'Helmeted Homunculus at the Ethergut Cafe'

Come back to me Channel 4! come back to Sleazeville.

We had a late license at the bar last night. I normally work Sunday nights, which is like working at the cholera wing of some WWI veterans hospital, suffice to say it's not very glamorous. I was expecting all-out debauched Friday-night carnage like the last days of Sodom or something. As always I was slightly disappointed, as it all proceeded in a very civilised but fun manner. Thankfully I had set the video to observe the sublime Friday night Channel Four comedy experience that is Peep Show when I got back. Oh to have a 'Super Hans' action figure which attached crack pipe!

I've always loved Channel 4, as a source of perverse madness--I fondly remember the illicit thrill of catching a 'Red Triangle' movie or a RuPaul cable show at some odd hour of the morning. Friday night rocks on Channel 4...until about 12 am when it all takes a nosedive and you get something like Snow Patrol live in concert, it's as if Ch4, my childhood friend, is sending me to bed! Then after 1am, there's fucking snowboarding and skiing. C'mon Ch4, know your audience! The people that like that kind of extreme sport shit aren't up at 3 am drinking 'Good King Wencesles looked Stout’ and hoping that there's going to be a documentary about Troma films or Bettie Page or something. No, the sort of people who like snowboarding are off on the slopes with impressionable ladies who think that strapping a plank to your feet and falling down a mountain is somehow impressive. Don't get me started on Ban This Filth a show that shits on the noble tradition of Eurotrash.


Anyway, I'm off now to see Blade: Trinity, for my sins. I've heard awful reviews but that's hardly stopped me from spending an hour and a half in the dark listening to loud bangs and people in leather coats hitting things before.

In your face Covenant!!

Up there with other phrases that make the average modern life a misery—"last orders at the bar", "It’s not you, it’s me", "except for viewers in (insert your area here)"—must be "press 'X' to enter side seat".

Some explanation for my hatred of this phrase may be needed. I have, after much mental stress and fleeting moments of carnage-inspired joy, finished Halo on legendary. Halo mostly consists of shooting things with various cool weapons, which rocks, the last level ‘Warning: Hitchhikers May Be Escaping Convicts’ consists mostly of getting pasted by all comers as you drive through a soon to be vaporised space ship in a dune buggy style vehicle called the Warthog which handles like shite*, keeps toppling over and seems to always land with its side seat next to you. With every second counting (before the fusion reactor of the Pillar of Autumn explodes with a temperature of one hundred million degrees!!!), the time it takes to discover you’re in the wrong fucking seat, see the horrible phrase "press 'X' to enter side seat" and get out and run around to the driver’s seat seems like aeons.

Getting into the side seat of the Warthog is like saying to all Covenant and Flood "Come ye with your needlers and shotguns! Because I’m a fucking idiot and I’ve just sat in the side seat where I can neither drive nor operate the gun turret, I’m sitting here as if on a stationary little golf cart in a lion’s den wearing a large novelty top hat made of meat".

*Check it out, I can’t even drive but I’ve watched Top Gear a few times and this is the short of crap they come out with.

Does my gun look big in this?

Feck! Christmas is yet again creeping up on us like a black cat that rifles our pockets and plies us with booze. On Saturday I began to think about Christmas shopping and attempted some leisurely browsing in the various emporia of Norwich, bad move! I was slightly hung over after consuming some of Labhaoise’s boyfriend’s brother’s festive homebrew, ‘Good King Wencesles looked Stout’. The narcotic effects of homebrew had been proven previously when said brewer and Cambridge canoe maker fell asleep half way through a bottle of my ‘Lorcale’. He had repaid the favour in full as I dozed off after only a few mouthfuls of his Christmas concoction, half way through The Mystery of the Batwoman DVD. Needless to say I did not discover what the mystery of the Batwoman was, as I similarly do not usually discover the mysteries of nonbatwomen.

Anyway, the Cornish pasty eating shopping masses of Norwich can sense weakness and as nature abhors a vacuum any slightly fragile shoppers can easily get crushed. Especially in the Works, a place that is easy to wander into yet impossible to escape, one is trapped by their 'art' books section pondering whether to get a certain book in hardback that you already have in paperback, you never know when you might need a spare copy. Ducking into an arcade, I found solace in a toy shop, where, among the action figures and similar plastic objects of desire, I observed a large portly gentleman in a Punisher T-shirt, Black trench coat, and 'Frankenboots' (beloved of Goths). He was deliberating with his troll-like missus which big plastic gun he should buy. As far as I could gather, he was judging the plastic guns by such criteria as size, realism and what noise it made. I think one can a take a comic-inspired look slightly too far. God knows what vigilante-inspired sexual shenanigans this couple get up to behind closed doors? I shuddered to think but my bad aul brain pan was way ahead of me and I already had before I tried not to--suffice to say it wasn't pretty.