As the Church of the 12th night Cakesniffers gathers members around the globe, a special new centre in British Columbia, Canada, has been funded with contributions made by its generous members.

Sister April Pissoff is rabbimam in chief there. She’s available round the clock to guide new flocksters with her words of wisdom and colourful, yet degrading, language.

Thank you Sister April Pissoff. Any excuse to distribute these photos around the web.

Apparently, these t-shirts are quite the thing to be seen in. Who’d have thought it?

Being driven by any of these people:

It’s just not right. It’s basically very wrong to the point that it makes me tut and shake my head at the drivers. That’ll tell ’em!

This says more about me than it does about them, but people of a perceived social background, age, occupation, sex or even weight just don’t look good or even right in certain cars. In fact, the only vehicles some people would look good in are bendi-buses, herses and ambulances.

What really pisses me off is when I pass the disabled parking bays near the entrance to a shop, that are occupied with brand new, MASSIVE four wheel drives and people carriers – this is usually after driving round for a bit and eventually parking at furthest point and walking to shop in a downpour. I’m sorry, but if you’re disabled and can’t work a) how come you can afford such a nice new motor, and b) if you’re disabled, how the fuck do climb up to get into one of those things?

Jealousy? To some extent I suppose, but more annoyance at paying taxes that fund other people’s luxuries when I have nothing to treat myself with after I’ve paid all my bills.

Not that I’m fussed about being able to park right near the entrance to a shop; it’s just that a lot of people “with disabilities” who you see jumping in and out of these huge vehicles appear to have fuck all wrong with them.

And then there are “parent with child” spaces. FUCK RIGHT OFF!

The UK’s retail industry is bending over backwards to help parents with children to such an extent that its spine must surely be at breaking point. It’s got to the stage now that, at most supermarkets, there are only a couple of rows of parking bays left for able-bodied, childless people – and these bays are usually full of shopping trollies where the lazy fucker parents dump theirs because they can’t be arsed to walk all the way to the trolly park.

There have been occasions when the entrance to Asda (Walmart-owned UK supermarket chain for scumbags) car park has been gridlocked because of fucktards in people carriers queuing up and waiting for parent with child spaces near the store front to become vacant when the rest of the car park has been empty. They’re just too fucking lazy, stupid and inconsiderate to walk the extra 15 seconds to the bloody shop.

“But it’s really difficult with all the kids and their carry cots and stuff”. My response to this is a) generations of parents coped before people had cars let alone people carriers, before all these dedicated spaces, etc, etc, etc and b) if it’s so fucking difficult, why the fuck have you got 4 of the little bastards (all the girls wearing pink of course)? Surely you’d have known it was hard after the first two!

Stupid, selfish wankers.

Pious parents
Of course, one of the great many things about our population of pampered parents is their sense of right and wrong.

It’s completely unacceptable for women to drive their kids the half mile to school in a four wheel drive, but it’s absolutely essential for them to do the same journey with their precious little darlings in an equally large people carrier.

The things you see when you haven’t got a rocket launcher

Fucktard, wanking tosspots. They should all be sterlised and their kids taken into St Cakesniffer’s Academy for Social Modelling & Pickle Research Centre.

It must be freaky being a bat. Seeing the world upside-down, apart from when you right yourself to go toilet (it only takes once to learn not to poo or wee while your arse is above your head).

Seeing people’s faces upside-down completely freaks me out, even more so if they’re talking. It’s the way all the features seem oddly independent of each other. The way that face no longer belongs to the person who’s looking at you, as if it’s their doppleganger.

Freaky deaky.

Of course, some people’s faces look a bit like they’re upside-down anyway…

I wonder if the Soviets or the Nazis conducted experiments into suspending children upside-down as they grew? I shudder to think what the consequences might’ve been…

It’s very dangerous, living with wild animals. Last night, I was the innocent victim of crossfire in an unprovoked attack on Sonny by stupid fucker Otto.

I have this policy of not removing my shoes until the very last minute before going to bed, but unfortunately, this was the precise time that the little one-eyed dickhead decided to pounce, using my unprotected toes as his springboard.

