2006: It sucked!

Admittedly, the amount of blog posting I've done in the month of December has been pretty goddamned unimpressive.

Alas, I've been too busy drinking entire bottles of Jack Daniels, getting whiskerburn from great aunties, sobbing myself to sleep in fits of self pity, drinking entire bottles of Absinthe, waking up in puddles of other people's vomit and other assorted malarkey that people tend to get up to when they're forced to spend time with their awful family then violently overcompensate on New Years Eve. But it's a fresh new year and all that Christmas/Hanukkah/Kwanza/New Years nonsense is over so I can go back to posting properly! Hooray!

So 2006...it really wasn't any good was it? At the close of 2005 I remember wondering if 2006 would be the year in which the rubbishly titled noughties would finally start to get interesting. Unfortunately, 2006 has proven to be the least interesting year of all time. Don't believe me? Alright then, here's a month by month review analysing all the mind-numbing lows of 2006:

January: A Bottlenose Whale gets stuck in the Thames. It later dies. Seriously, that's all that happened in January last year.

February: American Jack Abramoff is charged with being a massive immoral, capitalist asshole. During his trial, private e-mails are released to the public in which Abramoff refers to Native Americans as "monkeys", "troglodites" and "morons." "My kids were watching Pocahontas and I thought they were watching a sequel to The Jungle Book because of all the primates!" one e-mail may or may not have said.

March: The crappiest movie of all time Crash inexplicably wins the Oscar for Best Picture. Pulitzer Prize winner author Annie Proulx hilariously refers to the film as "trash". Also Muhammad Ali dies, but probably not the one you're thinking of.

April: A man is disfigured by a Bear in China and becomes the first ever recipient of a face transplant. This event inspires a 44 year old man in Leicester to hire out the DVD Face/off but he is deeply disappointed when he discovers that said film stars John Travolta.

May: Tony Blair's labour party suffers its worst electoral defeat in just about ever. A survey conducted by The Sun reveals that 9 out of 10 Britons would rather have the Prime Minister in Little Britain leading their country than Tony Blair. "You're all a bunch of fucken idiots," Tony Blair says in response. "And by fucken idiots, I mean roguishly handsome, talented sex gods," he adds several days later when someone points out that 9 out of 10 people in the country already hate him.

June: Captain Great celebrates his birthday. Probably some other stuff happened as well but nothing nearly as important.

July: Everyones' least favourite ex-Beatle Paul McCartney files for divorce sparking an endlessly entertaining public marital breakdown involving petty lock-changes, allegations of spousal abuse, allegations of madness, photo after photo after photo of Heather Mills doing a bit of in out/in out with odd hairy men and a heavily pregnant Stella McCartney threatening to crush Heather Mills' spine with her prosthetic leg. This would later prove to be the only entertaining event in 2006's entirety. Also, Israel bombs some stuff.

August: Norwegian police announce that they have finally recovered the priceless paintings The Scream and Madonna which have been missing since 2004. However said event is grossly overshadowed by a video circulated across the net in which Britney Spears legitimately convinces Kevin Federline that Back to the Future wasn't just a movie but is, in fact, real. Mel Gibson later tries to convince Kevin Federline that the Jewish holocaust wasn't real but to less success.

September: Animal activist and annoying television personality Steve Irwin is tragically stabbed in the heart by Stingray, a character from Australian soap Neighbours. English composer Sir Malcolm Arnold, Japanese actor Tetsuro Tamba and New Zealand Cricketer Walter Arnold Hadlee also die but everyone is too busy getting all upset about the death of a man who considers himself an animal activist yet also unironically goes by the moniker of "Crocodile Hunter" to care.

October: Two schools in Las Vegas, USA are locked down after a student brings an AK47 to school. Said student is later further ostracized by his peers because schoolyard massacres are, like, so totally late nineties.

November: That whiny brunette from Dawson's Creek with the wonky mouth marries Tom Cruise resulting in the fulfillment of an ancient Scientology prophesy foretelling the miraculous virgin birth of a strangely Asian looking baby and it's Caucasian mother's marriage to an obnoxious toothy midget. Tom Cruise was also going to sacrifice Katie Holmes to Lord Zenu but he decided to wait until next year when he had a movie coming out and could use the publicity.

December: Captain Great realizes that he had less sex in 2006 than he has had in any other year since he was seventeen. Everyone in the whole world sees Britney Spears' vagina.

And that's pretty much everything that happened in 2006 with maybe one or two very minor events left out. I hope you all had a top New Years and feel free to post all your wacky New Years stories in the comments below! Here's to a less shit 2007!

