Voldemort is noseless

Some kind of mixture,

Some kind of gold,

It's got to come find us,

All we are is dust ..

Someone using google.de got here today by searching "Voldemort is noseless".

He is indeed. 

So why google that?

If it had been "Is Voldemort noseless?", I might have understood a little better. Obviously someone not too familiar with Harry Potter just double checking whether or not the villain had a nose or not. Or even "Voldemort is noseless?", with a question mark. Google searches are best when they're phrased as incredulous questions.

But this search is neither of those. This is a statement.

"Oy, Google. Listen up, dickhead. Voldemort is noseless."

Thankyou to that person, for your post-modern use of a search engine and for confirming for all that Voldemort is indeed noseless.

It's also reminded me of why I love Robot Chicken. This is so appropriate right now.

Stories from the pub.

Over and over and over and over and over,
Like a monkey with a miniature cymbal,
The joy of repetition really is in you ..

One thing that could do with being done at the pub where I work is a new playlist for our iPod. As it stands, we have just the one, and when you work 5 days a week with a playlist consisting of only 12 songs, it becomes so soul destroying that you'd rather have stony, clinical silence. 

Marvin Gaye's album I Heard it Through the Grapevine was the relentlessly mind-numbing choice of 2 years back, which we grudgingly worked to every weekend for 3 years. In October 2012, it's an eclectic mix of generally better stuff, permeated on track no. 7 by Bryan Ferry doing his rendition of John Lennon's Jealous Guy, which is essentially musical blasphemy.

This problem of repetition is compounded during the week, when it's much quieter and there's not much else to do other than stand around and try and chat to drown the music out, but you've turned into such a zombie after 3 hours of Bryan Ferry that the conversations never really take off. This is my favourite from earlier, when we were polishing cutlery. 

Louise: "I don't mind polishing cutlery, it's not that interesting but it's quite relaxing"

Me: "I hate it, this is probably the most boring job going"

Louise: "I really don't like polishing spoons though. I don't know why, they're just more awkward than the others"

Me: "Oh, I don't mind doing spoons. They're all smooth and really easy to do. I don't like doing forks though, I always end up stabbing through whatever I'm polishing them with"

Louise: "Mmm, yeah, I know what you mean. Knives are ok though"

Me: "Yeah, knives are easy"

Louise: "I like the knives. The big ones though, not the little ones for the side plates"

Me: "Mmm, I know what you mean. The steak knives can be awkward, y'know, with the spiky blade?"

Louise: "Oh, yeah."

Steph walks round from the other side of the bar

Louise: "What's your least favourite cutlery to polish Steph?"

Steph: "Ummm .. forks probably. I always poke holes through the cloth"

Me: "Yeah, that's what I just said"

Steph: "I don't mind teaspoons though, they're probably my favourite"

Altogether: "Oooh yeah teaspoons are good, hmm, yeah, nice and easy"

The mundanity levels can occasionally go off the chart. 

Chanel no. Brad

Waiting by the mailbox, by the train,

Passing by the hills 'til I hear the name,

I'm looking for a saw to cut these chains in half ..

What the hell? Brad Pitt is the new face of Chanel No. 5?

I find this kinda depressing. 

In the wake of such brilliant performances in recent films such as Inglourious Basterds, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and The Assassination of Jesse James, is this really a necessary detour from his career?

This ad harks back to the Brad Pitt of the early-mid 2000's, post Fight Club and Se7en and 12 Monkeys, when he stopped 'acting' and just tried to 'cool' his way through it all. "Hi, I'm Brad Pitt and I'm hot and I kind of mumble and look disinterested when I speak, but I don't care because I just shagged Angelina Jolie and somehow made millions out of it".

Did you manage to sit through Mr and Mrs Smith? What a steaming pile. It hardly qualifies as a film. It may as well have been called "Two hot people shooting stuff".

