My colleague and I did however get Friday night off, and so we ventured from our hotel to the nearest ’strip’, which happened to be Santa Monica Boulevard, and to the bars we’d briefly seen from our taxi earlier in the day.

As we entered the first bar we came across, something struck me as a little different.  I am not unaccustomed to being ‘checked out’ when I go to bars, I can scrub up pretty well when I absolutely have to – but I’m not entirely used to being checked out by men.

“I think this is a gay bar.” I said to oblivious colleague as we approached the bar.

“Really?  Are you sure?”

We looked briefly around the bar at all the men having a good time, some in deep conversation, some dancing together, some snogging each other’s faces off to the sounds of Club Tropicana.

“Yes, yes I’m pretty sure.” I concluded with Hercule Poirot-esque insight.

We began to draw the odd glance, I imagine because they don’t get too many pasty white, slightly overweight, badly dressed couples as patrons.  We might as well have been wearing sandwich boards with the words ‘STRAIGHT GUY’ emblazoned across the front.

“Do you think they’re looking at us because they, you know, fancy me?” asked my colleague, who was beginning to find the situation hilarious due to my final words before entering the bar being, ‘remember to work the accent, they love a Brit over here’.

“No, definitely not, they’re wondering how rich you must be to be punching so far above your weight.”

It turns out that every bar in a three block radius is a gay bar when the travel agency books you into a hotel in West Hollywood.  Still, we made some great new friends and I got to see a bodybuilder walking a dog the size of a mouse.

The constraints were simple, the joke had to be of twitter-esque length in characters (a bit less, actually), and not be too rude.  Sounds easy eh?  It wasn’t.  Mostly it was making up horrible puns, or tweaking old jokes into a usable format.  I soon realised however that they weren’t interested in quality, they wanted groaners.

Well, I was clearing out an old email box the other day and found many of my submissions.  It made me wince.  Did people really pay for this?  Yes, yes they did.  I can only imagine the disappointment of the customer who had paid 50p or a pound only to have one of my one-liners sent to them by return.  Consider this an open apology to everyone who ever paid for one.

So, for reasons of catharsis, and because so much time has gone by that I think it’s OK to put them here now, please find some of the worst jokes I have ever written.  Do not judge me. Please.

• My Grandma suffered a massive seizure yesterday.  I didn’t know she could even LIFT that much Heroin.
• A puppy born without an anus is taken to the vet.  “Can you help?”  The Vet replies, “I’ll give it a crack.”
• I like to win at cards, which is why I only play Snap with stutterers.
• Which Sith Lord always crosses rivers at their shallowest point? Darth Wader.
• My girlfriend wants to retrain as a steamroller driver.  I’m not going to stand in her way.
• When I was younger I used to collect Panini stickers.  I had them all except the ham and cheese melt.
• Gary Lineker described England’s last match as a game of two halves. Personally, I found it a game of eight pints
• I’ve got this mate who keep putting laxatives in my drinks.  With friends like that, who needs enemas.
• A necrophiliac was caught trying to dispose of the evidence to passing strangers.  It was a dead giveaway.
• People who say “What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger”, have clearly never arm-wrestled a stroke victim.
• My Dad is an Imperialist.  He hates people who still use feet and inches.
• My girlfriend suggested using toys in the bedroom, the sex is still rubbish, but now I’m much better at Scalextric.
• When it says test your smoke alarm regularly, they don’t mean with a series of small domestic fires.  Firemen don’t like that.
• My nephew wants a pirate outfit for Xmas.  He can dress up all he likes, he’s never going to look Somalian.
• A man in a big car is said to be making up for a tiny penis, so what should we make of a woman driving a Mini?
• A guy was interested in my car.  I told him it did 100 mpg and never broke down.  He didn’t buy it.
• Being fat sounds so negative.  I prefer to look at it positively, being immune to Anorexia.
• Why say “turn a blind eye”?  Surely it’s the GOOD eye you should turn. The blind one can look wherever it wants.

“Okay, that’s it for the warm-up, now we can get started!”