Bono: Officially Better Than You

According to wikipedia: "in the High and Late Middle Ages, the principal duty of a knight was to fight as, and lead, heavy cavalry". Oddly enough, the standards of knighthood have fallen somewhat; in fact, if someone with little to no knowledge of Britain stumbled onto our shores today, they would probably come to the conclusion that the principal duties of a knight involved prancing about on a stage in a Donald Duck outfit and disturbingly over sized sunglasses, stabbing one-legged porn stars a bit with a broken glass and rooting ninety percent of the world's female population.

That's because Elton John, Paul McCartney and Mick Jagger have all been considered important enough to be bestowed with a state instituted title of honour. Don't you just love living in a country that has created a system in which certain people are officially declared to be much better than you by way of their ability to write songs about postboxes and kites and other twee nonsense?

Now, some people have argued that this whole knighthood rubbish is just the monarchy's way of saying, "Hey! We're not really an increasingly outdated and irrelevant anachronism in a world that has embraced Democracy! We like pop music too, you see!" but those people are probably just jealous haters. I mean, I personally see absolutely nothing wrong with deserving individuals getting bestowed with awards and titles for accomplishing something important by a woman whose greatest accomplishment is once making herself a cup of tea instead of asking her hordes of man servants, slaves and personal chefs to make one for her. But that's just me.

Anyway, just when you thought England couldn't slump lower than that time they let Paul McCartney join the hallowed ranks of Sir Lancelot, Sir Galahad and that bloke that looks like a sheila, the Queen has decided to grant an honorary knighthood to the biggest knob sack in the entire world: Bono from U2. Yes, all you ordinary plebs are now officially shitter than a man who wears sunglasses at all times, even inside and at night. As justified by Tony Blair, who probably should be doing more important things than sucking up to self righteous rock stars: "You have tirelessly used your voice to speak up for Africa". Which I think is quite a polite way of saying "used your inexplicable popularity to fly around the globe harping on at world leaders about how shit Africa is and getting a bit of free publicity in the process" really.

Now, I'm pretty sure that Bono accepting an honorary knighthood from England is actually tantamount to some sort of vast betrayal if you consider that several of the Queen's direct ancestors have been responsible for the deaths of millions of Irishmen, the destruction of their native language, several centuries of economic subjugation etc. etc. etc. But then again, I'm sure the Irish already hate Bono after that time he decided not to pay millions of dollars worth of taxes back into the country of his birth.

Arguably, the right thing to do would have been to just refuse the bloody thing. It's been done before; the list of celebrities who have refused some sort of imperial honour includes David Bowie, John Cleese, Kenneth Branagh, Albert Finney, Vanessa Redgrave, John le Carré, Robert Graves, Evelyn Waugh, Roald Dahl, J G Ballard, George Melly and even Nigella Lawson. Of course Bono did nothing of the sort even stating that he was "very flattered". Which means he now has less credibility than some snobby, posh bint with a cooking show.

I decided to do a bit of research by asking Colin the Irishman that works in my office how he feels about Bono's knighthood. He said, "I don't know about Bono, but that queen looks like she could do with a good knobbing." I think Colin is actually from New Zealand rather than Ireland but he does have a funny accent so close enough.

Everybody Hates Heather Mills-McCartney

People really seem to hate that one legged porn star Heather Mills-McCartney, don't they? Not even Mel Gibson gets as much hate as Heather and he supposedly despises an entire race of people and only values women because of the innacurate assumption that they lactate sugar from their breasts or something. People even prefer Tom Cruise and everyone knows what he gets up to, from his crusade to stop women from not killing their newborn babies to his plans to sacrifice his virginal, captive bride Katie Holmes to Lord Zenu. All poor Heather did was divorce Paul McCartney then bleat on a lot about how much he loved stabbing her elbows and stuff.

"Dig a hole and put something in it" sang Paul McCartney in 1967. "Preferably Heather Mills' fake leg so the bitch has to hobble around hilariously on her one good one," he might have added had he written the song in 2006. You see, the relationship between the Beatle that gadded around barefoot like a hobo on the cover of "Abbey Road" and the least popular Beatle spouse since the last time Yoko Ono opened her mouth has hit a new low. Which is really saying something considering that their marital breakdown of the last twelve months has included Paul pettily changing the locks on their home, hysterical claims of spousal abuse, Stella McCartney trying to kill her mother-in-law and Paul probably also sang a Wings song or two to poor Heather. Yet despite suffering horrors no human being should ever have to endure, being subjected to an accoustic version of "Live and Let Die", the public seems to be completely against Heather Mills and firmly in favour of Paul "Ringo's nose has more charisma than I do" McCartney.