That's by the by, but as I say, virtually all his stuff of late has been awesome and occasionally had me thinking "damn, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, you're gonna have to up your game to hold onto my top spot, mate". 

And then all of a sudden, Brad Pitt's standing there in black and white in his shirt, his face being all sensitive and doing the kind of wracked, conflicting emotions and inner turmoil malarky, while he spouts off some godawful bullshit about journeys and fate and fortune. 

It makes no fucking sense whatsoever.

The whole advert is the epitome of what I thought was a bygone technique, which subscribed to the idea that if enough Brad Pitt is thrown at something, then it will automatically write itself (I'm looking at you, Troy).

In short, they may as well have just had 30 seconds of Brad Pitt's arse with the perfume bottle wedged in his crack and 'Inevitable' hastily scrawled at an angle in sharpie across one arse cheek, with Clair de Lune playing in the background. It would have packed the same emotional punch.

If you can watch this through no more than once and tell me what he's talking about, drop me a reply on facebook.

Minor nostalgia

Another tricky little gun giving solace to the one

That'll never see the sun shine ..

Having been moved out of Leeds for 4 months now, I'll admit I'm actually starting to miss living in a house where fireworks, Asian children, takeaway flyers and friendly bible bashers at our front door were a regular occurrence. The last one in particular often gave me a great idea for a progressive rock band called Jesus Christ and The Latter Day Saints.

I'm also incidentally missing Kitchen Dance and the one and only partner for such.

This might explain my £15 tips

But I set fire to the rain,

Watched it pour as I touched your face,

Let it burn while I cry,

'Cause I heard it screaming out your name, your name ..

I was at work the other day when I accidentally wandered into the midst of one of those little moments in life.

I'd been running around serving drinks, organising various bits and bobs in the kitchen, carrying trays of canapés and socialising with our throngs of guests. It had gotten a little warm in our restaurant area where I'd been working and about halfway through the night I removed my work apron, because it was a little stifling and there was no longer a need for extra pocket space.

At the end of the night, we'd cleared out all our guests and I'd just cleaned and closed the upstairs bar. I got myself a drink and slumped into one of the big sofas by the window opposite and just happened to glance at my crotch.

And I had to ask.

Just how long has my zipper been down?

Assorted thoughts from the arse end of the day.

Let the sky fall, when it crumbles,

We will stand tall,

Face it altogether ..

In no particular order:

1. I missed Felix Baumgartner's space jump. During the first two attempts which were aborted because of the weather, I sat watching all the live-feed on YouTube, with baited breath, and was genuinely disappointed when the jumps were called off. After the second time, after 2 hours or so of viewing, I closed the window and told myself that I would not miss it when it actually happened.

Then the next day I went to work, came home, and the first thing on the BBC was the news of the third, successful jump and the breaking of the sound barrier. 

Retrospect will tell me that the money I earned probably trumps watching a man falling off a balloon at the edge of space, but at the time, I was certainly cursing the bollocks timing. I've watched it since, but it wasn't the same.

2. Facebook feed suggests something bad happened on Downton Abbey. I know nothing about Downton other than there's some ruthless businessman type played by Iain Glen, who also plays Ser Jorah Mormont in Game of Thrones. He can't possibly be as much of a badass as he is in Thrones.

3. Someone got here the other day by googling "grey pubes". 

4. Adele's new track Skyfall, for the new Bond film, is fucking brilliant, hence this evening's intro lyrics. Google that sucker, it's some stirring stuff.

5. I still don't understand why Coors adverts still try and extol the virtues of how cold their beer is. Admittedly the ads are always amusing, but as soon as you realise that they're simply equating "cold" with "refreshing", with no mention of taste, you begin to smell their bullshit.

You can't taste 'cold', and as a general rule, liquids like coke and lemonade and of course, alcohol, start to lose some of their taste when they're really cold. So Coors, by exporting their beer via glacier, is concealing the fact that it doesn't actually taste of anything. Depending on the goal of your night out, this may be a good thing.

