For one thing it’d be a really useful thing to have when you’ve just arrived back from the supermarket and have more carrier bags in the trunk of your car than you’re able to take inside with you in one go.

But mainly it’s because they are the ultimate stealthy killers – the perfect tool for killing off people you don’t like very much.

As we all know, more people are kicked to death by donkeys than they are in plane crashes.  Think about it – that’s a pretty impressive achievement for dumb little Eeyore.

And all these donkey deaths were caused by accident.  Just imagine what an effective killing machine my little donkey would be if I got an animal trainer in to hone the beast of burden’s natural murderous talents?

I’d get the animal trainer to teach it to kick back with its hind legs when I spoke a secret command word.  Like ‘toast’, perhaps.

They’d never see it coming, and that’s the beauty of having a pet killer donkey. Now if I had a pet wolf, lion, tiger, crocodile or shark, then people would be a bit wary of it.  But what harm could come from a cute little donkey, with all of the associated sweet childhood memories of rides on the sand?

While I would be chatting with my unassuming enemy, who would probably be admiring my odd choice of pet, I’d be subtly maneuvering it round so that its hind legs would be in the optimum strike position and then it would be ‘toast’ followed by ‘SPLAT’.

I would then naturally express surprise, horror and alarm that my sweet little donkey could have performed such a heinous act.  I might even spank my donkey.

But then, I’d shake my head sadly, shrug and tell the shocked onlookers, “well he should have been a bit more careful really.  After all, they’re responsible for more deaths than plane crashes, you know.”

No, actually that’s Yves La Rock’s dream (and my bloody nightmare as, in Egypt, they still think that this trick is new and interesting when everyone else stopped playing it six months ago).

My dream is that, one day, I will be able to find a way of making an income that will allow me to make my living purely from the Internet, meaning that I am as free as a bird to travel from one place to another at a moment’s notice, changing locations as often as I change underwear.

Wherever I lay my laptop, that’s my home.

However, like most dreams (and kinky sex fantasies) the reality is often not nearly as good as one imagines it should be.

The main problem is that I really don’t like laptops at all.  Their nasty little keyboards just aren’t designed for people with jumbo-sausage-like fingers like me and those silly little touchpad things are simply a pain in the arse (or more accurately, a pain in the fingers).  So whenever I use a laptop, I need to plug in a ‘proper’ keyboard plus a ‘proper’ mouse.

But this doesn’t solve the main problems.  Normally I use a desktop with twin 19″ flatscreen monitors side by side, giving me a monster 38″ of vision.  Going back to a teeny 15″ of single monitor is just a real step down.  Also desktops are really cheap and so I was able to have lots of RAM, processor speed and storage on mine.  Getting anything close to that on a laptop would cost me an arm and a leg.

But the real, real difference is that. at home, my PC is online 24/7.  I just need to stumble out of bed to my desk and, because I never turn off my PC, I’m ready to start work as soon as my bleary eyes are ready to focus on what’s come in while I’ve been sleeping.

When I’m travelling, however, it’s a whole different ballgame.  Now I have to wander around some strange city attempting to find some wifi cafe before I can connect.  And half the time my laptop refuses to connect to the wifi system and so it’s on to the next one before I can get my external keyboard and mouse and external hard drive, etc. set up.

Now, if I was on my own, this wouldn’t be so bad, because I have a basic problem with travelling.  I love to travel, to go someplace new but, to be honest, I don’t really know what the fuck to do when I get there.  I don’t like sight-seeing at all, I loathe sun and beaches, I don’t like shopping – so what else is left?  I like to eat in different restaurants, to see different people and to generally ‘feel the vibe’.  But these are all rather passive rather than active pursuits.

I remember first realizing this when visiting The Hague in about 1982.  I remember thinking “I’d love to work here”, but I was bored shitless just wandering around the place.  And, to be honest, I’ve thought the same thing about most other places I’ve visited.  I’d love to live there, to mingle with the locals, to go off the beaten track, but I’d need something to do to keep me amused during the process.

Spending eight plus hours a day on my emails or fiddling around with web-itey things would suit me fine, as would doing some research for a new book.  No problem at all.

But the problem comes from the fact that I very rarely travel alone.  I have my bay-bee with me.  And there’s no way that she is going to sit around with me for eight hours while I do all of my Internety type things.  Like most rational people who travel, she wants to do stuff  when she gets there.  Normally she’s not quite sure what stuff she wants to do, but sitting around in a wifi cafe watching me work is definitely not one of them.  And I can’t really fault her logic for this.

When there’s a beach for her to sit on, that’s not such a problem as she can stay on the beach while I do my business.  For a while at least.  Not for eight hours.

Which means that I am usually rushing to get eight hours worth of work done in a couple of hours maximum.  And I hate rushing, which means I am usually stressed out.  I’m stressed out if I am rushing through my emails, and I’m stressed out if I’m not doing my emails at all.

I’ve noticed that my mood depends totally on how long it’s been since I checked my email and answered it all.  When it’s all up-to-date, I am exceedingly mellow – all is well with the world.  After a couple of hours, I’m curious as to what might have come in.  After four, I’m a little concerned that someone might be needing something urgent from me.  After eight, I’m getting rather worried.  By 16 I’m starting to panic a bit until, by 24, I’m just a panic-stricken maniac who absolutely must get to his email or else it will be the end of the World as we know it.

My hands are shaking as my email starts to download.  ‘Dowloading message 1 of 367’.

FUUUUCCCKKKKKK!!!!!!!!  I hope it’s mostly spam.

But Sod’s Law says it isn’t all spam.