It REALLY hurt. In the minutes that followed, he was called: you little fucker; you stupid little bastard; shithead; nobhead cat; fucking wanking cunting arsehole, one-eyed fucker.

Pain
There are some pains that leave you helpless as all your nocireceptors fire at once, sending the blood flowing to the affected area, setting your heart racing and your head pounding. During those moments, it feels like your brain could implode with the agony. You’re left breathless by the experience.

Such pain is experienced in the following circumstances:

• Biting the inside of your mouth
• Stubbing your toe
• Bashing your freezing cold fingers against a hard object, or trapping them in a door
• Kneecapping
• Having 4kg of cat scraping his claws over your unprotected feet

A kind of blind panic accompanies this pain: you run and scream (in your head), and for some reason, holding your breath seems like a logical thing to do.

Slugs
I hate slugs. These bastards eat all the best and most expensive plants in the garden, but never touch dandelions or other weeds. Cocks.

They aren’t even imaginative enough to grow a shell.

In the bad old days of heavy industry, coal fires and other such carbon-derived pollution, the slugs round here were pitch black. I remember going on a school holiday to the north Wales countryside and I remarked at the brown slugs they had there.

Curbs on the burning of fossil fuels, and the general preference for gas and electric domestic energy, has resulted in a change in our slug population. No longer are they sleak and black and interesting. No, these days they are brown and insipid, almost transparent.

Check these nastry little bastards out:

Today is Saturday and I’m not working. Tomorrow is Sunday and I will be wrkign. Because of this, and the fact that I’m perpetually knakcerked, I’m going to take things very easy today. So much so, that I don’t think I’ll bother getting dressed, or washed for that matter.

Today I inted to be as lazy as possible, right down to not correcting typos or spelling meistaks I as I compose blog posts.

And this is an interesting experiment,. Not being trained a trained tupist, I tend to havet o to correct use my backspace key quite a bit, the woerd autocrorrect thing is great – uless it’s set to american Englaih . Obviouslty, Bloogger sodoesn’t have this utlity, so you generallty have to watch what you’re doing and make quite a cfew corrections as tyou tippy-tappy away at the keyboard.

owNow, not correctiong things that are mistyped is almost impossible. It’s the same as not striaightnening papers prior to stapling them. Looking ofver this text as I type is cayusing my blood pressure to rise because I really I am fighting the urge to go back over it and correct the mistakes that have krept in. crept in. At one place of work, a lot of “send to all” e-,mails are sent out , via Outlook, which are written very much in the style of this post. The sender simply types the message, igrnoes all the typeos and spelling mistakes and hits “send”. How fucking rude is that? How unprofessional is that? If i ver met this person, I’d urely like to give them a godo hard kick up the boobum with an iopen-toed sandal.

So this is how things are in a world without the backpspace key and cursor controls. Pretty much like real life really.

Cakesnifferology
Religions and cults are weird things. Are religions just cults with a large following? I don’t know, and I don’t profess to know enough about this other than to wonder why people get drawn to these things.

I suppose one difference between a religion and a cult is that a religion, or proper faith, would never seek to isolate a person from their families or natural environments. Faith should never instruct a person to make financial contribution, as a proportion of salary, to their cause. Faith should survive through generations of leaders who represent the god, rather than being short-termists with the leaders acting as a god.

I wrote this somewhere else earlier: “Faithless in faith, we must behold the things we see”. I guess it sort of means that seeing is believing and this is the safest option for a lot of people who don’t quite “get” faith.

Anyway. I’m going to start a cult.

The Church of the 12th night Cakesniffer, or Cakesnifferology, will be a virtual cult that has the basic remit to spread normality and common sense across the globe. Unlike the Heaven’s Gate cult, which lost 39 purple shroud-clad members to a suicide pact under the flight of the 1997 Hale-Bopp comet, we won’t talk about aliens being our saviours.

Fuck it, I can’t be arsed.

You need to be an egotistical, mentalist wanker to want such adoration and no normal person would want that.

I suppose that’s why normal people don’t start cults.

