newmalden’s Neighborhood

What’s your favorite movie quote of all time?
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http://gawker.com/5412825/the-mounting-evidence-that-avatar-will-suck-part-2-an-eyewitness-account

The Stasi Party continue their relentless assault on the British way of life. Take a holiday snap of a public building in London and you risk being banged up under the catch all Section 44 – you know the anti-terrorism legislation they brought in, that was only going to be used in emergencies...................

Here's our brave boys leaping into action

Come Spring 2010 the electorate are going to have the unedifying choice between Brown’s police state and Cameron’s workhouse.

Next up is Mrs Dolittle's column. As you can probably guess from her pseudonym, Mrs Dolittle talks to the animals. Not for her, however, the time-honoured tradition of talking to an animal by vocalising speech sounds, waiting for it to meow, bark or squeak, and then cooing "oh, he thinks he's people!" No, Mrs Dolittle communicates with animals psychically. She meditates quietly and tunes into what animals are thinking. She goes into a trance to tap into your pet’s thought processes. She brain-rapes them, essentially. Let's not sugarcoat this.

This month, Mrs Dolittle is forcibly inserting her mind into a hen.

Mrs Dolittle

Or rather, several hens, starting with Henry who tells Mrs D about how wonderful it is to submit to her partner, the cockerel Bertie (who , Mrs D notes with with stunning insight, 'is rather cocky'). 'The hens accepted that their cockerel was the boss,' she says admiringly.

She moves on to a broody hen, Francine, sitting on a clutch of eggs, who has a 'feeling of relaxed purpose’. Mrs Dolittle asks her if she’s bored and gets the reply ‘Not boring at all. Youngster to hatch, very important.’ So charmed is Mrs D by this ‘wonderful experience’, she tells us she will communicate with her whenever she is stressed.

Through Mrs Dolittle, C:IF is promoting its sly anti-feminist agenda that women should submit to their men and will never be happier than when fulfilling their maternal duties. C:IF wants us barefoot and pregnant and chained to the wall of the barn.

Ignoring this misogyny, I pressed on. There is a lack of chickens in south London so I chose to commune with an animal more commonly found here: a squirrel. Specifically, Ceiling Squirrel, who lives in our loft and likes to scrabble around noisily in the evenings.

Earlier this evening, I sat back on the sofa, closed my eyes, and waited. Sure enough, within minutes there was a tell-tale pattering and thumping overhead. 'Hello?' I thought very hard. 'HELLO?' Nothing. I wondered if Ceiling Squirrel had heard me and was translating my thoughts into Squirrelese and forming a response. This could be slow. This could be like using chat rooms on a dial-up connection in 1995. From up above, nothing but the sound of tiny paws scuttling around. Thump. Bang. Clamber, scramble, tumble, CRASH.

'I wish you would be quiet, Ceiling Squirrel!' I thought loudly.

And suddenly, Ceiling Squirrel came though. 'No, you don't,' he psychically replied, 'because that would mean I was dead. Then you'd have to deal with my stinking rotten corpse. FUCK YOU. I’m going to fuck shit up in here until the end of your tenancy.'

I ended the connection. No-one needs a squirrel cursing directly into their brain. Some people may see this exchange as me projecting my thoughts about our loft-dwelling pest. I assure you, it is not. Ceiling Squirrel spoke to me. There is no real evidence for this, but it is a fact.

CONCLUSIONS

I need to tell the landlord about the You Know What in the You Know Where. (Shh. He can hear you.)

I choose the man who, in a nearly empty carriage, came and took the seat next to me. I was so enraged by this clear breach of the unwritten rules of carriage seating (everybody knows you always take the position diagonally opposite first. Everybody!) that I had to pretend to get off at Putney just so I could move to another seat.

Now I'm going to have to make myself some toast just to calm myself down.

Helllo! I was reminded earlier today that I used to blog, because I got my Advent Calendar ready for tomorrow, and I remembered how once on 20six I made a naff fun blog game of guess the advent chocolate.

Senate Foreign Relations Committee has reported on Bush’s failure to get bin Laden. In 2001, US forces had bin Laden cornered in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan. They could have captured or killed him there. Instead, Bush rejected requests to send in more troops and bin Laden slipped across the border into Pakistan.