No, Sod’s Law says that I can sit in front of my desktop at home and there’s not a lot going on.  But as soon as I go travelling, everyone in the world and his dog needs something from me urgently.

I am only writing this now because I am trying to move all of my thousands of archived emails from my desktop to my laptop – and of course it’s not going very well. 

Packing is easy as I am male.  I know that packing for a woman is an exercise that can takes days of preparation.  For me (and most other males, I’m sure) it’s very simple – throw every item of clothing in my wardrobe that isn’t dirty into a suitcase and close it.  Done.  Five minute job maximum.

But getting all my technological gear ready for the stressful journey – now that’s an exercise that will take most of the night to arrange.

So I am going to be away for nine stressful, panic-inducing days, on a bizarre journey to Latvia and Bulgaria and then back to Egypt that will involve six different flights using four different airlines with connections in Germany, Greece and Cairo.  During which, I will have plenty of time to fret over all those unanswered emails just screaming to be answered.

So don’t expect much blogging from me until I am back and have caught up with the non-urgent backlog.

I said there that I would maybe expand on the idea one day and release it as a book.  While this one day is not here yet, it’s coming closer now.

After several conversations with a good friend of mine who is an excellent writer and also knows a thing or two about Internet Marketing, we have decided to form our own publishing company, which we started a couple of days ago.

And that company is Informer Books.

The website is a ‘Work in Progress’ naturally as I only registered the domain 48 hours ago.  The logo is currently being professionally designed as my graphics skills are limited.  The furthest I could get with it is this:

Informer Books Logo 1.0

The publishing company will be publishing non-fiction books in the form of both printed books and as downloadable e-books and will have a particular house style in that all titles will be edgy, provocative and will reveal some ‘tricks of the trade’.

The book version of the ‘Make Money as a Shameless Writing Whore’ posting will be its second release as we will use the first title as a ‘test case’ in order to refine the content that is contained within the book.

I’ll keep you posted as to how the project develops.

But such thinking is, of course, complete bollocks.

Although there is little more irritating and mind-numbingly dull as a Procter & Gamble washing powder commercial repeated ad nauseum, they obviously work very well as, otherwise, they wouldn’t keep pumping money into variations on the same theme decade after decade.

If advertising didn’t work, then we’d all be shopping at Aldi and Lidl, buying non-name groceries and driving Hyundais … well actually, I do drive a Hyundai, but only because I loathe cars with a passion (I can’t even remember what sort of Hyundai it is – it’s just a silvery-blue one) and it’s not mine anyway – I just rent it so that I can give the keys back to the company when some mad minibus driver takes a wing off it.

But this is beside the point, because we are all slaves to advertising whether we admit it or not.  Want some proof?  OK, so name me one market sector where the leading brand/product is also the cheapest?

That’s a hard one, isn’t it?

Another proof of the pudding is to go to a strange foreign country where the majority of brands and products are totally alien to you.  Your initial reaction, probably, is to assume that they are all shit and will probably give you agonizing diarrhoea if you as much as lick them and so you instinctively reach for anything by a global brand that you recognize – anything from Heinz, Nestlé, Gillette, etc.

As time goes on in the strange foreign place you’re in, you’ll be subjected to advertising to local brands and see other people eating or drinking the products without dying and you’ll start to give those a try as well, but it is a gradual process to replace brands that have been at work on your stupid little brain for your entire lifetime.

It was also interesting for me to learn that different products have different brand identities across the world.  This was brought home to me recently while doing something as simple as buying soap – not something that I have given a great deal of thought to before.

But I was interested to see that, here in Egypt, they sell Imperial Leather.  Now to those people who live in places where Imperial Leatheris not on sale (such as the US), this is not a book from Victorian times on the joys of sado-masochism, or a Swedish punk band..

Oh, well actually Imperial Leather  is also a Swedish punk band that sound like this:

Bloody horrible it is too.  Someone should tell them to go and see The Great Rock n’ Roll Swindle in which Malcolm McLaren (who should also have been on my list of greatest heroes) admitted that punk was nothing but a great big scam.

But that’s not really relevant.

No, I am talking about a brand of soap called Imperial Leather.

I’m a bit strange because I haven’t really followed the path of a typical consumer.  I started off as a normal one in that I watched a lot of TV when I was a kid, and then a lot less when I was a groovy, partying, hardworking, twentysomething.  But then things went wrong as I should have gone back to watching a lot of TV when I got into my thirties, as by then I should have got married and should have had kids which would have ensured that I was so knackered at the end of the day that all I could do was slump in front of a TV to watch bullshit programmes interrupted by bullshit advertising for over-priced products.

But I didn’t – and to make me even more weird, I moved away from the country as well.

The result of this is that the brand identity for a lot of products is still locked in the era when I was last a heavy consumer of TV, which was the late Seventies/early Eighties.

In these days, Imperial Leather was positioned as a high end product, an ‘affordable luxury’ – with advertising that positioned Imperial Leather in the same section of the soap market that Stella Artois occupied in the beer market in the late Eighties.

After making a bit of research, I realize that they have now changed tack with their strategy in the UK over the past two decades.  It did, however, come as a bit of a shock to find that, here in Egypt, Imperial Leather is a pretty cheap and shitty brand of soap.  It only costs something like 15p or 25c a bar, which is nothing.

While searching YouTube for some copies of their advertising from the 1970’s (and failing to find anything) I came across this clip which shows what an evil moneymaking machine the producers of Imperial Leather really are:

So this is what all those Nigerian scam artists are doing with the money they fleece off people – they’re spending it all on staying clean and smelling nice.  Well it’s better than wasting it on drink, at least.