And there it was, gone, no sooner than it had started. So Cakesnifferology was never to be more than a passing whim and the world is a better place because of it. And for all the weirdos hijacking it, the passing of Hale-Bopp throughout those weeks in the spring of 1997 really was something else. Searching through my photo archives, I was sure I had a blurred shot of it somewhere, alas no. But I did find this from the 1999 solar eclipse.

In some ways we in the North of England were lucky on that August day because we weren’t expecting the full solar eclipse, so we weren’t so disappointed when it turned out to be cloudy (as fucking usual). In the end, the cloud provided cover for some pretty decent photos. And the eclipse itself, partial though it was, was one of the weirdest things I’ll ever experience: the dusck-like light; the sudden chill in the air; the quiet as the birds ceased their twittering and the cars stopped to witness the event. Then with a click of the fingers, it was gone.

Starting a cult would’ve been a great way of getting people to wear Cakesniffer t-shirts though. You could imagine mothers across the world going through their teenagers’ washing bags to find a screwed up sniffer t at the bottom (how dare they treat the garment with such contempt!), crying to their husbands that their little one had been lost to the Cakesniffy forces of blogworld.

“My baby, why my baby?”

“Because they’ve got internet access and blogging all night sure beats watching TV with us.”

The South Lakes Wild Animal Park (they don’t just talk conservation, they DO it!), thrills its vistors with awesome acts of carnage perpetrated by the big cats there (which is more than can be said for the pathetic penguins). Each feeding time, chickens are placed on top of telegraph poles and the lions and tigers are let into their respective enclosures, where they race to the tops of the poles to collect and devour the chickens: feathers, beaks and all.

I suppose its a bit like It’s a knockout meets Animal magic, but we’re ensured that they do it this way to exercise the animals who’d otherwise laze about all day (anybody who’s owned a domestic moggie will understand this).

We were also told of horrible acts committed by poachers who ensnare and kill tigers to sell their bits for Oriental crank medicines. After being caught and tried in Indonesia, one such poacher managed to get out of his 5 year jail term by bribing whoever could get him out. This bloke had been caught by the conservation team as he’d gone back into the jungle to collect his snares, one of which had already been responsible for the death of a female tiger (that leaves about 499 Sumatran tigers now). Fuck, instead of going through legal channels, why didn’t they just tie the fucker up in the jungle and let the tigers get him? Bastard.

Or even better, bring him back here and stick him on top of a pole for a special feeding time! What an excellent, super-villain way of killing somebody. Now, when somebody pisses me off, all I need to do is envisage them being suspended from a pole and being eaten feet-up by a big, fuck-off tiger.

I love nature.

There’s something in the air at the moment, with both myself and Angry Chimp having something to say about pooing, and the use of public lavs in general.

Women tend not to poo when they know there’s somebody in a nearby cubicle. You’ll hear nothing for a while as your wee waits to start (there’s always delayed onset with an audience), then your neighbour will break the ice by getting some toilet paper ready, silence again, shuffle of feet. Your wee comes and goes and you’re off, leaving them to get on with their business once you’ve washed and dried your hands.

But what if you don’t leave? What if you wait? Will there be a stand-off? Who will break first? And how about playing that cruel game of going back into the lavs after you’ve left, knowing that there’s somebody desperate to lighten their load in one of the cubicles? I’m sure you could cause a nasty case of haemorrhoids if you played your cards right.

That’s the beauty of being a temp somewhere – you can really piss people off without it mattering.

“Whatever” is a word that can be used to convey at best disinterest, and at worst, utter contempt for a person and what they have to say. It is used in the same sneering context as:

• “(Fuc)k’offf!”
• “P-fah”
• “Yeah right”

It wasn’t always this way; whatever can be defined as “any(a): one or some or every or all without specification” and it even used to be used in a positive context, for example in Status Quo’s Whatever you want. But since the mid 1990s and now in 2005 it has skyrocketted itself to the top of the pile as the favourite dismissive of queens, fag hags and ineloquent teen slags on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Yeah right, whatever.”

Those three words tell us so much about who says them, such as:

• Can’t be bothered to listen;
• Can’t be bothered to have a proper discussion about something;
• Can’t be bothered to be
• Can’t be bothered to take contraception;
• Face? Bovvered? Right, because I’m not even bovvered, so shut up.

