Oh my God there has been a terrorist attack on The X-Factor

Cowell is halfway through a simpering tribute to the fat one from East 17. Sweaty and wheezing he lolls around the stage having just mimed, unconvincingly, through the 3 awful minutes and 47 seconds of his comeback single. Cowell's hair stands stiff and black like a pubic Brillo pad, lines etched in his face like knife slashes on a cooked ham. His shirt clings to his tits like a grey bin bag. Cheryl Cole throws back her head and her mouth flaps open like a spastic fish. Walsh claps his fat pink hands together and whoops like an Irish car alarm.

Stage left, Dermot O'Leary rubs his dry fists up and down his thighs and a contestant who looks like Gary Barlow with Down's Syndrome squirts tears down his snow white gilet. Lights whirl, the baying mob squeals, per minute phone rates scroll across the screen like falling shares on the Nasdaq.

No-one notices the three men sprint from the front row until it is too late. The camera zooms in, then out, on the shaggy beard of the crazed loon climbing the stage. Cowell throws his hands up in front of his face too late as the first bullet flies into his leathery temple and exits through his wiry crop. Cheryl moans as hot wet brain slops down her face like yoghurt on a patio door. Walsh scarpers into the crowd, but he is cut down by sniper fire. There is an explosion and the cameras go dead, but not before a horrified audience sees O'Leary's fuzzy peanut head bounce across the stage and into Cowell's clammy, twitching lap.

Three hours later. A special edition of Newsnight. Germaine Greer: "This was always going to happen". Piers Morgan offers: "They were so brave". Bruce Forsyth phones in his contribution. Stephen Fry says something on Twitter. Ashley Cole wears a black armband in the midweek clash with Hull.

And next week, Jamelia will sing a tribute. Live, on ITV1.

A short description of my dream

Rather than posting my latest mind fart on here, I will instead direct you towards two excellent blogs where it is featured:

A short description of my poo

ARKA

The piece in question is a critical write-up of a dream I had last week in which I dreamed that I shat myself.

Tao Te Chingford

For he who lowers his expectations, each turd found is a treasure.

Wake up with a list of things to achieve each day. Rewrite the list throughout the day. Fall asleep before you can assess why you did not achieve anything on your list.

Do not tell anyone what you really think. Eventually it will change.

Speak with your eyes. Sing with your heart. Hear with your soul. Love with your fist.

Look both ways before crossing the road. Sometimes cyclists will use the incorrect lane.

Do not judge others. Just point.

A cup cannot be half empty unless it is drunk from. A cup cannot be half full unless it is filled. Coffee goes cold surprisingly quickly.

Speak only when spoken to. Listen only when listened to. Give your debit card details to pretty much any online company that seems reasonably legitimate.

The pen is mightier than the sword. Guns are more problematic.

The beanbag by moonlight is dappled with the tears of sinners and madmen.

The strong leader is calm in his reactions. The calm leader is firm in his convictions. The firm leader is convicted and sentenced to 30 hours community service. There is nothing to learn from this.

When all is stripped bare there is only the way. The way, and also the cock and balls.

Some people say I'm bonkers.

The essence of the now is the shadows of the past, the rising tide of the future, and good local produce, simply cooked.

When all fades to black, it is time to move the mouse a little bit to bring your screen back up.

Things I shouted at people about last night

- the fact that London postcodes in the format 'letter letter number letter' (e.g. EC2A) were created for areas built on reclaimed land (not true)

- getting an erection in the bath ('periscoping')

- how well produced Robbie Williams' 'Rudebox' is

- "your shirt would look bettter if you grew some tits"

- buying someone the rights to all royalties from the use of the word 'electro' as a Christmas present

- the bar resembling one of those conical bags you use to ice cakes

- a homeless woman giving birth to a lump of mashed up cartilage with eyes like black tennis balls

The fact that I remember all of this is at odds with the strength of today's hangover.

The secret letters of the alphabet

Recently declassified government papers from the 1950s have revealed that a number of letters were removed from the British alphabet during the first half of the 20th century, since for various reasons they were considered a danger to those who spoke, read or heard them. These letters have since been more or less erased from the collective consciousness of the British people, but a debate is now raging about whether to restore the so-called "secret letters".

Jaitch

The letter jaitch traditionally sat between H and J, but was very much distinct from the letter I. There is some debate among linguistic historians as to whether the jaitch took its name from its neighbours, or whether the jaitch existed first and the other letters evolved at a later stage. The pronunciation is believed to be roughly equivalent to the noise made when stifling a sneeze, though with more of a voiced, guttural feel. English speakers have long since lost the ability to pronounce this phoneme, and it now only exists in a handful of Papuan dialects. The jaitch was retired from the alphabet in 1946, after the letter was attacked by a group of Cambridge professors who claimed the jaitch was inherently Nazi during the Second World War, a claim which has since been discredited following the unearthing of new evidence which shows that Hitler was unable to pronounce the jaitch.

