable not to the people of this country but to the head of a foreign power in Italy. It's these cunts that really fuck me off; to my mind we are a secular country (nominally I know we aren't but we're certainly not a catholic one) and if you have a religious faith you either check it at the door when you walk into the lawmaking chambers or you fuck right the hell out of public office. Frankly I think anyone with a delusional illness that makes them believe in fairies, invisible pink unicorns or a 2000 year old dead man who talks to them is certifiably insane and therefore unfit for public office of any kind whatsoever.

Hmmm... religious and politicians vs. just the religious. No brainer really, take a number bishop O'Kiddyfiddler I'll get to you in a moment.

Look this is really, really, simple. Even Galileo said that "I do not believe that a God who gave us reason and intellect intended us to forego their use" so why the fuck are we not using every tool at our disposal to end the misery of the diseases that afflict us. Hells donkeys even the chief rabbi said as much at the weekend (but then the yids always were a practical people who don't really believe in god anyway). I will make it quite clear that if a cure for alzheimers disease ming even remotely be found by dropping fetuses and cute baby seals into a large Kenwood food processor then so be it, get on with it. What is fucking offensive is people being robbed of their brains by a fucking evil disease and a twat of a child molestor in a robe spouting on that it is the will of his invisible friend that this is so, not a bunch of twatting cells in a test tube.

Saint Delia

"Oh Delia Smith's new cooking program starts tonight" says Mrs Dracunculus, something about how to cheat at cooking, should be good.

Well both me and Mrs D are not averse to rattling a couple of pots and pans when there are no evicerated knights around to nibble on so we decided to give "Delia does Nigella Express" a go.

Fucking hell! "Does a Nigella Express" is a cunting understatement. The first thing St Delia does is wander into shot and say something like "Five years ago I stopped doing cooking programmes because I had taught you proles everything but life has changed and we don't have time any more blah blah blah" when what she meant to say was "That bitch Lawson is stealing my thunder as the greatest cook since Escoffier and I want REVENGE" which she did by stealing the "express" format right down to the sodding St Germain "Tourist" soundtrack. In total she knocked together a total of six dishes, one of which was basically "Get a jar of fish soup and shove some extra fish in it" and another was "Buy some pesto sauce and stir it into some pasta, look you don't need to make your own pesto!" Jesus Christ on a pogo stick, this just in Delia, no fucker makes their own pesto, we've been buying it in tubs from M&S for fucking years. In total a little less than half of a cookery programme was actually made up with Delia wielding a spoon and actually cooking.

But if her recipe for spag bol made with meat out of a tin (a recipe incidentally that was a student staple for years before I could afford fresh meat) didn't make you heave then the rest would. We get to meet D's dippy old mum bimbling around the kitchen and the fossil she's married to tasting her soup but fully 25% of the programme is taken up with St Delia doing a commercial for the fucking catholic church, doing the bells and smells bit at daily mass at Stowmarket (Mrs Drac, who in a professional capacity once went there said the attendence was "unusually high" and St Delia certainly was not there when she was) and then going round an art gallery with everyone's favourite bonkers nun Sister Wendy who had to come up with the all time "What the Fuck" line when she said of some Coptic art "I love the way the eyes are open so wide, it's because they are looking at God". No you stupid fuck, it was because we as a species hadn't learnt to draw properly when they did those.

So there you have it, a 7 or 8 minute commercial for an organisation that covers up for paedophiles, all paid by from my compulsory television tax.

Now you think I loathe the catholic church... Mrs Drac was dragged up in that "faith" and really loathes it. To the extent that once the program was over she dissapeared into the kitchen for a couple of minutes and I heard a big "thump" noise.

"What was that?" I asked.

"Me throwing both volumes of "Delia's How To Cook" in the recycling bin" she answered.

Well bugger me Darling!

Well much to my surprise I tapped in my details into the BBC's "How much has that gurning fuckwad Darling screwed you out of" calculator this morning and bugger me with a horse dildo if I'm not actually up on the deal by about 250 quid!

Of course it helps if you take your cunningly purchased just below the fuck off tax band 4x4 to France twice a year and bring it back, axles groaning, full of booze so that nice Mr Sarkozi gets the tax revenues and not Gordo's sock puppet.

However you dour presbytarian fuck, doon't for a second think I'm ever going to vote any way but "anyone but you" come election time.

From the wayback machine

With Gazzer passing on, just for old times sake I dug out the old D&D fanzine I used to write and edit with two reprobates back in Sheffield. The cartoons below are by a chap called Steve Gilbert and unless you owned a copy of the AD&D DMG will mean fuck all to you. If you did, enjoy...

Farewell Gary

Today is indeed a sad day for I learned that Gary Gygax, inventor of the role playing game "Dungeons and Dragons" has failed his saving throw against death and has reached zero hit points. He is hereby awarded posthumously the status of Honorary Dragon.

I would not be the dragon I am today without Gary, in fact I probably wouldn't be a dragon at all. I got into AD&D at university, went along to my first game after joining the society during fresher's week and absolutely loved it. A year later I was society president.