And it just keeps getting worse and worse for Heather Mills. In what has been labeled as a deliberate play to the media, she was photographed this week carrying a piece of paper with the words "I'm seeking an order for the occupation of the matrimonial house" written on it. But the move has backfired on the not-so-gay divorcee with The Sun, determined to maintain its reputation as the trashiest tabloid rag in existence, hiring a Scottish Yard handwriting expert Ruth Myers to analyse Heather's messy scrawl. And the prognosis isn't good: “Her writing shows she is a fantasist who lives in her own manufactured world. This woman has a tendency to live in a world of deception and has lost all sense of truthfulness.”

Which all seems a bit unfair and biased to me considering that McCartney made hundreds of millions of dollars out of all his "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds/I am the Walrus/Strawberry Fields Forever" fantasist crap. And clearly Heather's "tendency to live in a world of deception" was inspired by John Lennon, who believed lying in a bed for several days would stop people doing the ol' stabby, stabby in Vietnam.

Some bint that writes for The Sun called Jenni also offers this lovely piece of advice to Heather: "She should try to maintain as low a profile as possible because she’s fighting someone who is considered a demi-god in this country and worshipped by millions." Which surprises me because I wasn't aware that anyone in Britain even liked Paul McCartney at all. In fact, I would venture that I haven't met anyone who didn't wish that all those late sixties conspiracy theories that Paul McCartney was secretly dead weren't just a little bit true.

I decided to do a bit of in depth research into the matter. Ergo, I asked Shelley at my work what she thought of ol' Macca to which she replied, "He's shit. By the way, stop using my fucking coffee mug," which is just about the most positive thing I've ever heard anyone say about the man who once wrote "When I'm Sixty-Four", officially the twee-est song ever written until Elton John nauseatingly played "Candle in the Wind" at Princess Diana's funeral.

Paul McCartney apparently not pissed off at Heather Mills McCartney

Sometime I wish celebrities would just have the balls to say what they really think.

Take probably your least favourite Beatle Paul McCartney for example. Ol' Macca has been in the news quite a lot lately which is quite surprising considering that he's famous for being a songwriter yet hasn't actually written a half decent tune since 1969. Appropriately, it is instead his scandal laden divorce from his one-legged one-time pornographer wife Heather Mills than has landed him on the front pages of both trashy tabloids and newspapers that should probably know better.

The latest installment in the starting to get tedious ongoing saga has Heather Mills claiming that Paul McCartney is a wife abuser. Yes, the mild mannered Beatle famous for write such twee songs as Blackbird and Maxwell's Silver Hammer allegedly got his kicks by stabbing Heather in the elbow with a broken glass, forcing her to slither on the ground after a leg operation and other mean spirited malarky. That cheeky rascal! Heather Mills then went on to claim that Paul also beat his beloved dead wife Linda McCartney.

Of course, no one seems to believe these allegations including Heather's own father who recently declared "my Heather is mad!" Paul McCartney similarly responded by releasing a few carefully worded public statements that included such choice phrases as "Argh! I kill that Bitch!" and "I want that one legged bitch dead!" I'm totally lying. Of course Paul did nothing of the sort. Instead, the least funny one in A Hard Day's Night responded by spouting a whole bunch of typical bland mamby-pamby PC sentiments about not holding grudges and stuff in a recent BBC interview: "Life goes on, I do not hold grudges against anyone...I think life goes on and it is what you make of it so I am pretty optimistic."

I don't think anyone believes for a second that Paul McCartney isn't totally pissed off at Heather Mills just like no one really seems to believe that he actually took drunken potshots at her elbows with shards of glass. Nevertheless he decided to take the dull PC route so beloved by celebrities as of late anyway. And I personally am sick of it! Don't you just wish that Paris Hilton would just come out and say "Hell yes I was drink driving!" or Tom Cruise had been all "God! Fuck those assholes" when he got sacked by Paramount Pictures? Wouldn't you have liked Paul McCartney just a little bit more if he had said "I wish I had bludgeoned her with a broken glass that lying, money grubbing cripple!" to the BBC instead of "I don't hold grudges against anyone"?

Like I said, I'm sick of it. It's high time celebrities stop pretending that they're real people who deserve silly things like privacy and respect and start realizing that they're here for our entertainment. For example, if Heather really had to make up stories about spousal abuse she should have done so with our entertainment in mind possibly by claiming that Paul hilariously beat her unconcious with her fake leg. Being wackily pushed down a shopping centre escalator would also have amused me sufficiently.