Stinker...

So, I'm in a lovely mood; a real triumph of circumstance and self-determination. The Les Paul guitar is still sitting downstairs, a brooding presence in the hallway. It's filled me with all kind of jealousy and self-loathing, and I feel like dumping it over the fence and seeing where fortune takes it. I'm just back for biking across town, doing favours for people and now I'm trying to build a website for a company in Nigeria and I'm doing so on Nigerian wages. Yet any complaint I might have only results in people telling me that I've made these life choices myself. Yet if only it were that easy. I don't know what's wrong with me. I've been blogging seriously for months now and my only rewards this morning are hits from people looking for 'ronaldinho having sex with his girlfriend' and one email from a reader.

I opened the email because I live for such emails. I can also tell the difference between SPAM and real reader emails and this was definitely going to be a real reader email from a guy called Andy.

Turns out his name is Andy Wu.

Dear sir or madam,

PowerfulSky Injection Molding service gives design engineers a fast and affordable way to get real injection molded parts in prototype or low-volume quantities.

Plastic injection molding is the mian facility we offer our clients.

Components for a wide range of industrial and consumer products can be manufactured on site using machines rated from 60 tons to 250 tons.

Contact me, let's talk details.

I hate Andy Wu. I really do. Andy Wu can make his spam look like real communication and he uses high level business power speak! 'Let's talk details'! He is probably the kind of go-getter who is making this world such an ugly place. I can imagine him: tribally tattooed, muscled, big car, a Les Paul waiting for him when he gets home after a busy day spamming websites. This is the problem with capitalism allowed to run amok. The old virtues of taste, politeness, and moderation have become victims of the new virtues: excess, arrogance, rudeness, and over consumption. I should look for a job in marketing. Nothing else seems to matter. The world be damned. It deserves to be taken over by the middle men who produce nothing, mean nothing and earn everything.

Like I say: a lovely mood. A real stinker.

The New Guitar

What a way to start the week! My dream guitar has just arrived! It's a 2015 model Les Paul with a tobacco sunburst finish. Okay, I wouldn't personally have chosen tobacco sunburst. Neil Young plays a wonderfully battered black Les Paul and I consider that the true classic colouring. This guitar isn't battered. It is brand new, in its original box, and obviously hasn't been touched by human hand since the day it left the factory. The retail price is a mere £2,499. It's sitting in the hall as I type this. Look -->

And the reason I'm typing this instead of plugging the guitar into my amp and hitting a few power chords is that I have no bloody idea who the guitar belongs to. It was supposed to go to the neighbour's house but they're not in. Not that the name on the box is actually that of our neighbour. Which makes me wonder: what kind of person buys a two and a half thousand pound guitar and doesn't make proper arrangements for somebody to be in when it gets delivered?

If I believed in God, I'd say God was testing me, punishing me, or simply mocking me.

Yet I say that but I've never been a huge fan of expensive guitars. I like looking at them and I know a better guitar would improve my playing immeasurably. I have two guitars. My first is a Gibson acoustic which despite being relatively cheap when I bought it, is now considered quite a decent guitar. The only problem is that it has an extremely high action and isn't the best guitar on which to learn. Since I've been learning for decades, I suppose I'm use to it. Or, at least, I'm used to not playing that well or feeling that I warrant, deserve, or (if I'm honestly) would ever pay £2,499 for a guitar. My other guitar is a Fender Strat but one of the cheaper Japanese models I bought when I was working but still didn't really understand these things and couldn't afford a Les Paul. I don't really like the Strat, though it's much easier to play. I assume the guy who bought the Les Paul sitting in the hall can play like an angel. That, at least, is what I'm telling myself along with the lie that I'm not really too jealous. Had it been a Surface Pro 3 that had just been delivered, I might have believed it a message and I'd had given everything up before breakfast.

