Andymonium

3 hours and 57 minutes.

That's how long I've been rooted to the couch watching Andy Murray's comeback against Richard Gasquet. I ran a bath around half past 8, it's now 10pm - still not been in it.

A clearly emotional Murray described his win as "the best moment he's ever had on a tennis court" and it's certainly the most entertaining match I've watched in a long time.

Get in!

Hell . . .

. . . is a three year old's birthday party, over and over again, for all eternity.

It was The Demon's nephew's 3rd birthday yesterday, which of course meant we had to attend the ritual kids birthday party, something I've never been truly comfortable with. Let me explain:

We don't have kids.

There. I've said it. I feel so much better now.
Being at a kids birthday party when you yourself have no children is like being at a Volkswagen Beetle owners club meeting, and having no Beetle. You feel like you shouldn't be there. You feel like a charlatan. You can't contribute to, or even understand, any of the conversations. The house is full of young couples, the male half of which you've perhaps met on stag nights or nights in the pub, who have suddenly transformed from being normal blokes into some sort of bizarre 'proud young father' spouting nonsense like ". . . and if you put on Kasabian, he'll dance all day! It's SO funny!"

Even worse is when a parent who you don't know gets chatting to you in the kitchen and asks the inevitable question . . .

"So, which one is yours?"

"None of them, we don't have kids."

"Oh . . . right."

There then follows an awkward silence where you can see said parent looking at you with a combination of confusion and sympathy.

Meanwhile, there is anarchy breaking loose all over the house. There are kids in EVERY single room, there is crayon all over the table, at least two children are crying at any one time, tempers are raised at the BBQ because it won't fucking light, children are fighting over the toys, the carpet looks like the floor of a concert hall after a Motorhead gig, the gazebo in the garden has been caught by the wind and is making a bid for freedom, kids have got into the garage and are playing with power tools, somebody's child insists on showing me 'Diamondhead' from the cartoon 'Ben 10' over and over again, and some bright spark has decided to give a toy gun (with lifelike battery powered sounds) as a present!

DRRRRRR! DRRRRRR!

8 1/2 hours I was there for.
It felt like a fucking week.

Wanted

Hmmmm . . .

Much has been made of young James McAvoy being cast in the action hero role, and having now seen 'Wanted' I'd have to say he acts the part very well. In fact, he seems to be the only person acting at all. Morgan Freeman walks around looking important and being Morgan Freeman, and Angelina Jolie looks like she's recently graduated top of her class at The Roger Moore School For Minimalist Actors. Seriously, all she does throughout the entire film is shoot guns, pout quite a bit, and raise the odd eyebrow, allbeit in an incredibly sexy, lets-adopt-more-brown-babies, sort of way. Having said all that, I loved it. It's exciting, violent, sexy, with plenty of high octane action.

There's just one problem. Well two actually. 'The Matrix' and 'Equilibrium'.
Basically if these two films had a quick shag at a party one night, 9 months later 'Wanted' would have popped out. All the way through the film I kept thinking 'This is a bit Matrixy' or 'That's the Gun Katta from Equilibrium'. No bad thing I suppose, imitation is the sincerest . . . yada yada yada.

In a nutshell then.
'Wanted'. You'll love it, but as you leave your girlfriend/wife will tell you that she doesn't know what all the fuss is about over Angelina Jolie. She's not THAT attractive. At which point you'll lie, and say "Well she does nothing for me".
Have a pizza and a few beers before you go to see it, you won't have to concentrate too much.

8/10

PS - You get to see her arse.

Ever The Optimist

Good news folks. A new Gary Glitter album is imminent.

Oh joy of joys.

Apparently, the 63 year old 'glam rocker' has ". . . an incomplete album that I want to finish. I have been thinking about the plan during my days in jail."

Surely he should have been thinking 'who the fuck is going to buy my album?'.
Can you see Virgin (no pun intended, honest!) stocking a new Gary Glitter album on their shelves?
Do you think it'll feature in iTunes 'most downloaded' list?