I didn’t buy Imperial Leather though, not because it is the soap of choice for thousands of Nigerian scam artists, but because the packaging still looks like it is stuck in the Seventies to me and I don’t like its snobby brand qualities.

So instead I went with another familiar old brand from yesteryear which is also sold surprisingly cheaply, which is Camay (mainly because of the fact that this comes in a lot nicer packaging).

This was, I admit, a bit of a gay, faggoty, nancy-boy choice for soap (I should instead have gone for something manly by Adidas or Gillette, but those brands are frigging expensive over here and, after all, it’s only fucking soap.  No one else is going to know that I use a girl’s soap (or rather they wouldn’t have done so before I decided to blog about it).

Camay have done a good job in keeping the brand contemporary – it now comes in lots of different types with names like Camay Chic and Camay Passion which come in different coloured packaging and are probably advertised in such a way that there’s a sub-brand of Camay that is just right for your own lifestyle (unless you’re a hairy-arsed bloke who’s just looking for a cheap bar of soap to wash his hairy arse with).

The soap is really supposed to be used only be sexy, smooth-arsed people like this:

But when I came to actually open the bar of soap to start using it, I discovered I had made a terrible mistake.  Just look at the frigging thing:

Camay Carcinogenique

The fucking thing is fluorescent purple!

How the hell did they decide to make the fucking thing that revolting colour?

I can just imagine the planning meeting with all of the marketing staff gathered in the conference room:

“So what colour shall we use for Camay Passion?”

“Duh … um … I don’t know.  It’s a hard one.”

“Well, what’s another word for passion?”

“Errm … sex?”

“Good one, good one.  So what’s a good colour for sex?”

“Errm … dunno.”

“Well let’s find out. Let’s all go to a sex shop.”

At which point the entire marketing department of Procter and Gamble head off in cabs to the nearest sex shop.  Here one of them finds a plastic dildo made from bright fluorescent purple plastic.

“Ladies and Gentlemen, I have found the colour that encapsulates the concept of Camay Passion.”

“Wow, you’re a branding genius, boss.”

Camay Passion?  I reckon it looks more like Camay Rádioactíve, or Camay Carçinogénique or Camay Chernobyl  to me.  I’m scared to rub the thing against my genitalia for fear that they will whither and fall off upon frequent contact.

So next time I think I’ll be better off with the Imperial Leather, or something that I’ve never heard of before.  After all, common sense should tell me that a bar of soap is just a bar of soap.  After all, all it is meant to do is get the grime and stench off your body more easily – it’s not exactly patented chemical rocket science.

1.  My bay-bee tends to hog the TV and it would bore the pants off her.
2.  It bores the pants off me as well watching the cars go round and round without hardly anyone overtaking anyone else.

But I followed the results on and off and so realized that the final race could, possibly, maybe, perhaps have a slight chance of being mildly interesting.

Also, my bay-bee was out at the sauna and having her nails done, leaving me in the rare position of having the TV all to myself.

The next challenge though was to try and find a channel that was showing it.  We have probably about 700 channels here, 693 of which we never look at because they are usually just showing round the clock Koran reading, which doesn’t make for terribly edge-of-the-seat viewing to a couple of heathens like us.

I eventually found a channel showing it though after browsing through just 115 of them.

The race was mildly interesting throughout the coverage.  Most of the time it looked as if Lewis Hamilton should take the title, but he was never in a position of comfort as any minor mistake could have lost it for him.

Things got a bit nerve-wracking just a few laps before the end as it started to rain.

At which point the electrical adaptor fell out of the wall and I had a mad scramble to plug the TV and satellite back in and then hunt around and try and find the channel again.

By the time that I had tuned back in again, everyone had gone into the pits to change tyres and Hamilton was just, just going to take the Championship.  But then, with less than a minute to go, Vetter in a Red Bull car (you can tell I’m really no expert in this sport, can’t you?) overtook him and it looked like he was going to lose.

The commentators were all jabbering away in Arabic and so I didn’t really understand what was going on in the last few nano-second of the race (because nearly all the cars looks the same to me anyway).  The Ferrari team were all celebrating and then it cut to the McLaren team celebrating.

What the fuck was going on?

It was a minute or two later than I realized that Timo Glock in his … well whatever car he was driving … was still on tyres for dry racing and both Vettel and Hamilton had passed him, putting Hamilton one point clear of Massa to snatch the Championship.

OK, so a career in sports journalism is obviously not awaiting me, but it was quite exciting stuff, especially for a Brit in a British car (OK, with a German engine, I’ll admit) to beat a Brazilian in an Italian car on his home turf … or maybe that should be home tarmac.

So Lewis Hamilton is not only the youngest ever Formula One champion but also the first Brit to grab the title since 1996.

Well, done, lad!

Lewis Hamilton

Now all I want is for another nice young non-Caucasian chap to win his particular race in a couple of days’ time and I will be a very happy man indeed.

This was something that I had been avoiding for the past few weeks because:

(a)  I’ve been too busy to find the time.
(b)  I really don’t like reading large amount of text on-screen.
(c)  He writes fiction and I really don’t like reading fiction very much normally.

I have to say that I really enjoyed his book.  It was a real page-turner (or, in this day and age, more accurately a ‘screen-scroller’).  One of the reasons that I enjoyed it was due to the fact that it was set against the sub-prime crisis and he had done a hell of a lot of research into the subject.  I remember discussing with him a year ago how bad we both thought things were going to get economically, but I don’t think either of us imagined that it would get quite this bad.