This was my third circuit training class since a friend convinced me it would be a good way to keep fit during the summer with little or no football available.  You know, when you write it down like that, it seems like a perfectly sensible, even logical argument, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, ten minutes in, unable to breathe and with the early signs of a cramp developing in my left buttock, it seemed so completely illogical a statement that it would probably drive Dr Spock to self-harm.

From this point on, my thoughts turn merely to damage limitation.  You simply can not leave a circuit training class without looking like a wimp, and although my puce-faced appearance probably already classified me as such, I was going to try and retain what little dignity I had remaining.

I worked my way to the back-left corner of the room in the hope of being out of sight of the female instructor, as she began detailing the next thirty minutes of “military style fitness training.”  However, it is difficult to ‘hide’ when the walls on three sides are covered by floor-to-ceiling mirrors.

Being shouted at by a woman to ‘work harder’ and ‘put some effort in’ is deeply unpleasant if you’re not sporting an erection.  It’s not all that pleasant if you do have one, but at least it’s probably being made up for with other things.

Fifteen minutes in and I genuinely thought there was a danger I might die.  Twenty-five minutes in and I began to fear I might not.

The final fifteen minutes or so are something of a haze.  I have read that the mind can sometimes block memories of particularly traumatic experiences, and I am pretty sure that this is what happened here.  Though I am quite sure that I am the first person to ever suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder from a circuit training class.

“Good work, did you enjoy that?” asked the instructor as I staggered from the studio.

“Yes, see you next week,” I lied.

I’ve genuinely lost count of the number of times I’ve met people who’ve said, “Weren’t you in that thing I saw?”, “Are you sure you weren’t at my school?” or “You were definitely on last night’s Crimewatch.”  It’s something I’ve learned to live with, and my “I guess I’ve just got one of those faces” face, is right up there with the best of them.

The point I’m making, I suppose, is that being mistaken for someone I’m not, is not a particularly uncommon occurrence for me, and it rarely offends me.  Unlike the last time.

Now, I don’t dress up to do my shopping.  I’ve seen Cougar Town, so I know there are certain women who like to trap young eligible men like me in every aisle, so I feel it is best that I don’t offer them unnecessary encouragement them by dressing up, so I go to the supermarket in my skivvies when I am doing my weekly shop.  I was wearing a sweater and jeans, for the record.

“Excuse me,” said the older gentleman behind me.

I ignored him at first, because there was simply no way he could be talking to me.  I hadn’t brought an old person with me, so he definitely wasn’t mine.

“Excuse me,” he said again, tapping me on the shoulder this time.  I turned to face him, quizzically.

“I wondered if you could tell me where the tomatoes are?” he asked.

I was shocked!  Not only had be mistaken me for a Tesco employee, but so confident was he in his assertion that he had mistaken me for an OFF DUTY Tesco employee! I was mortified.

“I don’t work here!” I corrected him, firmly, but politely.

He stared at me blankly, before slowly raising his hand and pointing to the tomatoes in my trolley.

“I saw you’d got some, and I wondered where you got them from,” he asked, somewhat sheepishly.

This embarrassing episode could so easily have been prevented if only he’d had the foresight to preface his question with, “I know you don’t work here, but…” or even, “I couldn’t help but notice you have some tomatoes in your trolley…”  But no.  He had to make be believe he’d mistaken me for an off duty supermarket worker.

Fortunately I went about the rest of my weekly shop free from both old people and cougars.

Anyway, with Ben recovered from the viral epidemic, our two week hiatus is concluded with Cliff getting a new watch strap – though listening back I think he was basically admitting a sexual assault.  Ben was bored at home and found a place to confess all of his sins.  Online.  And I did some rubber necking.

All this plus a birthday for Eric Bristow, Beethoven writing a song for his ‘bit on the side’ and why you shouldn’t buy cigarettes for kids in your dressing gown.

Go on, have a listen…

Well, he has written a book!!!

A proper book too, not just a collection of blog posts.  It is called Sex and Bowls and Rock and Roll, and will be out shortly.  I suggest you pay a visit to the book’s website to have a look, as there a few amusing snippets, and links to places where a purchase might be made.

