The Sweet Smell Of Failure

Disenchantment

I never really felt the right sort of alienation; the kind that we're supposed to feel these days. I got drawn in rather than repulsed by the nowhere spaces of burnt out woodland and the concrete playground. At school I became fixated on a kind of primitive determinism and felt sure that I was in danger of sucking all meaning from the cosmos.

I'm not pulling doughnuts on broken mopeds in car parks any more but I do still like to hang out in forgotten nowhere spaces and I'm working on putting some meaning back.

 

1999

Sat in Bethlehem Grotto (no, not the milk one) drinking one of the few New Years beers I explained to Rafi that  "Even in these desperate times where everything seems to hang in the balance everyone goes on living; and even in these desperate situations goes on as though nothing were wrong." I hope he didn't believe that as much as I did.

2004

And I remember thinking "He's dead to me now and now nobody is standing between me and death."

The little shits are just going to draw massive cocks on the walls

Subject: IMPORTANT RE BRAND - this is a Big Company approved chain mail please pass on!

Hello, we are going through a re-brand in Big Company. We wanted to find a different way to tell everyone – something that involved using our imagination. So, this is a ‘pass it on’ chain email. Just like the days of the old chain letter! The idea is to read it and choose someone to pass it onto - always make sure you ‘reply all’ so you copy everyone and we can see the chain email grow as well as an understanding of our brand. Let’s see if we can keep it going. So read and pass on!

The brand – making our brand even greater!
A group of 30 people went away to think about what our brand should be for the future.
We have lost touch with the younger generation and want them to know our brand, so we focused our brand around 17 year olds.
To help us get in touch with 17 year olds, we created a character called ‘Lloydy’ – and built our brand around him but it applies to all.
We re-thought through what our values should be and we chose Leadership, Integrity and Imagination – what do they mean? Find out more at market place and you will start to hear/see other things
In coming months you will see some changes, we will be re-branding some rooms in London and will look later to do the same in regions – we are getting 17 year olds from our colleagues to re-brand certain areas. If you know any creative 17 year olds who might want to get involved, let us know.
You may have already seen a presentation on brand – if not, let us know and we can bring all this to life with you!

One last thing…ask yourself this at the end of each day – ‘Where have I demonstrated leadership, integrity or imagination in my work today?’

Today, I sent this email using my imagination to be creative…..in the next month, I will put 3 cylinders in reception each labelled with our new values and 3 different coloured balls next to them – asking you to put balls in the cylinder values you have seen demonstrated each day as you pass them! What will you do?….

67% = FAIL

You might like to see if you can do better than me at the Life in the United Kingdom Official Practice Citizenship Test. I'll be holding a special blinks on Sunday, at the end of which those of us who don't know or care how many hours 13-16 year olds are allowed to work in a school week will shuffle off down to the docks to be packed onto a container ship bound for forrin parts whilst being waved off by our more patriotic chums.

Still, it's nice to know I'm not the only one who can make mistakes about such vital pieces of information as how many million teenagers live in the UK  - The writers of this test appear to have forgotten that in Wales (still part of the UK as far as I'm aware) no fucker pays prescription fees (Q9) and that some hospitals have these things called Walk-in Centres where you can literally 'walk in' without the need for a GP's letter (Q14) for a whole range of non-emergency complaints.

I'm not sure what I expected from this test but if it ends up staying in its current form then it's worse than useless.

Pop Obit

RIP Swells. I'd like to think that as Jacko was reading one of your old Daphne and Celeste reviews he was struck by the sudden realisation that he was a fraud and his heart gave out under the strain of knowing he'd never write anything as good as "Ooh Stick You". It was probably a preexisting medical condition, mind.

I'd Hit It

In conversation with a colleague this morning I said "and I might get hit by a bus tomorrow" three times, so now she probably thinks I'm some morbid weirdo who spends his day brooding about that sort of thing. Should I tell her it's not like that, that it's normally trains that do the hitting?

The New Gold Standard

Tanya Gold is disgusted that a contestant on end of the pier talent show Britain's Got Talent (sic) was initially assumed to be a useless singer because she's unattractive. And she's right, it's unfair that based only on an assessment of their looks somebody should be considered to lack certain qualities. In this case though I hope you'll forgive me for being so cynical as to believe that anyone deemed interesting enough to have made it onto the broadcast will have been vetted and the judges made aware of the angle that their 'story' is to take, or at the very least that their reactions and those of the audience are edited to more closely fit the desired narrative. Perhaps whilst this injustice is prominent in her thoughts Tanya might have a word or two with the Tanya Gold who got rather worked up on Monday about the return of "beefcake" men because their Metrosexual predecessors were skinny runts and thus "men by genitals alone".
 