The other reason that I liked it was because I was named as one of the main characters in the book (albeit I had become Finnish in it and changed my job).  I was very pleased that I was the main villain in the book – the asshole capitalist pig who thinks of nothing but money no matter what its human consequences might be.

Actually, I think that this is the third time that I’ve been a character in someone’s book (not counting my own, which would be rather cheating).

The last time was probably in another friend’s book, but I don’t know for sure.  He’s a writer of pulp-fantasy who churns out paperbacks so fast that he can probably write them faster than I could read them – 3,000 words a day, every day.  He told me that he usually bases characters in his books on people that he knows and, as I was one of his main associates in those days, I’m sure that I was in one of them in some capacity.  I’m sure again that I would have been someone very evil and calculating because, whereas most people in his circle of friends talked about nothing but dwarves, orcs, goblins and elves, him and I spent most of our time talking about royalty payments, compound interest and offshore tax havens.

So I was probably cast as Accountant King of the Dark Elves or something.

The first book I was cast in I don’t think was ever published, but it was a supposedly fictionalized account of a very sad story that happened in the late-eighties – a doomed love story.

I always got on well with the girl who did PR for our company and we would have each other in stitches every time we were on the phone to one another. 

I never thought much about it until my secretary, who was good friends with the girl asked me one day, “do you fancy xxxxxxxx?”  (I’m not changing the names to protect the innocent – I’ve just forgotten her name – which probably makes me sound very callous, but a lot of shit has happened over the past 20 years and I’m probably suffering from Alzheimer’s already).

I’d never really thought about it before.  She was no ravishing beauty, but she was a lot of fun.

“Well … errm … yes, maybe,” I stuttered, put well and truly on the spot.  “But she’s got a boyfriend hasn’t she?  Don’t they live together?”

“Yes,” my secretary replied, “but it’s not working.  She wants out.  She asked me whether you would like to go out on a date.”

“Well … errm … Yes, OK, then, I guess.”

At this point I had been single for about three long years and had tried just about everything to try and get a date, but had never got anywhere at all, mainly because I was a complete social retard.

So we met up at a restaurant and had dinner.  It was a bit weird at first being in a totally new environment after previously being work colleagues, but the initial nervousness soon wore off and we got along really fine.  We parted saying that we must do it again soon.

The rest of the story I only found out from third-parties.

The next day, a Sunday, she had to go to work as she did a second job as a waitress or something.  Before she left for work, she told her boyfriend that they needed to have a serious chat when she got home that night.

During the day, she phoned her sister and recounted the events of the night before to her.  She said that she had a really great time and that she was going to dump her boyfriend.

But a few hours later, she got a terrible headache.  She tried to persevere, but it just got worse and worse until she had to be taken to hospital.

She died a few hours later from a massive brain hemorrhage.

Obviously everyone was totally devastated by this.  I learned about it from one of the other girls in the office who worked for me as my secretary was too shocked to come into the office. The boyfriend never found out about our date the previous night – everyone thought it better not to tell him, including me.

The sister was supposed to have written a book about it, but I’m not sure that it ever came out as there wasn’t really enough material in there to make a whole novel about, as sad as the whole event was.

But anyway …

As I said earlier, I’ve never been a great fan of fiction.  In a lot of cases, it’s because I don’t see ‘the point’.  This is obviously a stupid thing to say because there is equally as little of ‘a point’ in watching a movie or watching some crap on TV, yet for some reason I don’t have a problem with that.

Another problem that I have with fiction is that I find it overly descriptive, and my friend’s book (the one I read yesterday) was no different.  I almost stopped reading it when he got too heavy with the description of the buildings surrounding the main character at one point in it and what he had for breakfast. 

Every day.

Maybe it’s because I have a good imagination that I don’t need for all of the details to be laid out in front of me, or maybe it’s just because I’m naturally impatient, I don’t know, but it bores the pants off me. 

When I was involved in the movie biz I read quite a few movie scripts and these were a lot more to my liking.  They just contain the main elements of the surroundings plus all of the dialogue – leaving the production designer to fill in the details (or rather my imagination while I am reading them).

My own (pathetic) attempts at fiction always ended up reading more like scripts than novels – the dialogue was pretty good (if I do say so myself) whereas I always struggled to express the surroundings, what people looked like, etc.

But the main problem that I have with fiction (in terms of writing it rather than reading it) was to come up with a proper beginning, middle and end.  I have to admire people that can come up with a proper and interesting story because I’ve tried and failed to do the same on numerous occasions.

For me it’s a lot easier to write non-fiction because it’s easy to break down all of the information that I need to give over into chapters, and then simply write up each chapter one at a time.  And they don’t need any descriptions – simple facts explained as easily and quickly as possible, because I know that people don’t read non-fiction for the entertainment value of it – they just want to get the core points out of it as quickly and painlessly as possible.

Maybe another reason I struggle with fiction is because my unconscious mind realizes that there’s very little money in it.  So I soon realized that, when I had an enterprise that needed some fiction to be written, it was a lot easier to pay someone else $500 to come up with 30,000 words than it was for me to do it myself.

So maybe an evil Finnish Accountant King of the Dark Elves is a pretty good analogy for me after all.

I was at it again today.  As I mentioned in a previous posting, I am going through a musically fallow period at the moment where I’m not hearing a lot of new music that I like.  Last night, however, I downloaded some new DJ sets from ump3.de, including a couple of sets from Axwell, who still seems to stand head and shoulders above any other (pop) house DJs around today.