I am confident that first editions will be worth a fortune once the movie rights are secured, so don’t waste time, go and take a look for yourself…

* that beer might have been a glass of white wine, but that doesn’t help either of our images so we’ll stick with ‘beer’.

It’s difficult, because I am torn between the desire to write down lots of jokes about how Ben sounds like Louie Spence from Pineapple Dance Studios, and the desire to tell them to his face when there is a microphone to record his reaction.  Then there is the fact that it takes a lot less time to say it, than to write it.  Which when coupled with my inherent laziness means that I don’t write it.

But next week I am doing something which I will talk/write about after the event, but first I wanted to give you an opportunity to offer me some advice in advance.

I am going Speed Dating!!

Ostensibly I am accompanying a female friend who wasn’t keen on doing it by herself, but essentially I will be a contestant (they’re called contestants, right?).  I tried this once before many years ago, but got very drunk, couldn’t remember people, and subsequently ended up going on a date with someone I really didn’t like very much.  This time I intend on being sober for most of it.

Three minutes might not sound very long to spend with someone, but you can do an awful lot of damage in three minutes, so I am looking for advice on questions I should ask, and details I should/shouldn’t share.  So come on, give me some good opening lines or funny questions.  I promise to use the good ones and report back with the answers.

Oh, and in the meantime, you can hear Cliff and I taking the piss out of Ben’s soundalike at our podcast site, plus we discuss elephants that look like Brad Pitt and whether the Pop would come quietly…

I’m also pretty confident that what they meant to say was, “Chicks dig guys with scars – as long as they weren’t earned in a ridiculously embarrassing manner.”  And let us be clear, I got my new scar in a ridiculously embarrassing manner.  I told the story on the podcast, but as I’m not putting them up here any more, I thought I’d tell the story the old fashioned way in the style of our forefathers, with my fingers via a keyboard into a computer and onto the Internet.

It started with a morning visit to the bathroom, nothing unusual in that – we all do it.  This was how I noticed I was about to run out of toiler roll – which would have created an entirely different blog post.  So, I went onto the landing and to the airing cupboard where I keep spare loo rolls.  To help paint the picture you are no doubt mentally building, I keep the loo rolls on the shelf directly below where I keep the iron.  The iron which I had no put away properly the day before.

As I reached in for a new roll I accidentally brushed against the power lead for the iron, which knocked it from it’s precarious position and sent it tumbling down onto the top of my head.  Such was the rotation of the iron that it was pointing direction downwards by the time it reached my head, ensuring that the only part that made contact with my skull was the pointy bit at the front.  It would probably have hurt a lot more if more surface area had made contact, right?

I shot backwards with my hand at my head and let out a yelp.  And some swears.  Then some louder swears.  I took my hand away to notice it was already covered in blood.  This was not good.

I went back into the bathroom and began mopping blood from my head, but still it continued to seep out of the top of my head.  By dabbing the site of the wound with my new toilet roll, I noticed what appeared to be a puncture mark of about 1cm in diameter.  I did not know what to do, so I did what any sane person does in the midst of a medical emergency.  I asked Twitter.

“How big should a cut on your head be, before you consider going to the hospital to get a stitch – serious question…?”

Twitter was not much help.  Mostly people just wanted to know how I had done it for their own idle entertainment.  The Internet can be a cruel place at times.

I was pretty sure that all the blood was quite misleading in terms of judging the severity of the injury, plus I could not think straight due to the blinding headache and I was feeling quite nauseous and really quite faint.  So I decided that instead of wasting valuable NHS resources I would just to hold a sheet of kitchen roll to my head and have a little nap.

Eventually, the bleeding stopped.  The following evening Cliff and Ben came round to record the podcast, and continued the theme of people off of the Internet giving me little or no sympathy – you can here their reactions in this podcast episode.

So what I would like a new excuse, please.  I am going have this mark for quite some considerable time I imagine, and when questioned I would like to have something really cool to explain it away.  Preferably something that doesn’t involve the use of the words ‘loo roll’ or ‘Morphy Richard Turbosteam’.