That's optimism for you. Hounded out of his homeland and convicted of child sex offences in Vietnam, yet all that Uncle Gary can think about is his fans. That's the spirit.

"Do ya wanna be in my gang?"

Do I fuck.

Raping And Pillaging

This is Kid Rock.
You may not be aware of his work, but he was briefly married to Pamela Anderson and he's the white guy who 'raps' over rock tracks, and I'd like to thank him for abusing a couple of my favourite songs with his new track 'All Summer Long'.

Not only does he have the cheek to rip huge chunks out of 'Sweet Home Alabama' by Lynyrd Skynyrd, but he's pulled the whole tune to his song from the greatest song of all time (in my opinion) 'Werewolves Of London' by the late, great, Warren Zevon!

The bastard!

Mr Z must be burling* in his grave!

* I'm not really sure, but I think that 'burling' may be a word that doesn't really exist outside Scotland. Please substitute 'spinning' instead.

You can view the original here.

Angry

I've found myself to be quite angry over the last week or so, yet I have no idea why.
I've been extremely annoyed by the slightest small thing, and have been quite sarcastic to anyone to offers any help (my apologies to The Demon). Again, I'm not sure why.
I kinda feel like smashing a window, kicking over a plant pot, just doing something destructive to alleviate my anger.

I thought getting out on my mountain bike last night would help me to burn off some of this rage, but my bike broke down after about 30 minutes and this just poured more fuel onto the anger fire, but when I got home and found out the price of a new part, I was angrier still!

Then I get behind the wheel of a car.
Lets not go there.

What the fuck is going on?!

Male menopause?
Mid-life crisis?
Nervous breakdown?

Be warned, Jaggy.

In My head . . .

. . . this is me . . .


. . . but in reality, this is me!

TV Theme Tunes: 2

Be honest, they definitely don't write theme tunes like they used to.

Hawaii 5-O


The Man From uncle


The New Avengers


The High Chaparral


Magnum P.I.


You liked Magnum best, didn't you?
That's ok, everyone does. It's great.

Easy Cash

I don't smoke. Never have, never will. Yet I was flabbergasted, yes, flabbergasted, to find out that NHS bosses in Dundee are actually going to pay 1800 people nearly £50 a month to give up.

Are you fucking kidding me!?

Pay people to stop smoking?

Has the world suddenly shifted on it's axis slightly?
Have I woken up in another dimension?
Is this the Twilight Zone?

Why don't we just give Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty a couple of grand to quit smack, or lob some cash at Chris Langham if he gives up kiddie porn?!

Everyone knows the health risks that you run by smoking, and everyone knows that smoking related conditions are a fucking HUGE burden on the NHS. If you're aware of all this, yet wish to continue puffing away, by all means do so, but I don't see why my hard earned tax cash should be used to bail you out. Fuck that.

This leads into a whole other Pandora's Box of issues.
Should you be refused treatment if you continue to behave in a manner detrimental to your health? It's a bit of a gray area, but broadly speaking, yes.

Drank your life away and fucked your liver? Ok, here's a new one. Stop drinking.
Smoked 60 a day? Fine, here's your treatment. Give up.

It's not rocket science. If it causes an injury every time you bang your head off a wall, don't bang your head off a wall. If it makes you worse every time you smoke, don't smoke.

Or...

I know you like banging your head off walls, but I'll give you £12.50 a week if you don't do it.

Get real.

Ride Me, Baby!

Calling all UK mountain bikers!

You may be aware of the UK governments 'Cycle To Work' scheme that The Jagmeister was blogging about yesterday, but if you're clever, you can blag yourself some tasty new machinery at ridiculously low prices!

For example, if I were to try and replace my Morewood up there with a brand new complete bike, then it'd probably cost me the thick end of £2000+ or so (difficult to work out as Morewood don't supply complete bikes, you'd have to build your own), but going through the CycleScheme policy, you'd get the same bike for £1174.47.

No brainer!

Let the good times roll!