D&D taught me narrative, plot, character development and a host of other skills as I ended up writing almost all my games after a few weeks and I can say that I was a fucking good DM; I never had a shortage of players and the games went on long into the night. I made some great friends through the game and had some truly excellent times thanks to it. Contrary to its geeky image it even helped me get laid on more than one occasion. It also got me up close and personal with religious types who were none too happy with this "satanic" game and whereas I was indifferent to the religious until them it served to harden my atheism and taught me that anyone who follows any religion is, when all is said and done, a fool at best and an evil twat at worst.

Later on after leaving uni I fell in with a couple of players and we started a fanzine called "The Immoral Minority" so I even ended up learning to draw properly (well someone had to do the artwork) and how to steal time at the company photocopier without anyone noticing.

And although I played other RPGs, particularly Warhammer later on in my "London Period", AD&D still remained a firm favourite. I still have the books and my dice upstairs in the loft although it's probably fifteen years since I rolled a d20 in anger.

Gary, you were an inspiration to a generation, your invention gave me some of the happiest memories of my life and your legacy will live on*. Today there is no-one sat behind the DM's screen, a can of coke will go undrunk, a bag of crisps unmunched and a d4 will roll no more.

Rest easy Dungeon Master, may Bahamut fly you home.





* (And future generations will forget the fucking awful cartoon series and that turkey of a movie with Jeremy Irons in it)

Soma

Well after a brief break from blogging I'm back at work (although not in the saddle) and so coming into contact with the usual plethora of morons in the big wide world so, grumpiness revived, I'll start stomping and breathing on random fuckers once more.

One thing I noticed whilst I was off was that our lovely nanny Labour are getting all het up about supermarkets selling ultra cheap lager which is supposedly cheaper than bottled water, so cheap in fact that they must be making a loss on every tin they sell.

Now you don't need to sample this product to know that it is going to taste something like chilled horse piss and therefore not something that'll find its way into the shopping trolley of anyone who reads this august journal. No this is chav-fuel, own brand shit for the lower orders so they'll have some money left over after buying 24 tins of Tesco Value Horse Urine for scratch cards and Silk Cut. But no doubt lulled by the soma of cheap beer the estate scum flop around in front of their widescreen tellies and don't cause any bother apart from to their equally slimy neighbours on the sink estate.

Now although NuLab are a bunch of lying, mendacious cunts they are not uneducated and I cannot believe that none of them have read Aldous Huxley's novel "Brave New World" - hey they made a movie out of it if they can't be bothered to actually sit down with the book. The lower orders, the "Epsilon Minus Sub-Morons" were kept quiet with their daily doses of "Soma".

So take the soma away from the pond scum and I wonder what will happen. Can't imagine that they will be very happy about it and I bet the resultant riots as the morons start to think a bit and see the shit they are in without the happy fog of booze will make for great TV viewing. Hint to any aspiring right wing politician: you may want to latch onto this and blame the muslims because they hate alcohol, right?

How stupid can people be

As I'm laid up at the moment I've taken up a fun new hobby of pissing off people who send out "419" - also known as "advance fee fraud" - emails. You know the ones that you get where some twat pretending to be the wife of some dickcheese ex president of some shithole African swamp has umpty million dollars in dodgy blood diamonds she needs your help in smuggling out of the country.

Like you I've normally just junked these when the get through the spam filters but with nothing better to do and inspired by sites like TheScamBaiter and 419Eater I thought I would open an account on gmail and play the part of a slightly dippy old granny who is bemused that a former head of state's wife would choose an Ilkley church-going grandmother with a fondness for baking rock buns for her neighbours to be the recipient of several squillion dollars in bent oil revenues.

If I was stunned that anyone would even answer these emails before I am even more stunned now that after two or three responses from the perpetrators that anyone ever gets as far as the "money shot" where the perps ask for a large wedge of cash to be sent by money transfer. As an example at the moment I have a "lawyer" called Richard Crook who can barely string a sentence together in English despite having sent me a scan of a UK passport depicting a middle aged white guy and having chambers in what a Google search reveals is a TK Maxx outlet on Oxford St and as proof of the huge sums awaiting me says he is going to the high court in London to lodge an affidavit and then as proof sends me something from a magistrates court from Accrington, a small town in Lancashire noted for a joke football team and being the birthplace of a certain prog rocker who really, really wanted to be an elf called Jon Anderson.

To be honest my gut feeling is that anyone falling for this hogwash deserves everything they get. But I realise that there are genuinely frail, desperate and dippy grannies from West Yorkshire towns out there who are not savvy enough to see through the bullshit and who think that Miriam Abachas' millions might just save then from a life on NuLabour's hand to mouth breadline and keep them out of the state's piss stinking nursing home. So if me tapping away on my PC and sending 20Mb blank PDF documents to these bastards keeps them from a genuine granny then so much the better.

Incidentally, I have this bridge in London for sale if anyone is interested?