Suggestions welcomed…

The latest episode includes Cliff’s imaginatively titled quiz, ’sound for a pound’, Angry’s intense hatred of Pandas, Google street view, lesbian school discos, and why Crufts is essentially a Nazi’s dream. All this plus the Pope apologising to God, Ben’s training course, the very first FA Cup final and a few words from Flavor Flav.

In the meantime, I’ll be trying to turn this site back into blog…

All this plus dog insurance, a new drug called meow meow, how to deal with recruitment consultants, and a list of disgusting things that have been in our mouths.

We are also happy to announce our new website, which can be found here: Angry & Cliff – The Podcast.  It’s almost finished, so feel free to come by and say hello.  As of next week, this site will return to being a ‘blog’.  A rarely updated, distinctly unpopular blog, but a blog nonetheless.  Which means of course that the show will now be published on the new site.  It won’t make a difference to your feeds or anything, so you shouldn’t even notice the difference, if you’re a subscriber.  If you’re not a subscriber, then I ask why the hell not?!

Ben has also prepared one of his special quizzes, which is loosely based on footballers.

All this plus Tangerinegate, broken PS3’s and all of your everyday items that sound like they should be sex toys.  There’s a lot of sex this week, isn’t there?  It is Ben and Cliff’s fault, they’re insatiable.

We will have a new website for the podcast soon, and so this will return to being a terrible blog.  By terrible, I of course mean formidable.

As always, iTunes users can subscribe by clicking here or you can listen to the podcast by pressing the play button below. Clever people can subscribe in their player of choice with the feed which is here.

Twitter updates and the opportunity to be in next week’s show will be found if you follow us here.

Or, you could join our Facebook group here and drop us an email at podcastREMOVE_THIS_BIT@iamlivid.com.

This week discuss Ben’s secret chorister past, we learn Cliff can’t change a car tyre, and I buy the biggest root vegetable I’ve ever seen.  All this plus Gordon Brown the bully, learning sex from the Catholics, and the worst place possible to have a small domestic fire.

As always, iTunes users can subscribe by clicking here or you can listen to the podcast by pressing the play button below. Clever people can subscribe in their player of choice with the feed which is here.

Twitter updates and the opportunity to be in next week’s show will be found if you follow us here.

Or, you could join our Facebook group here and drop us an email at podcastREMOVE_THIS_BIT@iamlivid.com.

We chat about how little we remember of Friday’s show, how Cliff and I have made idiots of ourself recently, and we come up with a solution to the perennial problem of fat people on planes.

All this plus birthdays for tennis players, gangster rappers and Islamic paramilitary organisations – hurray for February 16th!

Now that we have figured out how to use Skype properly, we would welcome callers to future shows, so if you happen to be a Skype users, feel free to add us (we’re ‘angryandcliff’ surprisingly), and maybe we’ll get you into a show in the near future.

As always, iTunes users can subscribe by clicking here or you can listen to the podcast by pressing the play button below. Clever people can subscribe in their player of choice with the feed which is here.

Twitter updates and the opportunity to be in next week’s show will be found if you follow us here.

Or, you could join our Facebook group here and drop us an email at podcastREMOVE_THIS_BIT@iamlivid.com.

This is Ben, mid recording, on his webcam, pondering what to set light to, his cigarette, or his hamster.

It was the cigarette, by the way.

This is the bit where I mention some of the things we talked about, but drink has this strange effect where I’m not really sure what we spent 50 minutes discussing.  I’ve got vague memories of a story about Ben being hit on by a man van, and I think he might well have got married to Cliff.  The rest, I really have no idea…

iTunes users can subscribe by clicking here or you can listen to the podcast by pressing the play button below. Clever people can subscribe in their player of choice with the feed which is here.

Twitter updates and the opportunity to be in next week’s show will be found if you follow us here.

Or, you could join our Facebook group here and drop us an email at podcastREMOVE_THIS_BIT@iamlivid.com.

Each of us also shares an online conversation we’ve had with a website help operator, and we still can’t decide if they’re actually human or not.