Ring Rang-A-Dong For A Holiday

Sometimes, just sometimes, something can be SO bad that it becomes priceless.
I think this qualifies.

The (not very much) Happening

Oh dear.

M. Night Shamalamadingdong, you promised me SO much in the trailer!

I can't believe what I've just sat through. 90 minutes that would barely make into a Hammer House Of Horror script. 'The Happening' is one of the worst films I've seen in a long time. From half way through, when the plot is starting to unravel, I found myself thinking "He better not be planning on ending this film the way I think he's going to?!", and he did. I don't really want to spoil it for anyone, but if I did you'd be thanking me. As for the cast, well, you know things are bad when John Leguizamo is the best actor in the film! Mark Wahlberg is as wooden as a 12 foot dining table, and Zooey Deschanel (Trillian from Hitchikers) is to acting what the drummer from Def Leppard is to juggling.

I liked 'The Village' and 'Unbreakable', and I loved 'Signs', but I've had urinary tract infections that are better than this film.

Avoid at all costs. 1/10

Anticlimax

Firefox 3.
It's finally here.
I have it. Right now.

Can someone please explain to me what all the fuss was about?
Don't get me wrong, I'm a firm believer in The Mozilla Foundation and I've used their excellent web browser, Firefox, and email client, Thunderbird, for some years now, but F/Fox3 looks exactly like the old one, which it's supposed to I suppose, but I'm completely in the dark as to what improvements have been made 'under the hood' so to speak.

Can any geeks out there enlighten me? In queens english please.

Charidee: Part 2

Let me clarify something before I go any further:

I do not do sentimentality.

With that out of the way, let's continue.
I've just popped my blood sample in the post and it's winging its way to the secret underground bunker that houses the laboratories of The Anthony Nolan Trust as we speak.
I've been a registered organ donor and blood donor for as long as I've been legally allowed to. All it took was seeing my friend's dad as he waited for a liver transplant and that was me, signed up and take whatever still works. I'd forgotten about the bone marrow register but then I stumbled upon Adrian Sudbury's blog. Adrian's blog is one of the most popular you're likely to come accross. His writing is inventive and witty, with no sense of self pity. I say self pity because his Leukaemia is probably going to kill him soon.

Now I'm not a preacher. I'm not asking anyone to rally to the cause. I don't think badly of people who say things like "Oh no, there's no way they're cutting me open when I'm gone".

Ok, I lied about the last one, I think they're total arseholes, but my point is this:

If you have it in your power to save someone, why the fuck wouldn't you do it?

All it takes is 5 minutes on a questionaire, then another 5 with your GP for the blood sample a week or so later. Job done.
Once again, this isn't sentimentality. It's a no brainer.

I love my life, I'm having a blast, and it's great to be alive. So many mountains to ride my bike down, so many gigs to bounce around at, so many books to consume, so many films to digest, but if it were all to come crashing down, I'd like to believe that someone out there would help me when I needed it most. So it's my own selfishness that's driving me. I'm a donor because I damn well want to live. No hypocrisy.

Join the party.


This week I'm listening to 'Brothers On A Hotel Bed' by Death Cab For Cutie.

My 15 Minutes

As Cilla Black did sing "Surprise, surprise. The unexpected hits you between the eyes" and it was a surprise indeed to find out that my blog has received a brief mention in no less an esteemed tome than The Sunday Mail. Now I'd like to think that they selected me because of my piercing insight and keen intellect, but it's more likely to be random chance, but, never one to knock back some publicity, I'll now be listing my blog as The Sunday Mail 'editors choice'!

Thanks Misssy for the heads up.

Upstanding Member Of The Community

Read it and weep, Jaggy!

Women And Other Minorities.

Woman.
God knows, I love you all as a species, but I really don't have a clue what goes on in your heads.
Let's look at the lovely Reese Witherspoon for example, shown above parading her United Nations Women's Empowerment bracelet. She made her first appearance on the big screen at the age of 15 in the 1991 movie 'The Man In The Moon' and has seen her career grow to the point where she's now one of Hollywood's highest earning stars, making between 15 - 20 million dollars a movie, so what she knows about the struggle of oppressed women across the world is completely lost on me.