As it is: I have so much to do this week. Two websites to build and two 'projects' on the go. I'm determined to finish the smaller of the two projects, launch it on one of the two websites I need to build and use that as a trial for the bigger project. I hate talking about projects that I still don't want to talk about in detail. It makes me sound like I get nothing finished. This week I want to have at least one thing finished and that means I need to work. It might, at least, take my mind of the £2,499 guitar sitting in the hall.

New Religions

Bill O'Reilly Doodled Badly

This is throwaway stuff. Caricatures are fun to draw, though I draw them simply in order to learn how to draw them. I have no idea why I drew Bill O'Reilly. I don't watch Fox News and I don't watch his show. However, I like finding faces I've not drawn before, so last night, I sat down and drew his face. Then, not quite knowing what to do, I took my usual step when bored and stuck the head on a naked body wearing a g-string. Childish stuff, I know, but I was bored, too tired to think but not quite tired enough to sleep. I also believe in the old dictum that the best way to take away a person's powerful mojo is to picture them naked. Nothing ridicules a person more than stripping them of all pretence.

I have two stages when I draw these caricatures. Stage one is actually trying to get a likeness and it can take anywhere between two minutes and two (even several) hours. Because I don't have an artistic bone in my body and I can't draw to save my life, I have to work hard to get past stage one. Sometimes I really struggle with a face. Prince Andrew is a swine to draw. Nick Clegg is getting better. I like drawing Stephen Fry. I hate drawing Tom Cruise. Other times, the face is immediately there. Some faces lend themselves to caricature and a 'likeness' is never too hard to find. Other faces, just never quite work. This Bill O'Reilly worked fairly quickly, though I think I lost a little something during stage two. Stage two is the bit I enjoy. It's when I clean up all the lines, adding shading, and then (if I'm in the mood) putting in the colour.

Today I'll be hard at work going through computer code. I'm trying to get at least one of my two current projects finished so I can at least put it out into the world and I can forget it and move on to something new.

Gordon's Here

Haven't been able to get the writing juices running today, so here's my attempt at drawing Gordon Taylor. Odd face. Not much to hang a likeness from. This was my second version. First attempt turned out okay until I realised it looked identical to America actor, Paul Sorvino. From that point on, all I could see was Paul Sorvino so I had to start again.

A Fryday Doodle

Drew this one days ago when it was more relevant. Was about to post it when the Charlie Hebdo story broke.

How I Miss Anna Nichole Smith's Cleavage Now That Porn Has Won The World

In my formative years, porn was not so easily available. If it was mentioned at all, it was mentioned in the context of 'dirty old men' and those mysterious shops you'd glimpse in big cities like Manchester or Birmingham. They'd have greyed out windows, peeling paintwork, and were usually stuck down dingy Victorian side streets where men called Trevor, probably lorry drivers by day, taxi drivers by night, would visit to purchase things in plain brown paper. It was the same world that Joseph Conrad had written about in The Secret Agent: the kind of shop which 'in the daytime the door remained closed; in the evening it stood discreetly but suspiciously ajar.'

Naturally, a youthful mind wondered about such things but the products of these places would rarely make it into our everyday lives where the word 'Playboy' was really synonymous with the ultimate in erotica. There was English pornography, of course, and you might occasionally seeing examples of it lying wet in the road after it had fallen out of cabs habituated by one of the Trevors. It would be a mangled pulp of pubis and tit. Sometimes, a school yob would bring in a copy and throw it around the classroom where you'd briefly see nasty portends of adulthood: usually pimpled overweight women leaning out the back of caravans with their oddly shapes breasts and haystacked pubes. Personally, I never understood who'd want to look at that stuff. Perhaps if you were into caravans or haystacks...

My own tastes were never that odd. I suppose, if anything, I always had a kind of elevated liberal guilt at looking at pictures of naked women but, at the same time, utter delight if the subject matter appealed to me and what appealed to me was very run of mill. What I suppose I'm saying is that I'm just a normal heterosexual guy who enjoys the female form and could never resist the chance of opening The Sun on page 3 if I found a copy lying around. It was generally stuff that was half seen or seen briefly in passing. It was the Swedish TV ads that Clive James would play on his shows, gratuitous shots of sweaty naked blondes in steamrooms which was funny because it was gratuitous but also deeply exciting because it was gratuitous.