In his (and every other DJ’s) sets, there are usually a few tracks that I really like, with the remainder that are so-so.  I try and download the tracks that I like as separate MP3’s.

The problem for many years was, how the hell do I know the names of the tracks that I really like when there are no track listings available?

The answer, as I figured out over the years, is the following.

Listen out for the lyrics and write down as much of them as you can remember, and then type them into Google together with the word lyrics.

So it’s been a long time coming but I like what I hear from the … to the bass lyrics resulted in my finding:

TV Rock ft. Rudy – It’s Been A Long Time (Axwell Remode)

And let me see you moving shaking cross the dancefloor lyrics produced:

Treasure Fingers – Cross The Dancefloor (Laidback Luke Remix)

It’s then just a question of opening up Limewire and grabbing myself a copy.  If there’s nothing on Limewire, then it’s a bit more of a hassle.  Another possibility is to go to The Pirate Bayand try and find a Torrent, however, it seems to be quite hard to find individual tracks as Torrents as usually people only upload entire CD’s.

So if that doesn’t work, the only option is to Google the following:

<artist> <title> mp3 free download

It can be very time-consuming to find a track this way, but the track can usually be found (but make sure that you have good anti-virus protection as the sites with these downloads can sometimes be found are often riddled with viruses [or should the plural of virus be ‘viri’?])

As someone who has spent most of their life making a living from selling intellectual property, it might be considered as being somewhat hypocritical to have such a cavalier attitude to the subject of copyright theft and, to a certain extent, it is somewhat true.  However, my defense is that I consider that the music industry has been, in the past, an exceptionally greedy entity that is now getting exactly what it deserves.

I lost count years ago, but I would imagine that, over my lifetime, the music industry has probably taken me for around $20-30,000 judging by the amount of CD’s that I have amassed (now somewhere or other in Prague – I don’t know exactly where – I haven’t seen them for nearly six years now).

I got caught up in the same madness as everyone else did in those days before MP3’s became commonplace.  I too was a sucker who would pay $15+ to buy a CD that maybe contained a couple of good tracks with the rest of them being fillers.  But not any longer.

The new age of iPods, YouTube and MP3’s has made me realize what a rip-off the whole concept of ‘albums’ or CD’s really are.  I really can’t think of any album made over the years where I really enjoyed every single track – the majority of the tracks were usually pretty rubbish ones that you had to endure to get to the next good one, so I ended up begrudging paying for them.

Another thing that really annoys me about the music business is that the production costs of music are getting smaller all of the time, yet the purchase price always seemed to get higher and higher, which just seemed to be a case of the music industry taking the piss.

OK, so I must admit that I kind of lost track of the relative buying prices of CD’s versus DVD’s and computer games since I became poor in the early Noughties, but at that point a music CD in the UK could cost around GBP15.99 (say $30) with a movie on DVD costing around GBP9.99 (say $18) and a computer game costing around GBP29.99 (say $50).

This always seemed to be totally out of proportion with the costs of production for each of the mediums.  Hollywood blockbusters involve a cast of many thousands costing anywhere from $50-200 million.  Computer games involve a cast of many hundreds and cost maybe $5-30 million. 

Today, a lot of music is made by one person using a laptop using freeware and so is produced for practically nothing.  I know this because several of my friends in Latvia produce their own tracks and you’d be hard pressed to tell the results of their works from much more famous artists.

So where has all of the money been going all these years?

On sales and marketing of manufactured acts that need to be forced upon the public rather than those that rise to the top due to their merits alone – that’s where.  And I don’t see why I should pay money so that so manufactured act consisting of good lucking guys or chicks who can’t sing a note, but know how to dance (i.e. Pussycat Dolls), can be made popular for a bunch of tweens who don’t know any better than to like what they’re supposed to like.

So, in summary, the music industry has consisted to date of a bunch of greedy leeches and the sooner that they are forced to downsize because they’re not making enough money as a result of people like me taking what music they want the happier I’ll be.

It was from some serious newspaper like The Guardian and The Times (of London), so it probably didn’t use expressions like ‘having a wank’ or ‘jerking off’.  Probably just some stupid article which basically says ‘football is really popular’ (which anyone with half a brain has known for the last decade anyway) which the journalist in question gave a teasing headline to and made a few half-arsed analogies in so as to get it past his editor.

I tried to find it again, but couldn’t.

As I think I’ve mentioned on this blog before, I’ve never been a big sports fan.  My Dad was never into football and nor were any of my friends and I came from a small town that was nowhere close to any of the interesting clubs that actually had a chance of winning anything and so I got involved in other blokey interests, most notable of which was music.

Since then, my interest in football has increased a little, but really only with international games where my natural jingoism comes out as I actually care (a bit) as to whether one side wins or loses.  In this respect, I show a loyalty to England (naturally) but also to the Czech Republic which still feels like my adopted homeland even though I haven’t lived there for more than six years now.  Also more minor loyalties to Russia and Latvia.  But still I only pay a passing interest to it.

I am a little more interested in motor sports – Formula One and the World Rally Championship, but I have to admit that it’s unbearably boring to actually watch either of these sports take place – even more boring than football – because nothing ever seems to happen.  In Formula One, the only thing you’re watching for is to see if someone breaks down, crashes or if they spend too long in the pits, which means the mechanics are a lot more influential than the drivers.

So, contrary to the old adage, for me at least, it’s not the taking part, it’s the winning that counts.  Because all I am interested in seeing is results, not the events unfolding.  And the only interest that I have in the results is hoping that the English/British team does better than the French/Italian or German teams.