While we're at it, women fire fighters.
WTF is that all about?
Let's be clear about one thing. If my house is on fire, I want a fireMAN who looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger in 'Commando' except with more steroids, a man who can knock down walls with his bare hands, a man who looks like he can carry a whole bus to safety, to smash down the door of my house and lift my unconscious body to sanctuary. Mr Jaggy, for example, is not what you would call 'slight of build', and were he to find himself overcome by fumes in the upstairs of his burning house, I reckon his chances of survival would be slim at best if Fire Fighter Judy was sent in to save him.

Female Soldiers.
Yes you can point a gun, yes you can throw a grenade, yes you can climb up that wall on the assault course using the rope like Richard Gere did, but lets see you tackle a knife-wielding Somalian militia man when your gun jams, or drag your wounded comrade onto that Blackhawk whilst hefting your M240 and letting off a few rounds at the insurgents. It ain't happening.

I fully realise that my opinions may offend some of the fairer sex, but that's not my intention. I just think that political correctness is creating more problems than it fixes. I mean you no disrespect, but the reality is that just because you legally can do a thing, doesn't mean you should.

Blokes On Bikes

I've just returned from the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup races at Fort William, and what a top weekend it was. Lets start at the beginning.

The road from the central belt of Scotland up into the Highlands and on to Fort William itself passes through some of the most incredible landscape in the UK, possibly even the world. If you're passing through here, bring a camera.

We arrived at the Nevis Bank Hotel in Fort William on Saturday afternoon, and from the outside it looks like the respectable, family run, two star hotel that the website claims. Well that would be true if your family were all Polish, and the two star rating was optimistic at best!
Anyway, it had a bed, which was all we really wanted.
Inevitably, the beers started flowing around 6ish in the afternoon and that's where everything started to go Pete Tong. Some fucking bright spark, I'll not say who it was but he is rather freckly, decided that we should try some of the local beers, including one flavoured with Elderflower. It was like drinking fabric softener. To cut a long story short, we found ourselves at a caleigh dance in the town hall along with several hundred other heavily intoxicated mountain bikers. All was going well until two of my friends, I won't name them but one is a 'relationship manager' and the other looks like The Edge from U2, sat on one of the tables scattered around the hall, promptly snapping the leg off of it, and depositing them and everyone's drinks all over the floor. The rest of the night is a bit fuzzy, but as it drew to a close we found ourselves wandering back along the main road to our hotel past a house that had a trampoline in the front garden. You don't have to be Mystic Meg to work out what happened next. Some of the group, I won't reveal who it was but one is freckly, one is a 'relationship manager', one looks like The Edge, and one has a lot of product in his hair, decided that the lure of said trampoline was too much to resist and invaded the garden of the house . . . just as a police car was driving past. It was around this point that I was doubled over, laughing SO hard that it was actually painful. I should point out that we're all approaching 40!

Time passes.
I woke up on the Sunday with a monumental hangover, and even the thought of any kind of cooked breakfast was enough to have me heading for the toilet, and I wasn't the only one.
It took some time, and a few venison burgers, before some semblance of normality was resumed.

The racing.
The downhill course at Fort William has to be seen to be believed. Huge speed, big air, and that's just the women! Some parts of the course scare the hell out of me, but the competitors seem to have no regard for life or limb and throw themselves and their machinery down the hill with seemingly reckless abandon. Having said that, they are mostly a lot younger than me.
The event itself is run much like downhill skiing. A timed semi-final has an eventual group of the fastest riders, 21 for the women, 70 for the men, who then make their run at 1 minute intervals, slowest riders first. This makes for a great finish, with the fastest runs coming towards the end of each event.

The womens event was a very popular home win for Britain's Tracy Moseley, who fired herself and her KONA down the course in a time that would have beaten more than a few of the male competitors!