My muttering doesn't stem from thinking that Tanya was wrong in the Guardian piece; there's a very good case to be made that women over the age of 30 and/or women who don't conform to airbrushed images of beauty are more readily assumed unlikely to be very good at much; and I'm neither particularly surprised nor perturbed by the hypocrisy of her writing, but I am annoyed at what I think she represents. The problem as I see it is that her work is a symptom of newspapers' latest decision, seemingly terrified that they've losing their audience to alternative news sources emerging on the internet, to retreat from journalism and rely instead on retyped press releases and a procession of opinion columns designed to either pander to readers' preconceptions or stir up a bit of debate on a trivial issue. Comment pieces aren't new but as they struggle to find a way to make profit from content that is infinitely copyable and available from numerous other free sources, traditional print media are ditching investigation and reporting of stories that don't immediately scream 'front page', downscaling their news rooms and instead asking a Tanya Gold to knock out 1000 words on yesterday's telly, some celebrity guff and a made up new trend.
 
Newspapers seem to have hit upon the idea that they need to be more like bloggers (though they seem to have a shaky view of what blogs are actually like) and it's left me depressed beyond tablets.

Manky Bingo

I've mentioned before how internet gambling ads make me sick to my balls but I have to admit that even bloody good bloke/professional poker player Joe Hachem couldn't make me as bilious as new kid on the shit advert block, Minxy Bingo. The concept - that playing bingo over the internet for hours on end of a Friday night is not a problem but a glamorous activity - is already enough to bring up your lunch but it's their catchphrase "Release your inner minx" and the font that they use that'll really make you retch yourself inside out. What fucking evil scientist created that font? If Comic Sans is a comedy tie wearing cunt in typeface form then this abomination is a drooling, mouth-breathing moron who laughs at his own farts and thinks the Wayans brothers could do with being a little less highbrow. It's so bad as to immediately render worthless anything typed in it and I'd consider it a service to the world to pour petrol on any classic work reproduced in MinxyFont, even if it were the very last copy. As for "Release your inner minx" - frittering away the kids' pocket money on pixel watching is not fucking seductive and wearing yesterday's underwear, eating cold take away curry and texting your mates "just won £10!" is not the same as being at an exciting party.

 

A pox on you, Minxy Bingo and a curse on the house of Gala.

Suralan

There’s a new series of my show The Apprentice just started and those production types (bullshitters the lot of them) have been trying to mess with the format. Apparently these clueless idiots who spend their time in the kissy, kissy, huggy, huggy showbiz world know my business better than I do. “Suralan” they said “A television show where 10 sales wankers and 6 people who laughingly call themselves entrepreneurs prove categorically that convincing grannies to get another credit card is not a transferrable skill, is going to be a hard sell at the moment. It doesn't help that you seem to pick the winner entirely at random. Maybe you could select one of the good ones this year, perhaps even a woman?” “You ‘aven’t got a blaahdy clue. You’re out of your depth.” I told them. “We get 15,000 applicants for this one job and you’re telling me that it isn’t a fair reflection of the current economy. Pathetic.” We did make one change though; I decided it was time that they stopped mentioning my massive £800 million fortune at the start of the show. Not because it’s taken a hit in the last year like those bullshitters in the gutter press are saying, but just because you’ve got to make hard decisions in business and that intro had to go. No, I’ve still got plenty of money. I could write a £100 million cheque right now if I wanted, well, by next week, provided James Murdoch says I can. The important thing to remember is that I’m very, very rich and that’s why I deserve the adulation that I inspire in the swaggering braggarts who make it on my telly show.

 

Some people think that The Apprentice is a very clever way of discrediting capitalism by showing the movers and shakers at the top to be talentless, narcissistic, souless cunts. Well I’m here to tell those people that they’re wrong, it’s just blaahdy good telly but between you and me, this year’s lot are a bunch of schmucks and no mistake. I’m a straight shooter so I told them all what their problem was from the get go: “You’ve got to be like me, although there’s nobody like me. I could sell snow to Eskimos, chum. I could sell Pork Scratchings in Tel Aviv and get the Iranians going ga-ga for knock off DVDs of ‘Bend-over Boyfriends 6’! I don’t do that, I make crappy set-top boxes for BSkyB but you get my point and that’s that I’m unique and my company needs more of my uniqueness.”

 

I know you lot think I just sit up in my office bollocking the obsequious little shits that work for me but you’d be wrong there chum because I’ve actually been spending a lot of my time dishing out advice to the government about how to get out of this pathetic mess that they’ve landed us in. You see, selling green-screen computers in the 80’s and managing to tank my company’s share price to 10% of its market peak gives me a unique and valuable insight into the world of international finance. It’s like I told that Gordon Brown: “Listen up you clueless, idiotic, bullshitter; blaahdy old fool that I am, I'm going to take a risk - you're re-hired at the next election but you’ve got to pull your socks up and stop making careless, clueless and idiotic mistakes. It’s pathetic. And while I’m at it, I’m not ‘appy about that Fred Goodwin berk either. Born with a silver spoon in ‘is mouth and now he’s getting a payout? Do me a favour. They should just tell him it’s like my show - You’re fired son, you don’t get a penny.