Some men have mediocrity thrust upon them

if there's

ONE

THING

i hate...

Desperate Housewives, Cougar Town, Gossip Girl... Call me an anti-American misogynist, but why would anyone want to watch the painted banshees that litter these shows? Watching Desperate Housewives is like having one of those old-fashioned police sirens go off right next to my ear hole. Is it just me that feels physically sick at the sound of their ear-piercing bleating?

The US military should forget water boarding, they should strap their suspect into a chair in a windowless room and play him the season one box set of Cougar Town. After an hour or so of Courtney Cox doing her best impression of Teri Hatcher on Desperate Housewives, he'll be begging to confess.

Stick insect slatterns being zany and kooky at 110 decibels! What fun!

Your correspondent has the misfortune to live with someone who can gorge - at the drop of a hat - on hours of mainstream American television. Hour after hour of the above mentioned, plus the utterly joyless snooze fest that's FlashForward (you'll find me opening my wrists up in the bathroom just to escape), Legend of the Seeker (perfectly fine if you're a 12-year-old geek), NCIS: Los Angeles (where do I start? It appears to be some sort of cop show, with humour written by a 9-year-old shoehorned in).

They're all gloss and no substance, sickly confections, fluffy and insubstantial. No balls, no teeth, nothing. The kind of thing that British television has degenerated into over the last ten years. (Mind you, at least the Americans have The Wire, True Blood, Nurse Jackie, Rescue Me... What's the one thing UK telly does better than the US? Soap. We've got EastEnders, they've got The Young and the Restless.)

That's why, in the grip of my better half's all-American crapfest, I felt an extra kick in the guts when I heard the news that David Mills had died. He'd written for The Corner, Homicide: Life on the Street, NYPD Blue, and, of course, The Wire, and he was just 48.

I'd rather watch one single episode of his work, on a continuous loop, than have to endure a single second of Cougar Town and its ilk ever again.


Title quote: "Some men are born mediocre, some men achieve mediocrity, and some men have mediocrity thrust upon them." Joseph Heller, American writer, 1923-99.

I ain't a pussy-person. When people look at me, they don't think cat, they think dog

Why so uptight about calling male booty, boy pussy, boogina, et cetera?

For some, it just doesn't sound right. Fellow blogger and cutey Toddy English is one: "I only call my ass an: ass, booty (my favorite. The word literally means ‘treasure’), bum, rump, golden humps, or rectum."

Rectum? RECTUM? Speaking as a devotee of the Breion Diamond cult of salad tossing, the booty is a thrilling sexual playground. "Rectum", on the other hand, is a stomach-churning clinical term. That might excite some freaks, but not your correspondent.

For others, boy pussy is something to get their holier-than-thou knickers in a twist over. "My bottom is precisely that - my bottom," they say sniffily. "A pussy is part of the female anatomy." You can bet they don't manscape, and no one wants to go near their boogina in the first place. They're probably the same people who say porn is boring, and that people who sleep around are just disgusting!

Let's get something straight, kids. Unless your name's Mrs Slocombe or Wanda Sykes, a pussy is something a dick goes in. If you're lucky, a really big dick (colour optional). Therefore, a boy that takes dick must have a pussy. A boy pussy, in fact. (I personally don't like "boogina" or "mangina". It just sounds too much like the "V" word, and that kinda makes me sick.)

With that being said, be care careful where, when and how you toss your boy pussies (or variations thereof) about. Like bukake gone cold, it doesn't always go down well.

Title quote: "I ain't a pussy-person. When people look at me, they don't think 'cat', they think 'dog'." Dialogue, Linda LaHughes, Gimme, Gimme, Gimme (1999).

if there's one thing I hate...

...it's the Feds.

They just really rub me up the wrong way. I don't want to, I strive not to follow the crowd, but everything I've taken down in evidence can be used against them.

Like growing up in Northern Ireland and watching my father (a Catholic) being carted off by the police (inevitably, as instruments of the British state, Protestants).

