Support Single Mums

Righto kids, it’s story time. I’ve decided to share with you some stories of my youth so you may learn from my example. Good example or bad example doesn’t really come into it, but we can probably assume bad.

While I was young, care free and stupid (read: at university) my collection of friends and associates liked nothing better than to savour a cleansing ale and debate the finer points of social interaction, politics and religion. Either that or our nights ended up looking like Iraq if the US forces had been dropping beer, women and road-works signs from their aircraft instead of bombs.

Amongst some of our social circle our BBQ’s were known as marathon events to be feared by the uninitiated. Working in bars did nothing to lessen the regularity of late nights, late mornings and day-3 kick-ons (when you wake up/regain consciousness/get discharged from the ER on the third day of a bender and decide you might as well keep going). In fact there was a while there where our default state was ‘drunk’ and we had to make a conscious effort to sober up on days where we were working.

During this golden age of golden ale I found myself being on the receiving end of a cry for help. A friend of a friend had been asked if she could invite some young gentlemen along to an evening of birthday related revelry. Apparently the birthday girl had found her social circle had less cocks than a militant-lesbian chicken farm. I’m guessing there must a been a series of comical miscommunications that lead to the words “young gentlemen” being confused with “drunken idiots” because there I was telling my friends about the party we were attending that weekend and at no point did anyone ask if they needed to rent a tuxedo. I think even a tuxedo t-shirt would have been high-brow for us.

So the night has arrived and we’ve started the night with a nice big feed, a couple of cartons of beer and that all-time favourite male bonding ritual ‘watching the game’. Someone’s team won, everyone got drunk. I’ll skip the details of the drive out to the party but rest assured it consisted mostly of two cars loads of young men doing what young men do; drinking, some minor racing and shouting and the odd arse hanging out the window. We’ve descended upon the nice little community holding this birthday soirée with all the subtly of the Concorde’s last flight and to be honest, there wasn’t much chance of anything going well when two car loads of seasoned alcoholics turn up with a couple of cartons of beer and half a hundred pre-mixed peel-and-drink shots (In the worst flavours possible, banana & sambuca?  Really?). Mind you the shots didn’t do much except ruin the poor girls carpet...

We’ve arrived, been introduced to the birthday girl, been introduced to her enormous chesticles, discovered the party was being held while her parents were out of town and then immediately commenced to cause trouble. We didn’t set out to start an argument, it just kind of happened. It turns out when you wear a t-shirt with a silhouette of a pole-dancer and the words “I Support Single Mums” across it, you might offend some people’s delicate feelings. If you should somehow find yourself in this situation the correct response is probably not anything like as follows:

 Girl (having seen my shirt): “My mum wasn’t a stripper! She raised me and my 5 brothers and sisters by working hard and she still had time for us without ever having to be a stripper!”

Me (not even bothering to try and explain the concept of a ‘joke t-shirt’): “5 brothers and sisters and you as well? No wonder she wasn’t a stripper, she wouldn’t have been able to bank roll that. Obviously your mother was a whore if she made that sort of income”

Girl: “whinge whinge whinge, something about rights and equality, whinge”

Yeah, I tuned out pretty quickly when I got distracted by beer.

The good news is that one of my friends managed to hook up with this girl shortly after this exchange based entirely on telling this girl what a horrible human being I am. He may have embellished slightly in suggesting that I kick puppies for fun and once chased an elderly hip-replacement patient in a ride-on lawnmower. I’ve never kicked puppies. He even managed to salvage himself out of high-fiving me as I walked past while he explained to the girl about my apparent fondness for the führer and his great plans.

I later named this move the Luftwaffer Wingman, in honour of this stroke of genius (spending a whole night sharing a girl’s hatred of a friend just to get her into bed).

As the night wore on I steadily worked my way through the character flaws of each guest at the party, my particular favourite was the kid explaining how the Army had pre-selected him for direct recruitment into the Special Forces instead of the traditional method of actually using some kind of selection process and training course. Having pointed out that a skinny teenager with a homo-esque ear piercing, problems with authority inherited from MTV and a firm belief that “smoke weed erryday” is a life philosophy might not be the first choice of recruiters for the armed services, let alone for the cream of the crop, the young squire defended his honour with robust verbal jousting. This ended the way it usually does when someone realises they came to battle of wits with a rubber chicken. Also that I’m a foot taller than them.