All this plus regular segment On This Day in History with births, deaths and the quite lengthy origins of Groundhog Day.

iTunes users can subscribe by clicking here or you can listen to the podcast by pressing the play button below. Clever people can subscribe in their player of choice with the feed which is here.

Twitter updates and the opportunity to be in next week’s show will be found if you follow us here.

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Cliff tells us all about his meeting with a genuine rock star, Ben sets Cliff and I the toughest sports movie quiz you are ever likely to take part in, and we wonder about the origins of Australia Day whilst remembering as many foreign chat up lines as we can.

All this plus regular segment On This Day in History with births, deaths and the renaming of St Petersburg.  Go and have a listen.  Go on.  Do it.

iTunes users can subscribe by clicking here or you can listen to the podcast by pressing the play button below. Clever people can subscribe in their player of choice with the feed which is here.

Twitter updates and the opportunity to be in next week’s show will be found if you follow us here.

Or, you could join our Facebook group here and drop us an email at podcastREMOVE_THIS_BIT@iamlivid.com.

This week we catch up on Christmas and New Year, with hangovers, passive aggressive relatives, and texting girls you barely know when drunk.

Cliff is forced to dance with his wife, and Ben and I wonder if it’s possible to die from a headspin.  All this plus movie reviews, an American history lesson and the invention of the Y Fronts.  It would be remiss of you not to listen.

As it’s been so long, it’s possible you’ve been unsubscribed from iTunes (I think this happens if you don’t download something for three weeks), so don’t forget to press subscribe HERE.

Or you can listen to the podcast by pressing the play button below. Clever people can subscribe in their player of choice with the feed which is here.

Twitter updates and the opportunity to be in next week’s show will be found if you follow us here.

Or, you could join our Facebook group here and drop us an email at podcastREMOVE_THIS_BIT@iamlivid.com.

In this week’s 35 minutes of idle chatter we cover Cliff’s Facebook suicide, a European ban on loud music and Cliff comes up with possibly the worst iPhone application ever.  Not that this stops him selling the shit out of his idea.

iTunes users can subscribe by clicking here or you can listen to the podcast by pressing the play button below. Clever people can subscribe in their player of choice with the feed which is here.

Twitter updates and the opportunity to be in next week’s show will be found if you follow us here.

Or, you could join our Facebook group here and drop us an email at podcastREMOVE_THIS_BIT@iamlivid.com.

We have a new show logo too!

In his absence, Cliff tells us about going to a school disco (with his children, he is not a pervert), I explain why I am going to party in Simon Cowell’s honour, and we discuss the strange twinning of Swindon with Disney World.

All this plus, Tiger Woods, Kim Basinger, office parties and me trying to get you to buy my NewsArse book.  Honestly, you’d be a fool not to listen.  Or just a bit busy.  Or about to do something else.  Actually, there are a lot of perfectly valid excuses not to listen, now that I think about it.

Look, if you’re not doing anything too important for the next half an hour or so, have a listen, how’s that?

iTunes users can subscribe by clicking here or you can listen to the podcast by pressing the play button below. Clever people can subscribe in their player of choice with the feed which is here.

Twitter updates and the opportunity to be in next week’s show will be found if you follow us here.

Or, you could join our Facebook group here and drop us an email at podcastREMOVE_THIS_BIT@iamlivid.com.

Headlines you will find inside include:

“Successful Earth Hour delays inevitable global catastrophe, by an hour”

“World pig population shows signs of man-flu pandemic”

“New MPs Code of Conduct to include every possible definition of the word ‘thievery’”

“Ryanair to charge customers for breathable air”

“Americans protest for the right to make insurance companies richer”

“Cockney violence marred by footballing outbreak”

It has even been described by Stephen Fry on Twitter as “Good” (this is genuinely the highest accolade you can get on the Internet these days, honest).

If you are the sort of person who gives people books for Christmas, maybe you’d like to give them this one? You know, if you want to, like.  No pressure.  Honest.  You can buy NewsArse the book – Amused By The World or click the image below to go to the book’s page.