I might keep those two paragraphs written on a slip of paper and read it to my customers when they order a Coors. Or just say "Yeah, Coors. It's so cold, isn't it?"

Dissolving corpses

Yes the lantern burn, burn it easy,

And broadcast, so raw and neatly,

Thunder roll, sunshine, work it out ..

I came across this on wikipedia recently.

If you can't be arsed with extra curricular reading, the article describes an alternative technique for disposing of corpses other than burial/cremation: dissolving the body in lye solution, in what is essentially a giant cooker. After which, the remains go down a drain.

Is this dignified? Issues surrounding dignity isn't something I can offer much toward, considering I once had a 15 minute long discussion with someone in my first year of university on 'crop-dusting', the act of farting in a crowd before making your exit.

Cremation has some good Viking undertones; burial is something that everyone accepts as traditional. Even donating your body to science has some relevance and dignity to it, if perhaps in a post-modern kind of way. But, regardless of the fact that after death your body is a useless, empty vessel, there's still something slightly macabre and unsatisfying about having your remains dissolved into a gloop and flushed away.

It does raise several ethical issues.

In this day and age, when we hear of traces of prescription medication turning up in our water supply, is bits of dissolved corpse really something we want to add to the list of things we have to contend with when we go for a glass of water?

The odd, inadvertent dose of prozac is one thing; accidentally waltzing into casual cannibalism and drinking the dregs of someone's grandma who died two weeks previously is another thing entirely.

Otherwise, the only real train of thought is that, simply, you'll be dead. Ultimately, will it matter? I've already signed a form signing away my organs but they can also turn my head into a bong if they so wish. I've actually given no real thought to what happens to my body, though if I ever raised the funds I'd opt to have myself stuffed, mounted and possibly cast in bronze on Huddersfield ring road to leer at all the motorists and pedestrians coming in from Almondbury.

I realise there'll probably be some issue surrounding my stuffed and bronzed remains being used as a tourist deterrent. 

Failing this, I wouldn't be too fussed about being dissolved. Maybe someone could make a lava lamp out of me. That'd be kind of awesome.

Work gripes

Jump with the moon and move it,

Jump back and forth,

It feels like you would dare yourself

To work it out ..

You'll all be chuffed to know that the Woodman Inn at Thunderbridge has reopened after 3 weeks hard refurbishment. Going back there after 2 years away is feeling surprisingly familiar, despite the place having changed managerial hands, had a complete facelift and the majority of the old staff having left or been purged.

I had my 2nd shift today, on the 2nd day of being open again. I can barely believe that its taken such a short while for the old grievances to resurface. My main job-related gripe, which I never expected to worry about again, is this:

Stop paying by cheque. 

Please. 

It's 2012. 

I don't even care that our new till system makes it much easier for us to cash cheques. 

It's the simple principle of a person still living and going out for a drink like it's the fucking 1980's and using a cheque to pay for a bottle of Budweiser and a large chardonnay. Get yourself a debit card, Jesus.

In the same shift, a couple came in, cast their eyes over the sandwiches on our menu and said "We'll have the club sandwich and the salmon sandwich. On the club can we have one of the slices of bread toasted and the other only very slightly toasted, and on the salmon, one slice toasted and the other one plain?" 

I can only assume they woke up that morning and thought 'We should go screw around with some chefs today'. 

At least they paid cash.

Discuss paedophilia with your children, because if I do it it'll be weird.

Don't stop the buck when it comes,

It's the dawn, you'll see ..

Man, kids can have it tough.

Any quick glance at the news over the last couple of days will have been overwhelmed with stories about the abduction and murder of April Jones, underage sexual abuse by Jimmy Savile and today, the imprisonment after a year of Jerry Sandusky, the Penn State football coach, in the States.

I really hope parents aren't shielding their kids from these stories.