And what was odd, thinking about those years, is how damn erotic things genuinely were back then. Being a huge film fan, I used to buy the American film magazine Premiere from the States and it was there that I first saw the Guess Jeans commercials featuring Anna Nichole Smith. Back in the day of the Guess Jeans commercials, Anna Nichole Smith was without compare. Sod Miss World. The most beautiful woman on the planet was Anna Nichole Smith. She was pure Americana: a condensed version of 1950s voluptuousness. She was an uber Rita Hayworth that made me feel faint just looking at her.





Cut forward a couple of decades. Anna Nichole Smith was dead; her life a morbid reality TV show complete with decrepit billionaire and tales of wanton excess. She had appeared in films of dubious quality with the only memorable moments being brief roles in films such as The Coen Brother's 'Hudsucker Proxy' and a Naked Gun sequel. Yet she had changed like life itself had changed. Gone was the glamour girl who concealed all and instead we had the ex-Playboy model struggling with addictions, a doyenne of excess and of the worst things to come.

Pornography is now prevalent everywhere to the point that reading an article on The Independent yesterday, I had only clicked one link in an article before I was looking at a Twitter page containing pictures so X rated that in the words of Tom Waits, you would have thought you were looking at women without skin. What's even stranger is that nobody seems judgmental about this stuff. Newspapers treat porn stars like they're any other celebrity on the planet; as though we're interested in what they think or say. Novelists, poets, historians, scientists: none are as so well known as porn stars. And the papers love this stuff. As if we care (I don't), we're routinely told what the top search terms are on the big porn sites. In the comments, people laugh about their own (frankly odd) tastes and preferences. When the BBFC wrote up new rules to ban certain types of extreme pornography, The Guardian treated it as thought it were a serious threat to civil liberties. Elsewhere, people responded to the news with a familiar refrain -- 'They'll be banning kissing next' -- as though asphyxiating your sexual partner is the same as giving them a kiss on the lips. Even more startling -- and here I begin to approach the meat (no pun intended) of this essay -- is how much porn culture is entering out lives in causal everyday ways.

Perhaps what I'm writing reveals me to be deeply prudish but I don't believe that I am. Perhaps I'm just part of the last generation who will remember what things were like when sex was still a mystery . Perhaps I'm the only person on the planet who doesn't like what's happening. Perhaps people born into this Brave New World will wonder why I'm offended by the things I see around me.  Yet, for the record, I'd like to put this out there that I am offended. My blog is periodically archived by The British Library so, perhaps, some researcher at a later date will come across this blog entry and use it to example the last repressed heterosexual male on Planet Earth.

So let me be clear: sexuality of any kind doesn't offend me. What offends me is the way it's casually debased throughout our culture, thereby robbing it of all the excitement it once had. It also offends me that I have to be faced with it continually. Whereas it was once restricted to places where you had to seek it out, it is these days delivered to your inbox, or placed on prominent display on the shelves of ordinary shops. Whilst something as mild as Page 3 or a few bloke magazines in Tesco can still make headline news because women groups protest about them, hardcore porn seems beyond criticism. Sex has become commonplace, ugly, and, dare I say, debased to the point that it's become wearisome.

What prompted these thoughts was my going out yesterday to buy a birthday card. I wanted a simple card that read: 'Happy Birthday'. I was tired after doing quite a bit of loitering in PC World playing with a Surface Pro 3, so I was going to head into Waterstones for a coffee, a doodle, and a book browse. Since it was on the way, I thought I'd try Paperchase. It is a bit pricey but (supposedly) a classy shop. So I went in looking for a card.