Having successfully convinced the idiot that his village needed him, I found myself following a time honoured tradition of peeing in the garden. As a general rule at parties, gentlemen will yield the indoor bathroom to the ladies as a sign of chivalry and deference to the fact their aim might not be so steady after a couple of shandies. Instead men follow the old rule of “I’ve had three beers, the world is my urinal”. During my time contemplating the violets and lavender bushes of the garden I spied a cheeky little gnome staring back at me from beneath some bushes. So with the firm knowledge that this would turn into a “it seemed like a good idea at the time” thing, I gave the smug little bugger a nudge with my foot and was delighted to discover I’d decapitated the cheerful midget of the marigolds.

Souvenirs of the night:

Birthday Girl’s phone number

Decapitated Garden Gnome’s head

The joy of seeing Skinny Special Forces Teenager called out on his blatant lies to the point where he went home

The now famous “Luftwaffer Wingman” manoeuvre

Further evidence that I really shouldn’t be trusted unsupervised

-Worst Guy Ever

Getting From A to B

People often have a habit of finding some tenuous link between;

A. Something They Don’t Like, and

B. Something Bad

Then claiming that this link is direct proof that A causes B.

If you’re not sure what I’m talking about yet, have a look at some of these examples and think of where you’ve seen them in the news.

A             (causes)               B

Violent Video Games      Mass Murder

Being Muslim                  Terrorism

Alcohol                            Violence

Speeding Drivers             Road Fatalities  

Being a Minority             Crime

Cleavage                          Natural Disasters

Bath Salts                        Psychotic Episodes

And so on.

The people who see any conclusive link between these concepts are idiots and I’m about to do something they seem to struggle to do; back up my assertions.

You see, when some hack journalist or social (NotARealJob) commentator makes a claim like “Atheism has caused the breakdown of family values” they usually present some wealthy, holy, upper-middle-class family with pearly white smiles and a white picket fence and a perfect happy life (until 5 years from now their son finds out he’s gay and mum develops a fondness for gin at breakfast/Pablo the gardener). Then they juxtapose the Family St. Smug against whatever retarded caveman that couldn’t be bothered finishing evolving they can find and wave $20 at to talk about how they don’t believe in the great sky fairy and they have no idea where their children are but probably should go find them so he can beat them some more. “There!” they cry with self-righteous glee, “we have evidence of our claims! Anyone who doubts us is a dirty liar!”

Wrong! What you have done there is the equivalent of stating that ‘all cars must be red or else they turn into wild animals and kill people’ and backed it up with “this is a car, it is red, what a nice non-murdering car. Over here is a hungry grizzly bear, let’s poke it and see what happens.” Sadly this line of logic hasn’t made it into mainstream media yet, though I eagerly await the entertaining carnage. You have to wonder why no one asks “but this car is blue... why hasn’t it killed anyone?”

That’s the problem with the tenuous thread of these journalistic g-strings. The thin strands of a link are barely there (and may smell like ass, depending on how far you want to push an analogy). They find one piece of evidence explaining a link and assume that’s all they need.

During my time at university I found myself actually turning up to a class regularly and paying attention (probably because it was a morning lecture and the campus tavern didn’t open til 11am). The class was criminology and during a lecture on female criminals the lecturer posed a question regarding the tiny percentage of the national prison population that is made up of women: “These women are criminals, why aren’t more women criminals?” The question wasn’t ‘what made these women in jail?’ we know that, they committed a crime and got caught. Why haven’t more women committed crimes? They obviously have the capability, men commit crimes in greater numbers, why aren’t women doing their fair share?

This sort of logic can be applied to tearing strips off the above examples. If some guy in Norway goes on a killing rampage and you find a copy of Call of Duty in his Xbox, there must be a connection! The video games made him do it! What’s that next to it? A bible? No, ignore that, I’m sure it’s nothing. We’re talking about evil video games here!

Ok, if violent video games are the cause of mass murders, then we’re in a lot of trouble. Call of Duty: Black Ops has sold something like 18 million copies around the world. That’s 18 million shooting rampages that could start up at any second purely based on that ONE video game, saying nothing of the thousands of other games out there training your little darlings to give the neighbours a shotgun-colonic.

1 in 18 million, that’s pretty good odds when you consider your odds of being struck by lightning are about 1 in 2 million (dying in a car crash: 1 in 5,000. Have fun driving to work tomorrow). If someone told you the odds of dying in a plane crash were 1 in 18 million, I don’t think you’d cancel your Hawaiian holiday.

But the news needs to sell something, so they have to go with the minority story. No newspaper ever made front page news out of “Millions Survive Day On Roads” or “Thousands Of Youths Enjoy Night Out Without Getting Into Fights”. So we continue to see stories suggesting that a minority event has caused utter devastation and will do so again soon. IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU! *stay tuned, buy more stuff*

You’re smarter than this, you know when you see a news report stating that speed was the cause of a car accident that there were other factors too. Road condition, tyres, weather, driver attention, brakes, and a hundred other variables that all went into play to rid the world of another BRAT.