I'm not a parent, and I can't imagine how it would feel to have your child abducted or be the victim of some paedophile, but I imagine it must be devastating. This is why exposure to these kinds of stories is better for children in the long run, hopefully making them more aware and thus more savvy as they grow up.

Most parents will have had that talk with their children about strangers and not letting them do anything, like touch you. But, a key point that I reckon ought to be added to that lecture is that if some sick fuck does touch you anywhere you're uncomfortable with, then it's supremely important to tell someone.

I bet all of Jimmy Savile and Jerry Sandusky's victims are wishing they'd spoken up sooner. But it's easy to see in both cases why some of these victims must have been shrouded in shame. Both Savile and Sandusky were men who were trusted by their victims, and it is from here that the aspect of a victim's shame stems. Put simply, they let a man do something to them that they knew was wrong.

For children to admit to something like this, to any form of sexual abuse, is to admit that they did something they were not supposed to. To them, they were a part of something known only as "bad". Cast your mind back to childhood. How difficult was it to admit to stuff? Maybe you didn't do your homework, maybe you pushed a sibling over. You got into trouble for it because it was wrong. Sexual abuse is wrong. But it's no easy feat for young children to distinguish between these different kinds of 'wrong'.

Now think back to when you had the 'stranger danger' talk. How serious were your parents when they told you not to let someone do anything "bad" to you? Could you feasibly imagine going to them, age 10 or 11, and telling them that you'd let it happen? Imagine the disappointment they felt when you hadn't done your homework.

This is how it needs to be. Tell your children not only that there are dangerous people who might try and do horrendous things to them, but also that these people may not necessarily be strangers. And that should be followed up with "but if it does happen, tell someone". That they are not the bad person and they are not in trouble.

And simply having the confidence to talk at all is getting more important, because, as recent events have demonstrated, you can't always count on adults to do the right thing.

Liam Neeson killing Albanians again.

No more standin' there beside the walls,

I have got myself together baby,

I'm havin' a ball ..

It's official. Taken 2.

I mean really, who thought this was even an option?

If say, in 2007, someone mentioned a film about a tough-as-nails ex-military ops man whose daughter is kidnapped, forcing him to single handedly gun his way through swathes of armed foreigners to rescue her, you would stop them and say "Didn't Arnold Schwarzenegger already do that in 1985 as Colonel John Matrix in Commando?"

Absolutely he did. But the reason we all enjoyed Taken was that it took the done-to-death plotline and made it gritty and dark, if forgivably a little far-fetched.

Swap out Schwarzenegger in an assault vest to Liam Neeson in a leather jacket, give him some fucking badass dialogue and the job's a good one.

becomes:

But now the trailer for Taken 2 has been released, and everything the first one succeeded in looks about to be undermined, much like with The Hangover, by a half arsed rinse and repeat; all the key plot elements of the first film are taken, if you'll excuse the pun, and dragged kicking and screaming to scarcely believable proportions.

In this sequel, they're in Istanbul and it's the mother who gets kidnapped and it's up to Liam and his hot daughter to make the rescue this time round. In one scene from the trailer, we see the terrorists holding our hero at gunpoint, but still conveniently allowing him to make a crucial phone call to his daughter to inform her that they're "going to be taken".

"Listen to me carefully Kim. This sequel .. is probably gonna blow"

The other coincidental advantage is that the mother and daughter just seem to bump into Liam when on holiday in Turkey, just on the off-chance that at least one of them might get kidnapped. One can only really admire how well the daughter has recovered from the previous ordeal to even consider travelling abroad again. She's also seen perilously shimmying along a narrow balcony on the side of a building while scantily clad.

The balls on this girl!

Tragically even the dialogue has been recycled, and any new stuff hasn't got a patch on the famous "I will find you. And I will kill you" monologue.

"What are you going to do?" asks the daughter nervously at one point.

"What I do best." growls Neeson. Cut to shots of him killing Albanians with bits of fluff he found in his pocket.