Zay

The zay is the missing letter between Z and A, which links the two ends of the modern linear alphabet together. The alphabet had been circular since the time of the Romans, but the British government of the 1950s considered this to be a dangerous situation given the communist undertones of each letter having an equal rank in the so-called 'alphabetical order', which after the banning of the zay came to mean an arbitrary sequence whereby A is the first letter and each subsequent letter has its own fixed place in the order. The removal of the zay led to the concept of alphabetisation, which, though it brought benefits to small sections of society such as dictionary compilers, ultimately left the English language bereft of one of its most versatile letters. The zay acted as a kind of universal consonant which could represent any sound depending on where it was placed in a word. Indeed the word 'zay' was spelled BLLB(ZAY)ay, and was pronounced 'zay', whereas 'zebra' was spelled ZE(ZAY)O(ZAY)RA, with the double zay plus 'O' construction producing a sound akin to a modern 'B'.

14

 

It is another little-known fact that the number 14 was originally a letter, which was placed in between M and N. The letter 14 was pronounced like the Spanish palatalised L sound, as in 'Valladolid', but it became the source of much confusion after the number 14 was discovered on the 30th December 1913. This discovery led to a constitutional crisis, and an emergency session of Parliament was called to decide what to do about the impending new year. As a result the 31st December lasted for four days, before the new number was eventually approved and the year 1914 was ushered in on what would originally have been the 5th January 1915. This is the true reason for the modern phenomenon of 'leap years', and ultimately led to the deletion of the letter 14 a few months later, though it continued to be used in everyday speech until the early 1920s.

 

My poem for the Tube ("Stations")

holborn.

you have some medieval pictures, you are like a museum that hasn't tried very hard.

caledonian road. you have to take the lift to get to street level. it is like an airlock
in a sci-fi film.

earl's court, you are like a big glass barn, with your arrow-based departure boards that give no specific times. this is not ideal for commuters.

have you been to embankment (northern line platform)? low-slung and moody, like a goth made of bricks and soot.

at arsenal they have a cage to put the football fans in. the football fans go in the cage.

angel has the biggest escalator. i read this on the escalator at camden town. the escalators at camden town are a right bloody shambles.

but soon they will fix them. but not to make them bigger than angel. that would be

too    bloody    big.

they would come right out the station and up into the air. and the people would fall off the end and on to the street below, like a faulty conveyor belt at a meat factory.


what time is the next train to wimbledon?

i don't know, i am at earl's court and they don't tell you
how long the next fucking train's going to be.

twatmash #002

If you play claggage to a dog, it will have a stroke.

Claggage is a new genre of music coming out of London, principally areas within the ECN36 postcode in northeast central London. Keen followers of ridiculous dance music subgenres will be aware that UK funky has undergone something of a split, with the cheesy dance crazes and grime MCs on one side and the more dubstep- and house-influenced 'funkstep' sound on the other. A further development is the idea that a techier, more US-sounding house being produced in the UK by artists weary of funky and funkstep is worthy of being classed as a genre in its own right, 'dubbage', despite sounding basically indistinguishable from house.

Even so, no-one was ready for the way that claggage has exploded on to the scene. Clag producers strip away conventional musical elements and instead experiment with compositional techniques that transcend the idea of 'listening' to dance music as defined by the last 20 years, working on levels hitherto unexploited in anything but the most experimental subgenres. One of the defining aesthetic aspects of claggage is the use of sonic frequencies which, if played to a dog, will cause the animal to suffer a massive and fatal brain embolism. These frequencies, inaudible to the human ear, are complemented by rhythmic loops which will normally consist solely of hi-hats. The European school of claggage has also dabbled in the use of syncopated male voice choir stabs and pitched-up Mongolian throat singing, while in the US claggage is often sped up to 960bpm and accompanied by a stringless violin played by a robot.

A scene and a culture has quickly built up around claggage. Claggage raves usually take place in the loading bays of disused distribution warehouses along the M4 corridor between Swindon and Chippenham after the scene was driven out of London by heavy-handed policing and more stringent licensing restrictions. The drug of choice for claggers tends to be glue, which is drunk rather than sniffed, in large and often lethal quantities. Claggage is yet to cross over to the mainstream, although underground anthems like Bad Smegma's "Summer of Hard Clag" and the Nine Boris Norris remix of Alpha Bollock's seminal clagstep anthem "Norwegian Sponge Clamp" are huge YouTube hits with the online claggage community. Claggage has been banned from all mainstream radio and TV stations due to the effect the music has on dogs, but it can be heard on many pirate stations both in the capital and in Wiltshire. It is surely only a matter of time before claggage mutates and cross-pollinates with other dance genres, with a burgeoning 'psy-clag' scene in the Israeli cities of Haifa and Tel Aviv already taking the sound in new directions.