But over the past few days I have noticed that I have developed a much greater interest in a completely different sport, and that’s foreign exchange rates.

This is much more interesting to me than any sports event for a variety of reasons.  The first is that, whereas watching sports results only matters to me because of some national pride in relation to a country that I turned my back on five years ago, I actually have a fair bit of money riding on the results of the ForEx sport.  It’s the same as having taken a bet out on some of the sporting competitions, and having a gamble is an exciting thing, I have to admit, even though, as I have pointed out in a previous posting, it is a complete mug’s game because the house/bookies are always going to end up as the winners.

But with the foreign currency markets, there are no middlemen to stack the odds against you and so it is a fair fight and, like it or not, the outcome of the ‘sport’ has a major impact upon the money in my pocket.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I need to keep a close eye on the British Pound (GBP) as this is the currency I am mostly paid in, but I also earn a bit in Euros (EUR) and need to pay a lot of money out in EUR over the next couple of weeks.  Most of my expenses, however, are paid out in Egyptian Pounds (EGP), so I need to keep an eye out on that as well.  The Egyptian Pound is tied to the US Dollar (USD) which is also the currency that Russians (who are a small part of our client base) like to deal in.  But the larger share of our clients at the moment are Polish and so I need to keep an eye on the Polish Zloty (PLN) as well.

So that’s five different currencies that I need to monitor and which I have the ones that I like (GBP and PLN) and want to do well, and the ones that I want to die badly (EGP and EUR).

Which is a bit similar to the qualifiers for the next World Cup, for example, hoping that some get through to the next round and that some suffer a set of ignominious defeats.

Unlike the World Cup qualifiers where there are matches only every few weeks or months, the great ForEx battles rage day and night ad infinitum and, in these crazy financial times, there’s always something to look out for.

As of last week, the USD was easily top of the group, with the EGP riding on its coat-tails to take second place.  The GBP and EUR were very much mid-table, with the poor PLN getting a humiliating battering at the end of last week to bring up the rear.

But the mighty USD’s run of form ran out a little earlier today, with the GBP and EUR gaining ground on them.  But, most importantly of all, the plucky little PLN scored a last minute equalizer earlier today through clawing back 10% of its losses against the GBP and EUR in order to avoid its being relegated.  For now at least.

Tomorrow though, everything could be different again because, in this game, you’re only as good as your next match.

So, as the credit crunch continues to bite and the spectre of global recessions looms large over us all, ForEx could be the new football and, if football is the new porn, then surely this must make ForEx the new, new porn.

By the tender age of 19, it was already well on the wane.  A tragedy – at the time of life when most guys are experimenting with really stupid hairstyles this avenue of self-expression was closed to me (although this does have the advantage some 25 years later that there are no really embarrassing photos of me in my youth in existence).

By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I was officially a ‘baldy-twat’.  Whenever people guessed my age, it was always a decade more than my real age.  It did have some minor advantages in the fact that, in my business life, people didn’t realize how young and out of my depth I was.  But that was pretty much the only advantage of being deprived of hair from an early age.

This was not a great help to me while dating and also left me open to accusations of being a ‘skinhead’, ‘bone dome’, ‘slap head’, ‘bald-headed cunt’, etc.

My response to these taunts was that it was simply the result of having more than my fair share of male hormones and the burden I needed to carry in return for being blessed with an extraordinarily large penis (N.B. I have no research to corroborate my theory that bald guys have larger manhoods than those with a fine head of hair, just my own study, which had a sample size of one [i.e. me]).

But normally this was enough to shut the cheeky fuckers up anyway.

Fortunately the stigma of being bald has diminished a lot over the years.  In the Sixties, Seventies and Eighties, you were a complete freak or a Nazi asshole (unless you were Telly Savalas or Yul Brynner) if you had no hair because all the cool people had really long hair.  But this stigma started to wane as we got into the Nineties and the Noughties.

I kept cutting my hair shorter and shorter to try and stop the rot.  By the start of the Millennium I was almost completely grey as well, which didn’t help at all.

It was in 2004 that I decided to go the whole hog and get rid of the last of it – an exercise which involved hacking large chunks of flesh out of my head with the razor the first time I tried it.  I also had this strange moist feeling on the parts of my scalp that the sun had never shone on before.

I looked into the mirror with a feeling of trepidation not knowing what I would think of the person looking back at me.  The first reaction was one of alarm as I looked like something out of a slasher movie due to the crimson rivulets dribbling down my face from the multitude of gaping wounds.  However, after applying liberal quantities of toilet paper to staunch the blood-loss and then washing it off, I didn’t think it looked too bad at all.

And nor did other people.  Soon afterwards, when playing the ‘guess how old I am?’ game with people, they now stated to guess at ten years younger (actually some people even guessed at 20 years younger [but they did tend to be people who were completely wasted {and were usually aged about 17 so they probably thought that even a 21 year old was an old codger with one foot in the grave already}]).

Another advantage is that I have never needed to go to the hairdressers since that day.  I’ve never liked getting my hair cut – I’ve always thought that they were robbing bastards who should have charged me pro-rata based upon the percentage of hair remaining on my head because I had a lot less of it for them to cut and so it only used to take them about 10 minutes, but I still had to pay the same price as some other bloke who had more hair than an Afghan Hound.  Thieving cunts.

In summary, shaving my head was the best thing I ever did with regards to my personal appearance – I only wished that I had done it a lot earlier.  To all you fellow slapheads, I advise you to shave it all off as soon as possible.  Forget all of the Rogaine, the toupees, the comb-overs, etc. – you’ll just look like a complete dick whenever anyone discovers your dirty little secrets (and they will, one day).  Be bald and be proud.