“Talk to the hand, cos the face ain’t listening”
“Talk to da booty, cos da hand’s off dooty”

All mildly amusing the first time you hear them, but so tiresome after more than three or four times. Desperately sad when people, like my sister, take themselves seriously when they talk like that – accompanied by the RnB-esqe sideways movement of the head and raised hand, palm outward (what the fuck is all that about, sister?).

Nice looking lasses – Whatever!

But returning to “Whatever”. I hate this so much because of the attitude it conveys. It actually conveys “attitude”, whereby both you and your contribution are deemed worthless and yet those guilty of abusing this word rarely have anything to contribute to a debate.

It makes my blood boil to hear it, even worse if directed at me: little needles start to prick at my tummy; the heat rises through my breast and into my head; I go blind with rage; I could kill.

With the emergence of “whatever”, the beligerent and uneducated masses of the western world have been provided with the ideal tool to really get under the skin of others. With this “attitude in a word” they can put on a display that shrugs a “You might care about stuff, but I don’t give a fuck”, which is delightful.

Whatever? Don’t whatever me!

Entropy is described as being the measure of the degree of disorder, or “mess”, for want of a better term. Entropy is the default setting for the world, and indeed the universe. Left alone, things get messy and disordered, chaotic if you like.

People have a natural tendency to rebel against entropy to return order to their environments. Anybody who’s studied thermodynamics in chemistry or physics to any level will know that it’s pretty tiring fighting against this descent into chaos.

To counteract messiness, people tend to develop little “tidying” habits to help maintain order, or to prevent mess. Things, like DVDs, CDs and books are categorised; other stuff is organised into rooms according to appropriateness and relevance (bathroom, kitchen, bedroom etc); desks are organised so that different piles mean different things.

Piles of paper
These are the things that we create subconsciously before filing or binning. But the paper isn’t just “piled”, sheet upon sheet in any old fashion. We have a tendency to automatically neaten the pile of paper so that the edges match up as much as possible – it just seems like that right thing to do. In fact, it’s almost impossible not to. There are even guides in hole punches that centre the holes so that the edges of the pages are lined up neatly when the paper is filed in a ring binder.

Given some sheets of paper to staple, a recipient can’t usually stop themselves from straightening the pile prior to fastening it – the usual method is to lightly grasp the papers in portrait orientation and tap the bottom edges against a flat surface, then to repeat this while holding the papers in landscape orientation. With the edges aligned, the stapler is then used to fasten everything together at the top left corner.

So, what do we make of this then?

Is it just me? Surely it’s impossible to simply pick up a pile of papers and staple them without tidying them??? Surely you make sure you have all the relevant bits of paper in the pile before stapling it so that you don’t have to put a second staple through to append something else to it????

What the fuck is wrong with people?

Synchronicity
Synchronicity is one of my favourite songs from 80s rock superstars The Police.

It’s that thing that women who live and work together get when their menstrual cycles synchronise. Organisations have cottoned to that fact that, if you get a load of women who suffer from bad PMT working together, you can actually use their combined energy to power the photocopier for one week in each month. This can backfire and entire office blocks have had to have replacement windows after all the glass had blown out during an emotional outburst between two colleagues (something to do with wanting chives rather than pineapple in the low-fat cottage cheese).

I’ve noticed that there’s a bit of synchronicity going on in the ladies’ lavs at the Moonlighting Detective Agency. Every time I go in there, the same woman is there too. Trillion pointed out that I was seeing my reflection in the mirror, oh har har har. But seriously, it’s the same woman, I don’t know who she is and she always uses loads of toilet paper to clean herself up – as if she’s messed herself and got poo up her back or something.

Very odd.

Poo seems to be the topic of the day – Herge has given a wonderful description of the use of toilet cubicles already. Not long ago, my dad announced that he was “going for a sit” on the toilet. This is his way of saying that he was intending to spend 20 minutes passing a poo that would resemble a hedgehog in both shape and size. A poo that would be impossible to flush that would need vigorous liquidising with the toilet brush.

How delightful.