The Bush administration couldn’t have made it any easier if they’d chartered a plane for him.

Well, I supposed you can’t fight a War on Terror without an enemy

It’s Jef’s birthday soon and, being a man of simple pleasures, he has only requested one thing – an insanely hot chilli sauce. He already owns a bottle of Dave's Insanity Sauce, which makes me cry just to look at it and has a tongue-in-cheek message on the side claiming it can also be used to strip waxed floors and remove grease stains from driveways. At least I hope it's tongue-in-cheek. This is the even stronger sauce Jef wants to add to (his half of) dinner:

It's called Mad Dog INFERNO

Chillis are measured on the Scoville scale, a measure similar to the Beaufort and decibel scales. Mad Dog 357 Special Edition measures 600,000 Scoville units. For comparison, a mouth-burning Scotch bonnet peaks at 325,000 units and the pleasant warmth of a jalapeno clocks in at a mere 5000 units. If a jalapeno is a gentle breeze, this sauce is a hurricane. If a Scotch bonnet is a noisy workplace, then this sauce is a jet engine. Taking off in your FACE.

Jef originally requested this sauce which, at a brain-shattering four million Scoville units, needs to be added to food using a pipette. I refused on the grounds that I will have no food in the house that could kill a child. It is basically a terrifying weapon that should be dismantled by specialists and the original recipe destroyed. IT SHOULDN’T BE.

So happy birthday, Jef. Happy throat-burning, eye-watering, finger-blistering birthday.

is having some sort of crisis and refusing to work, so I thought I'd just come along here and see how we're all doing. Hey you guys! How are you? I am fine thank you.

So, stuff that is happening, firstly and most excitingly we are pretty much moved in to our new place. It is odd what you will put up with when you are renting, certainly when you are renting in London. The new place is like some sort of magical fabulous dream. Here are some of the things that I can't actually believe about it:

The hot tap runs hot.
The cold tap runs cold.
The taps all turn in an intuitive direction (three years I lived in the old place and I still got soaked everytime I turned the kitchen tap on.)
The lights all work.
The outside light works.
There are curtains! In each room!
There is no 'knack' to opening the front door. Or any of the doors, for that matter.
There are pictures on the wall. Hideous pictures, but they are steadily being replaced by our own pictures.
The shower works.
The clicker on the oven works.
The light in the oven works.
The radiators all work.
There is an airing cupboard.
There are window boxes and a teeny teeny raised bed by the front door.
There are stairs. STAIRS!! To the two double bedrooms. TWO BEDROOMS!

Other stuff that is happening:

Oscar is still not well, I think he really is asthmatic and won't grow out of it, but the docs still don't want to say when he is so small. Thinking of taking him to a proper asthma drop in clinic.

I have wasted a hell of a lot of money on myself this month (a hell of a lot) and now I am in a stress about money. But I guess as long as I don't buy anything at all for the next couple of months it'll even up.

I am doing stuff at work that is really interesting and in fact quite good fun but... BUT... I am only a Grade Three and this is going way out of my payscale. But how else would I get the experience? And they did mention it in the interview and I did say it was okay. And anyway I'm not going to stick at this forever. And I'm enjoying myself. So why am I moaning? I don't know! I'm not really moaning. I'm more saying 'look how clever and trusted I am.' I think. I am really really unconfident at work for some weird reason. Oh well. i am just generally feeling a bit uncertain of my own abilities at the moment.

The Daily Mail is Brigadoon for crypto-fascists, a place where the local time is always 1950. But there must be anxious scenes in the bunker this weekend as it dawns on them that the UK is no longer populated by racist homophobic bigot like themselves.

Jan Moir’s hate spewing rant against Stephen Gately has been rightfully pilloried across the internet. The Press Complaints Commission have had record complaints and companies have asked for their ads to be withdrawn from the web page. This Facebook page lists their contact details, if you want to point out to companies that you’re not prepared to buy their products if they continue to fund bigotry.

The Daily Mail is increasing looking like the embarrassing elderly relative at a family function.