You have to ask is the mantra of “Speed Kills” is entirely accurate. I’ve driven exceedingly fast and somehow I’m not dead. I know a lot of people in the same supercharged boat. You’d be better off suggesting that roads kill since so many car accidents happen on the road.

So now you know; alcohol doesn’t cause violence, tits don’t cause earthquakes, speeding doesn’t kill, violent video games aren’t responsible for shooting rampages and the media likes to make stories sound scary.

-Worst Guy Ever

(Homework: Consider the link between Ed Hardy/Tapout shirts and being a douche... odds are... 1:1?)

Three Steps to Success

When we’re children we’re taught that a story has three parts; beginning, middle and end. As we grow up and our understanding of the world develops we see this three-part process appear elsewhere in life:

Three parts of a day (morning, afternoon and night)

Three meals of a day (breakfast, lunch and dinner)

The life cycle of beer (brewing, fermentation, drinking)

The three important parts of a ménage a trios (me, your mum, your sister)

Even life itself can be divided into thirds (birth, life, death/Cher)

The important thing about any three-part process is you complete all three steps in order. You can’t just skip a step. It doesn’t work like that. You don’t just turn up and the Olympic Games and get given a gold medal. There are two important steps before that, training and competing. You really can’t skip a step in the process. It’s like skipping part of getting dressed in the morning. You might try it once, but when you figure out that you’ve got your dick tucked into a sock and you forgot to put pants on, it quickly becomes a very awkward boardroom presentation.

People often become famous based on the following process:

Develop a skill – achieve remarkable success in your chosen field – become famous for your success

Great actors, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more have achieved fame through these steps. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Lance Armstrong, Tiger Woods, Michael Schumacher, Hugh Laurie, Robin Williams, these are people who have worked hard and succeeded in their chosen fields. Paris Hilton was not included above because I refuse to acknowledge “Born Rich – Sex Tape – Famous” as a three part process.

That’s not to say people haven’t tried to skip a step before. Oh no, there will always be people looking for a shortcut. We’re making TV shows out of it these days (big brother, survivor, . Hell, most of our D grade celebrities are these people. Anyone who is described as a “Reality TV Star” is not actually famous, they’re just noticed. They’ve skipped part of the process and now they’re trying to be famous without actually having achieved anything. Seriously, who the hell are the Kardashians? (Aside from a clan of people that wanted a group discount on monogrammed towels)

We’re seeing more and more the problems associated with skipping step two these days. Rebecca Black wants to be home-schooled now because she gets teased at school.

1.       Harden up you tone-deaf twat, it’s high school, you’re lucky you’re not getting shot.

2.       This is your own fault for skipping step two (develop a skill (singing) – become successful (through being such a good musician that people want to hear more) – fame). Actually, you kind of skipped step one there too... either way it’s your own damn fault for trying to avoid the system and go straight to the fame and riches part. Maybe it would have been an idea to start working as a part-time singer in a small bar before launching yourself onto the internet.

We’re seeing the same sort of thing happen in the London riots at the moment. We have groups of lazy idiots that have seen the process of “Work hard – Succeed in your business – Get rewarded”. They thought the first two parts were a bit much and decided they just wanted to skip to the third part, the money. What they seem to have failed to grasp is the REWARD part. The expensive items you’re dragging out of a shattered shop window are meant to be worked towards. That’s why they’re valuable, not the price tag on the box, but the time and effort spent to afford it.

The reason people look so damn happy driving a Ferrari is because they earned it. They know that they worked hard, succeeded and they finally bought their dream car. People used to see someone with a big house or an exotic car and they would know that this was a person who had put in the hard yards. Now-a-days though we usually see the BMW and assume daddy was loaded and the driver is a wanker. That reminds me; parents, don’t give your children squat! Make the little thieving buggers work for it.

Skipping the middle is like going from being twenty or being forty overnight. Sure, you’ll be forty, but you won’t have the experiences and wisdom gained from your twenties and thirties. So you’ll probably be unable to satisfy a woman, useless at holding your drink and still laugh at fart jokes (ok, maybe that last part won’t change)

Some people might say that a celebrity culture and rampant consumerism are to blame. Some people might say that by talking about these issues we’re only feeding them the attention they so crave. Some people might suggest that deeply ingrained and complex social trends can’t be reduced to a three-part process. Well, some people might like to fuck off.

I’m right and you know it.

-Worst Guy Ever