This isn't of course to say it's guaranteed to be a flop. Yes, there looks to be a fair amount of gun battles, car chases and Liam Neeson shouting "Where is she?" again, but not even that looks good enough at this stage to live up to it's predecessor.

Make it worth it, Liam.

Do it.

Do that for all of us.

I leave the final say up to you.

Spiders

The Sun, the Moon,

Both turn for you,

And through your days

Will light your way ..

It's an old gripe, but this post is primarily for Kellie's entertainment. I'm beginning to feel that these posts are beginning to lose that subtle light of spontaneity that I enjoy, instead becoming entries lightly dusted with crap as a result of the pressure to just produce something, like some performing dog.

Anyway.

There's been a rise of late in the number of big fuck-off house spiders making terrifying appearances round our house. 

The other night, I was lying awake on my laptop in the small hours when I noticed something move out of the corner of my eye. I paid it no mind until it moved again, much more purposefully this time, at which point I realised it was a spider, doing that kind of awkward leggy glide, like some fucking 8-legged dementor. And then it did that thing that house spiders do, where, instead of just pegging it, they pause and wait.

I completely don't get this. 

Maybe its a kind of Jurassic Park tyrannosaurus thing and they believe human vision is based solely on movement. 

Maybe. 

I choose to believe its more of a come-on than anything else. That thing people say, about the spider being more scared of you than you are of it? If the behaviour of our spiders is anything to go by, then that theory is bollocks. Unless the spider dashes out of sight and never re-appears, then it's up for a scrap and is fair game as far as I'm concerned.

This was pretty much what was running through my head at the time, and I was getting all geared up (in a nervously shaky and sweaty way) to bring the spider, who we'll call Gwyneth, to its untimely death.

Then, in a heart-stopping moment, I noticed my BB gun, my primary anti-spider weapon, was on my desk. Gwyneth stood between us. There was no way I could have reached it without disturbing her. And she must have somehow sensed this, because before I made the next move she took off again, straight under my desk, and in a very Andy McNab moment, I dived for the gun and managed to fire about 3 rounds at her as she escaped behind some boxes.

This story should make a brilliant film.

After some minutes of tentatively shifting the boxes, a couple of screams and a bit of indiscriminate shooting, I managed to goad Gwyneth out from behind the boxes to under a set of shelves. It's worth noting that at this point I was close to soiling myself. And just as I opened my bag of BB's to perform a quick reload, Gwyneth bravely, but ultimately foolishly, made a try for under my bed.

Even when I'm at the point of shitting myself, no spider is ever knowingly getting near my bed without a fight. And in the second dramatic turn of the night, I dropped the half-loaded gun and grabbed the first object I found: my office chair. And in one smooth movement, I ran her over with it. Then again. And a few more times, just to be certain. This probably sufficed, but Jesus, when spiders are involved and I'm this worked up, I don't stop short of collateral damage.

In my wardrobe, I have an old samurai sword that a chef from the pub gave me. This was put to good use for the next 2 minutes or so.

I felt sorry for Gwyneth on some level. Regardless of the fact that she'd scared the crap out of me and had run the risk of turning my bedroom into a week long quarantine zone, I felt that nothing deserved a death quite as brutal and undignified as hers.

This feeling lasted about 15 minutes.

Just as I'd begun to re-settle in bed and just about gotten rid of the shakes, I saw another movement. Barely believing it, there was another one, who we'll call Scott. Not taking any chances, I grabbed the sword and the gun.

Scott may have been the nicest spider with only good intentions, but the fear he incurred in me was such that nothing would bring me peace other than his demise, which followed about 4 seconds after.

Some artistic license has been taken.

I'm hoping now that spiders have some sort of monthly/annual appearance quota to fill. By anybody's standards, September and October should now both be ticked off. One or two a month just begins to breach levels of acceptability, but two within 20 minutes of each other is just taking the piss.

Lets take a moment to thank the things that kept me safe.