However, I do have to shake my head when I see someone in their late teens or early twenties who has shaved their heads bald.  All I can think is “son, for most of your lifetime, bald is the only option you’re going to have for a cool hairstyle – do something creative with your flowing locks while you still have them”.

There is one great irony when it comes to me and hair though in that the only place that I would actually like hair is the only place on my body where I don’t have any.  Everywhere else and I can’t get rid of the bloody stuff fast enough.

No, I am cursed with being covered with a fine pelt, the like of which would make a Mountain Gorilla green with envy – it grows like weeds.  If I was to accidentally leave my contact lenses out, and walk into a safari park thinking it was a nudist colony, I’d be stuck there for life.

On my chest I don’t mind it too much, but on my back?  Ewwwww – that’s gross (something that I am reminded of constantly by my bay-bee [and quite rightly so]).  The problem is that it’s so bloody hard to get rid of the stuff because the human arm is not designed to easily reach that part of the body – anywhere else is not a problem, but to shave your own back requires the dexterity of a contortionist and the patience of a saint who lives in a small room with mirrors on every wall.

I’ve been told that I should get it waxed or lasered.  However, ever since the cancellation of Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ missile defense system I don’t think that there’s any laser powerful enough to get it all off me.  And it sounds terribly painful (and time-consuming and expensive).  I did think of just buying a Flymo, laying down prostrate on the floor once a week and getting my bay-bee to give me a good harvesting.  But she didn’t think it was such a good idea.

But salvation came after seeing this excellent ad:

So I got myself a Bodygroom (although I think it might be called something else in Europe).  Unfortunately, it still doesn’t solve the problems that I previously mentioned about it being impossible to reach one’s own back, but I had great fun with it having a good go at my bollocks.

Previously my pubic area was wild and untamed territory, my bodily equivalent to the Amazon and somewhat reminiscent of the bushes you see in old German porno movies.  Giving the region a good going over with the Bodygroom had remarkable, but rather shocking, results, because looking back at me in the mirror was the pubic area of a pre-pubescent teenaged boy.  This was not altogether welcomed as, for the following few days I was afraid to touch it as it made me feel like some kind of dirty, perverted kiddy-fiddler.

So ever since then, I’ve been afraid to use the Bodygroom around my knob and have decided that just giving it a bit of a trim every now again is better for my mental health, if not my overall personal hygiene.

One would be wrong.

Because, to the annoyance of girlfriends and other friends alike, I remain stubbornly monolingual.

This, they assume, is because I am lazy and stupid.  This is not altogether incorrect – I was never one for that ‘book learning’ stuff and, whichever side of the brain that is supposed to be the one that helps you learn languages must have been lobotomized at birth, as was the side of the brain that understands any vaguely scientific subjects like physics, chemistry and biology, plus the use of household objects such as washing machines and cookers.

However, this is only part of the reason why I don’t speak more than one language. 

The main reason why I don’t speak any other language fluently is because nearly every educated person in the world speaks mine. 

When any non-native English speaker thinks “what second language shall I learn?” it’s not difficult to guess that they are probably going to learn English, because English is a very useful thing.  For a start off, you get to understand pretty much all of the stuff that’s on the Internet, you understand all of the lyrics to your favourite songs and you can also watch the majority of movies without needing subtitles or to watch the dubbed version.

More importantly, English is now the world’s lingua franca.  This must be particularly galling to the French (ha, ha, ha [being British I am genetically programmed to hate all French – after all we’ve been fighting them {and beating them) for the best part of a millennium now and so can’t find any reason to stop {but recently I’ve started to dislike Italians even more than French because every time I’ve tried to do business with Italians they just jibber ‘discounto, discounto, discounto’ and then, after wasting all my time, decide that they weren’t interested in the first place even if you do give them a good discounto. Bastards.]})

What was I talking about?

Oh yes, English being the world’s lingua franca.  Lingua franca literally means ‘French language’ but figuratively speaking means ‘universal language’, which today is English.  Which must piss off the French majorly.  For which I am glad.  I actually read somewhere that they hate the English language so much that, every year, they gather together a panel of French linguistic academics to invent a new French word for each new English word that has popped into existence.  I can imagine that most of the time this ends up being some long and complicated sentence to replace a very simple English word.  They still have a lot of catching up to do though because I read somewhere else that the English language contains more words than any other language on Earth.

This doesn’t altogether surprise me as one of my favourite games to play is called ‘torture the translator’, whereby I make some poor translator try and translate some of the stuff I’ve written.  And even the ‘sensible’ business-type stuff that I write is not a million miles away from how I write in this blog (although I don’t swear quite as much).  I gave this as a test when looking for a Russian speaking translator/assistance and only one in fifty people who took the test came anywhere close to getting the ideas across that I was trying to express.

I’m not the only one either.  Take evil McDonald’s slogan of “I’m lovin’ it” for example.  The best that the poor bastard French translator could come up with was “c’est tout ce que j’aime”.  I’m sure that even the most diehard French loyalist linguist would have to agree that this sounds like utter bollocks.  Good job that they didn’t make Justin Timberlake have to sing his shit song in all of the different languages as he’d have really struggled over that one.

I’m going off at a tangent again.

But the point is that all non-native speakers are going to speak some English, if they speak any second language at all. 

This is a shame, actually, as English wasn’t meant to be such a dominating world language.  At one point this was meant to be Esperanto (I got a book from the library on Esperanto once – did I read it?  Did I bollocks.)  But the idea was a good one – invent a very simple language from scratch that everyone in the world would use as a second language so that everyone could communicate easily with foreigners. 