The mens race was a belter, with the lead being swapped between at least 8 or 9 riders. Crowd favourite Steve Peat looked like he was going to take home the silverware for a time, but eventually South Africa's Greg Minaar defied gravity and physics long enough on his Santa Cruz to win.

'Exciting' doesn't even begin to describe the downhill event. I thought it was incredible, and I'm damn sure I'll be back next year.

Where Are They Now?

As I was driving home today I happened upon a soundbite from John Craven on the radio (for those not from our shores, John presented a kids news show on UK television when I was growing up), which got me wondering where he was now. Now I know he does a programme called 'Countyfile', but this got me to thinking about other tv personalities that have left an imprint on me as I was growing up:

Judith Hann.
Presenter of the late, great, 'Tomorrow's World'. The Gadget Show of the eighties.

Sally James.
Presenter of 'Tiswas', and the first woman that ever had an effect on my gentleman's area.

Paul Darrow.
Played 'Avon' in the 70's/80's tv show 'Blake's 7'

Daley Thompson.
For a brief time in my life, I was convinced he was the only black man in Britain, then Benny appeared in Grange Hill.

The bloke who played Alan Carter in 'Space 1999'. Apparently his name is Nick Tate, and he was always my favourite character.

Anyone got any others?

Poofters

Just to show you what a bunch of gay-ass poofters some of this nations Premiership football 'stars' are, I've blatantly ripped off Motorcycle News and compiled a small table of injured 'athletes' compared to young Bradley Smith, Britain's up and coming 125cc racer:

Gary Neville (2002) broken 5th metatarsal, predicted 6-8 week recovery, returned 21 weeks later.

Ashley Cole (2005) broken 5th metatarsal, predicted 6-8 week recovery, returned after 12 weeks.

Michael Owen (2006) broken 5th metatarsal, predicted 6-8 week recovery, returned 12 weeks later.

David Beckham (2002) broken 5th metatarsal, predicted 6-8 week recovery, returned after 7 weeks.

Wayne Rooney (2004) 5th metatarsal, predicted 6-8 week recovery, returned 14 weeks later.

Bradley 'I Feel No Pain' Smith (2008) broken 5th metatarsal, predicted 6-8 week recovery, returned 22 HOURS later!

17 years old and he's a legend already!

Summer's here . . .

. . . so what other excuse do you need to enjoy the greatest song ever written?

Enjoy.

Charidee

Charities. They do a lot of good work, I get it. They need pots of cash to do said good work, I get that too, but one of the charities I support, the Whale & Dolphin Conservation Society are really starting to get on my sizeable man tits. Every few months they call me up, hit me with some sob story about how things are particularly difficult right now and could I up my monthly contribution by another £10 a month?

"No."

Then I get yet more sob story followed by a request to up my contribution by another £5 pounds a month?

"No."

This didn't go down too well, neither did my question about why the charity weren't out recruiting new donors instead of begging to their existing ones like a friend with a crack habit.

I support a few other charities, one of which is Riders For Health, a charity set up by the legend that is Randy Mamola to help medical care get into the wilds of Africa. They never call me begging for more cash, they always thank me for my contribution, they send me a quarterly news letter explaining exactly where my cash goes, and rather than play the guilt card, they actually make donating fun.

I got so pissed of with the whale huggers that I cancelled my monthly donation today. I think the woman on the other end of the phone would have had less contempt for me if I'd called up and told her that I'd just had violent reverse cowgirl intercourse with the entire maternity ward at my local hospital!

It looks like Sparta, my adopted Humpback whale, is on her own.

Swim Sparta, swim!
Swim away from men with slanty eyes and Kung Po Chicken, my cetacean friend!!

Black Gold

I hope all the environmentalists out there will be relieved to know that the diesel leak that the Exxon Valdez sprung last week has now been fixed, and all it took was a twist of the wrist and two sharp bangs with a big hammer. Fiscal disaster averted.

Car Sick

This guy really needs to get out more.