Bleach.

If you inhale a lot of it, it fills your whole upper body - lungs, throat, nose, sinuses, head - and you can't taste or smell anything but bleach. It'll also irritate your throat to the point of being red and blistered.

All in all, it gives you one fuck of a sore throat and little or no ability to eat/speak for a few days.

various f1 guys

Jaime Alguersuari



Heikki Kovaleinen



Christian Horner



Kimi Raikonnen

BAC

And it's a new record, with a calculated BAC of .31

let the hangover commence.

Room 38

There is a room beyond the eyesight of all the people I could never have known. I go away, out from the party, to find a hiding place where I can be alone. But you'll miss me when I'm gone, and tonight, all you'll get is pain. I'll never leave room thirty eight. Inside my room I am an island, a happy castaway in my own little world, and I don't care if you might miss me, you never cared that much when I was still around. And you'll miss me when I'm gone, and tonight, it's YOU who'll be alone. I'll never leave room thirty eight. And I've known it all along, even if you could change it, you'd do the same again. So I'll never leave room thirty eight.

Bob Dylan's right on the money

This is a gun built by a company called Gonher. It's made of metal, and it doesn't have an orange cap on the end of the muzzle. It's a cap gun. Police are all crazy about shit like this now, and you read stories in the news about toddlers being arrested and stuff
for playing with obvious plastic toy guns.

But this Gonher pistol was very realistic, and I bought one in France in about 1996. Luckily, we were never searched at customs off the Stena Liner, and my Gonher pistol came to the UK. In 1997, in the months following Princess Di's assassination, I took my Gonher pistol into school, hidden in the bottom of my gym bag. My parents didn't know it was there, and I was all adrenaline praying that they wouldn't look in my bag and find it. They didn't. In the playground before school started, I ordered some of the other kids to stand facing up against the back wall of the hall/gym/lunchroom. (Incidentally, anyone else remember being made to run around the periphery of their school hall in their pants and vest (I forgot my PE kit a lot) with terrible music blaring out of a casette deck that looked like the picture below, stepping in all manner of crusts and yoghurt smears as you went?)



Anyway. So I've got all these kids lined up against the wall, and they're playing along but don't really understand why I'm shouting orders at them, until I pull out my Gohner gun, holding the pistol and letting the bag drop around it, and start waving at these kids. I'm pretty sure they knew it was a cap gun. They stayed against the wall, either way. But the bell went, and so I had to hide my pistol again and give up on the massive rush and powertrip I was enjoying.

But that was the closest I ever got to a school shooting. And if I'd done that now, me, my parents, and my whole extended family would be in prison, there'd be an internal security investigation, media criticism of our police and customs and border control, Stena Line would be fined an amount of money roughly equal in size to the annual national revenue of Canada, and we'd be at war with France. Luckily, they were all distracted buying Candle in the Wind singles at the time.

But god, it was a hell of a powertrip, and I felt cool as FUCK.

What James does in his spare time

Sobs quietly in a corner when videos of him beyond drunk singing nirvana appear on the internet.

X

Mel Gibson Shatters Your Perception of Reality

I haven't blogged in ages. I think Princess Di has blogged more recently than I have.

Anyway, LucyBrownInLondonTown was praising the blog, so I thought I should write some more. I've had a few more crazy ideas and things come about in the past few months, so here we go.

Firstly, I'm scared of Michael Schumacher. This is partly because my mind always dresses him in an SS uniform whenever I see him, like some glitchy national socialist iPhone app that you pay loads for, then it steals all your personal information. And sends annoying texts to all your jewish friends ("What's a dilemma for a Jew? Half-price pork."). The other reason I'm scared of him is because of his actual clothes. I mean, have you SEEN what he fucking wears when he's not in race overalls? This is an athelete worth millions. If you had that much money, wouldn't you get like a whole styling team or something to sort you the fuck out? I mean, jesus. Seriously, take a look at some of these pictures I've been collecting in the creepy "james's schumacher pictures" folder on my desktop -




























































I'm particularly fond of the primark/brokeback look, the speedo and the one on the motorcycle (it's a ducati monster, actually) where he looks like a rejected Friends auditionee.
Isn't that a bit weird though?

I suppose it's all relative. I mean, a single grey hair on your head isn't really a problem, but one in your big mac is a fuckin' disaster.

Sort it out, Schumy.