Although I didn’t read much about it, the one thing that I remember about it was that I thought that the bloke who invented it did a pretty piss-poor job of it and that I could have invented a much easier language than he did.

For example, they still have all that masculine, feminine, neuter bollocks.  Why do you foreigners need all this gender crap?  It just makes everything that more complicated to try and remember if a table is supposed to be a bloke, a chick or just a thing.  It’s just a fucking table after all, for fuck’s sake.  It’s not like you’re going to try and shag it (providing it’s a feminine inanimate object because to try and shag a masculine inanimate object would mean that you were gay or a neuter inanimate object would mean that you were  perverted, but if it was feminine, that would be OK).

And having different verb endings.  If I was going to invent a new language, it would always conjugate like this:

I go
You go
He/She/It go
We go
You go
They go

We bloody well know who’s going because we’ve already said I/you/he/she/it/we/you/they, so why complicate things?

Past tense? Just stick ‘did’ before it.

Future tense?  Just stick ‘will’ in front of it.

Piece of piss.  If everyone learned my version of a universal language, everyone would be fluent by the age of 14.

I do feel sorry for poor non-native English speakers though because English is actually a very stupid language.  The basics are quite easy (because we don’t have any of that masculine/feminine/neuter bollocks, for example) but, to become fluent, is practically impossible for the poor foreigners because everything is irregular.  In the world of languages, English is the surly goth kid dressed in black with no friends and a love of anarchy who will get a gun and go around killing all his classmates before turning the gun on himself if he has a particularly bad day at school one day.

I used to think that all of the other languages were a bit mad at having all these weird lines and squiggles over all their letters, but now I realize that they are actually quite useful (although they’re a bugger to type) because, when you see a word, you know exactly how to pronouce it.  The poor bastards who have to try and learn English, however, are shit out of luck.

Take the English word ‘rowing’ for example.  The poor foreigners have to understand that, although it’s just one word, it has two totally different meanings depending on how it’s pronounced – one way means ‘propelling your boat through the use of oars’ whereas the other means ‘squabbling with someone (usually your boyfriend/girlfriend/husband/wife)’

So, in summary, I pity all you poor bastards for having to learn our incredibly stupid and hard language.

But at least you have the motivation to jump through all of the hoops necessary to try and learn it. 

I didn’t.

But there’s a reason for this.

Now I imagine that, by this stage, all you smug foreign polylinguists are thinking ‘lazy wanker’ (or something like wanquierre de las lazi’boi in your strange native tongue), but this is not actually the case because, during my lifetime, I have spent the following amount of time learning the following languages:

French:  5 years
Latin:  2 years (now that was a complete and utter waste of time)
Spanish:  2 years
Czech:  5 years
German: 2 years
Russian:  2 years

Plus smatterings of Latvian, Polish and Hungarian.

Now if I added together all of the years and blood, sweat, tears and failed exam papers into just one language, I’d probably be quite handy in it (especially if it led to cool things such as understanding all the best bits of the Internet, song lyrics, movies and the best books, etc.).  However, as it is, I can’t hold a conversation in any of them, and so all of that time spent learning has been pretty much a total waste of time.

Since then, I have again switched countries – this time to a country that doesn’t even use proper letters at all – just a bunch of squiggles that looks like a print out of a major earthquake on a seismic graph or else an annoying kid frigging around with an Etch-A-Sketch for the first time (does Etch-A-Sketch still exist?  If so, I have no idea why because, if I had the choice between an Etch-A-Sketch and a Nintendo DS when I was a kid, the piece of crap Etch-A-Sketch would have gone straight in the bin).

So I haven’t even pretended to even try to learn any Arabic at all. 

Forget it. 

No chance. 

In Hell.

Even my bay-bee, who is fluent in three languages and who picks up other languages usually in a matter of weeks didn’t get very far when she tried it, so I know darned well that I would have no fucking chance.

However, my need to understand foreign languages diminishes over the years as I have continued to hone my skills at getting around communication problems, which can usually be easily achieved through a combination of two much easier to learn skills.

The first is by learning to speak English verrrry … slloooowwwlllyyyy … and … clearly.  Most English speakers try and converse with Johnny Foreigner by SHOUTING AT THEM VERY LOUDLY. 

This doesn’t work.

The problem when someone is speaking a foreign language to you that you don’t understand very well is that it’s very hard to tell where one word stops and the next one starts.  So you might think you are speaking normally butthepersonyou’respeakingtoisjustlisteningtoyouspeaklikethiswhichmakesitveryhardtounderstanddoesn’tit?

So I am constantly listening to how good the other person is at speaking English and moderating my speed accordingly.  And I also avoid using any complicated words if they’re not that good at it as well.

The second element of communicating with foreigners is through the frequent use of mime.  This has the downside of making you look like a complete pillock, but usually gets you what you want.

For example, on my first day in Latvia I needed some milk powder.  This was achieved by walking up to the nearest shop assistant, placing my outstretched fingers from my head in the approximation of horns, mooing loudly and then blowing some imaginary dust from my hand.

This actually worked.  It also has the added advantage that, if I find myself in a position where I am unable to find alternative employment (which is looking increasingly likely as the world economy continues to slide into OH MY FUCKING JESUS H. CHRIST WE ARE FUCKED, FUCKED TOTALLY OH SO FUCKING WELL FUCKED mode) then all I need to do is slap a bit of white emulsion on my face and pretend I am trying to find my way out of an invisible box and people should give me money.