When I was a sixteen or seventeen, and an exile in Australia, I was stopped and searched a few times. On one occasion, the officer looked in my wallet, where I happened to have the picture of a (male, of course) crush. The officer looked at the picture, and looked at me, and I felt about an inch tall. Violated? It's not quite on a par with rape by truncheon, but it's still an invasion of privacy. When I was eighteen, a gang of Aboriginal youths mugged me and a Vietnamese date (George, the second boy I ever kissed), threatening us with a syringe of blood on our way to Perth's only gay bar. There was a police station across the street and a couple of officers saw what happened. They were laughing and joking. Heard the one about the Abos robbing the fags?

In London, the police took away my best friend. He was innocent, but not blameless. They tasted blood and hounded him until his life was utterly destroyed. Was it just coincidence that he's young, black and successful? It isn't cliché after all. It happens.

So I don't like the police. Not very original, I know. But it's based on personal experience, not media hype and peer pressure. The funny thing is, NYPD Blue, Law & Order, The Shield, The Wire and old school episodes of The Bill are amongst my favourite TV shows.

There's a thin blue line between love and hate...

(Pictured: Henry Simmons in NYPD Blue, and Aml Ameen in The Bill.)

if there's one thing I hate... DOORS!
if there's one thing I hate... CAPTCHA!

if there's one thing I hate...

...it's CAPTCHA. Okay, that's not so uncommon. No one likes CAPTCHA. And as internet mischief goes, it ranks much lower on the torture scale than, say, the Single Mom's Secret For Whitening Teeth At Home (what exactly is it anyway - Domestos?) or blogs that generate those mini-broswer pop-ups when you inadvertently hover over some random word. Or Twitter. No, my gripe is more specific, and directed at a few of you reading this, so pay attention. Right, comments on blogs. No one wants spam, or otherwise unwanted comments. There's only one way of avoiding nasty or self-promoting comments, and that's to moderate. If it's just spam you're worried about, there's CAPTCHA. One or the other. There are no circumstances that justify using both methods. A reader leaving a comment can just about tolerate CAPTCHA if their comment gets published right away. But if after going through the hell of deciphering CAPTCHA, your reader sees the mesage: "Your comment will be visible after approval," the blogger deserves to be slowly eviscerated by a very small, blunt knife. If you moderate your comments, don't make me suffer CAPTCHA-rage. Go on, think about it for a minute. You know it makes sense. I sincerely hope this is the last time we have to talk about this.

if there's one thing I hate... is a new, regular column, the sole purpose of which is for me to vent my spleen.

if there's one thing I hate...

...it's people who use my doors on the train. Yes, MY doors. The ones I specifically use. Okay - yes, a regular London Underground train has around 26 sets of doors, but everyone has their own door. It's the one that opens onto the exit and gets you out as quickly as possible. London Underground knows this. They know passengers have these little foibles. They even have a name for it: critical doors (there's also critical seats, but that's another story). Critical doors are those doors everyone wants to use, and the reason LU asks passengers to "move along the platform and use all available doors to board the train". In my case, it's the set of Northern line doors that pulls up right underneath the train indicator on the ceiling at Charing Cross. Because when I get out of those doors at Embankment, I can walk straight onto the escalator out of the station. This means I don't get stuck behind the slow, stupid, and generally ignorant herds who like to shuffle along platforms and corridors as if the rest of us have nothing better to do. (Sadly, cattle prods are cumbersome and probably illegal.) The trouble is, some of these people think they have a divine right to use my personal double doors. To add insult to injury, when the train pulls in at Embankment, they don't shoot out of the train and up the escalator like a bullet from a gun (as I do, with not inconsiderable athleticism). They slowly, arduously dismount from the train, like the Queen getting out of a horsedrawn carriage. They then pause in the doorway to arrange themselves. And finally, they shuffle forward. In the meantime, fast-moving bods trying to get from A-Z (like me) have swarmed off the rest of the train and got ahead of me. Those doors are mine. Yeah, the one's underneath the train describer at Charing Cross, going south. Don't even look at them. I sincerely hope this is the last time we have to talk about this.

if there's one thing I hate... is a new, regular column, the sole purpose of which is for me to vent my spleen.