Moving on, how come in Terminator 2, Robert Patrick gets tricked by Arnie when they're on the phone and Arnie refers to the dog as Wolfie rather than it's real name (Max)? Are they seriously suggesting that the piece of coding for random dog name generation was upgraded between the T-800 and the T-1000 Terminator models? Surely if Arnie generated that name, Robert Patrick would be able to recognise it as a name that he might generate for a dog on the spot. It completely undermines the credibility of the entire film. Up until that point, it made complete sense.
Funny how such a small point can ruin your whole perception of something. Like a Casio watch in a period drama, or the twin tours still standing in a film set in the future, or an alien that inexplicably speaks english. Or Mel Gibson.

My mind is starting to misfire. I'll be back with some more answers to questions nobody asked tomorrow after work.

Oh yeah, I invented a fictional family, a bloke called Alan Shrimpley, his brother Peter Shrimpley, and their father, John Shrimpley. I plan on using them for something one day, probably in a complex lie.

Zen and the Art of Awkwardness

I was reading 'Zen and the Art of Motorcyle Maintenance' (fantastic philosophy book, read it!) on the bus the other day. As the bus came up towards Holloway Road tube station, I started to put my book away, so I didn't have to panic last minute at my stop, further up the road. The big black woman sitting next to me took this as a sign that I was getting off. She asked me, "are you getting off here?" and, as I wasn't expecting this just kinda mumbled "uhhh, no, it's after this".
She took this to mean the bus stop directly after the one we'd just passed. She pressed the stop button for me. She stood up, and gestured me past. I didn't really wanna make a fuss, so I picked up my rucksack and got up. And thanked her. And got off the bus. I thanked a woman for adding a half mile walk to my trip.

fml.

Because nobody's told me to stop yet.

They say that violence in video games and cartoons incites people to go on killing sprees or to murder their parents horribly. Of course, you wouldn't be playing violent video games unless you already had some desire for violence inside you. So it's a pretty flawed argument. Like claiming listening to Cher made you gay. Well, you wouldn't be listening to Cher if you were straight, would you? However, what's not so often mentioned is the detrimental effect of stupidity in video games and cartoons. What about all the stupidity cartoons have hammered into people? And it's getting worse, with many children's TV characters now being brightly coloured but barely literate guys in suits. As in Barney the Dinosaur guys in suits, not like Resevoir Dogs.

When I was six, I had watched some evil cartoon character run his finger down the blade of a sharp knife, from hilt to point, whilst grinning maniacally. So of course, I went into the kitchen, grabbed a knife, and sliced my thumb deeply from the knuckle up. It wasn't the cleverest move. But then nor was panicking and spinning around in small circles, leaving a fine spray of blood over the entire kitchen. I spent a lot of time damaging myself as a child; it was practically a hobby for me. Fingers flattened in doors, numerous cutting incidents (the aforementioned thumb slice, my first penknife, playing with a pizza cutter, learning what a chisel is, etc.), working the webbing between my index finger and thumb through the cog mechanism of a hand drill, swinging a hammer into a nail full force to find the hammer had missed and I'd inserted an inch or so of nail into my hand, and of course the full mains voltage electrocution adventure.
These events, paired with accidents not caused by me, like having my face ripped open by my great grandmother's dog, teenage injuries including falling off skateboards and self harming, PLUS all the injuries I've accrued since I became old enough to drink heavily, have left me scarred like an ordanance survery map of a hilly area.

So why am I telling you this?
Well, why are you reading this?

You're probably thinking how tame my injuries seem, and are recalling all the injuries and scars you've gained throughout your life, and how they one-up my scars. And I know you're thinking this because this is how people react to minor injuries. We wear them like badges of honour. It's like that scene from Jaws where Hooper, Brody and Quint all start comparing scars, or the (a little too?) similar bit in Leathal Weapon 3. We love it. We all have that little sadistic streak.

So what, you ask, does this have to do with violence and/or stupidity in video games and cartoons? Well, nothing really. I suppose I'm just saying that when you're driven to do something harmful; whether it be cutting yourself superficially as a child, or loading up your guns and taking them to school - there is something already inside you that enables you to do those things. It isn't learnt from Natural Born Killers or Halo. Clearly, because otherwise everyone who experienced it would be out in the streets killing people. When it comes to violence in films or video games, or even music, I have to believe that these things, for the vast majority of people, are good. Perhaps even necessary. A way of releasing their primal urges in a safe environment. As Rob Schrab once put it, "There's a little monster inside all of us, a little wolf-faced monkey that needs to be satiated. ...[violence in entertainment*] gives our monster something to chew on. It's pain food that wears it's teeth down.".

And as for stupidity? Well, it's upsettlingly fashionable, and seems to be just about everywhere. Even in places you'd never dream of finding it.

Like this blog.




Pointless.






















*JTHM specifically, but I feel Schrab wouldn't mind it being applied in a more vague context.