The greetings cards were along one wall to the right side of the shop and they had a fair range which weren't all humorous (the worst kind of cards, usually unfunny and bought by people without any sense of humour). Yet my eye couldn't help but catch sight of a few cards high up. They were obviously high so people of a certain combination of height and age couldn't see them but, being well over six feet, I saw them first. I confess, I wasn't sure what I'd seen so I looked again. They were Valentines cards which read, from left to right:

'Hello gorgeous! Fancy a shag?

'Oh look! You've given me a huge stiffy!'

'I love you like a slapper loves cock!'

'It won't suck itself'

'I love your bush'

'I fucking love you'

and then there was 'Happy Blow Job Day'.

And if you don't believe me, I even took a photo:




With a shake of my head, I walked out. Paperchase has now become a shop I refuse to enter (no pun intended). Am I the only person offended by this? I guess I am.

My feet were tired but I headed back to The Arndale where I knew there was a Card Factory. They're much cheaper and the range of cards isn't bad. I didn't want the walk but, like I say, I was just disappointed at what I'd just seen in Paperchase. So, I arrived at The Card Factory. All I wanted was a card that said 'Happy Birthday'. The selection wasn't great but I found a Happy Birthday and I headed to the till. That's when I saw this card. 'In a recent survey on why Men like Blow jobs, 6% like the feeling, 12% like the thrill...'




Whatever the remaining 82% like, I don't know and I don't care.

Now, perhaps I've just forgotten what life was like just a few years ago but I don't remember this level of smut in postcards. In fact, I don't even think it's smut. There's nothing here that is meant to be arousing. There's no clever double entendre. This isn't the stuff of saucy Blackpool postcard. This is simply blatant and when did we become so blatant?

I've noticed the tendency most of all in comedy. I remember when Julian Clary made a vulgar remark about the then chancellor, Norman Lamont, on the 1993 comedy awards and I had to go and look the word up because I had no idea what it meant. Even now I'm not entirely sure I know what it means but I know for damn certain that I really don't want to look at a picture of it being done. Yet increasingly comedy is becoming like that. You can be sitting there, watching a fairly mainstream act on BBC1, and you end up ten minutes later trying to understand the punchline by typing a strange term into Google because you've never heard the phrase used before but you quickly realize involves three lesbians and a length of tubing.

My liberal sensibilities say: this is no big thing. People are more open about sexuality and what harm is there in that? Perhaps the future will have no such hangups. It reminds me of the old Bill Hicks routine about the ideal commercial that companies really want to run to make you drink Coke.


Back when Hicks did that routine, you'd had thought the future impossible. Now I'm not so sure. Porn is everywhere and it has destroyed whatever it is we had when sex was half-glimpsed and distant. Perhaps the day will arrive when the Christmas ads for perfume will involve full on graphic sex because none of that actually means anything. Without taboo, nothing is erotic. It's just photographs of meat on the plate.

So what I'm trying to express isn't a disgust at sex but the loss of the thrill around sex. Where there is no imagination, there is only physical reality in all its shaved and pimpled banality. Looking out at humanity, you begin to feel that any notion of civilisation was lost years ago. We're just a great humping mass of blubber and juice. I miss Anna Nichole Smith's cleavage and the mild filth of Carry On. I miss the glimpse of Barbara Winsor's breasts when she flashed them on a Sunday afternoon. I miss the mystery and I miss the wit of comedians who could talk about sex without it being explicit. Repressed was always much more fun and human than being comfortable with your body. Yet it's more than that. I miss the chance of comedians to talk explicitly about things and of my being amused and shocked at their words.

Would anybody really be shocked by Peter Cook's skit about lobsters? 'The worst job I ever had was with Jayne Mansfield. You know, she was a fantastic bird, you know .....big tits, huge bum, and everything like that, but I had the terrible job of retrieving lobsters from her bum.'

For all I know, there might be sites out there were you can see a woman pulling a live lobster from her arse. Porn has made everything literal. It has taken that world away from us. Porn has won the world but I just wish somebody would have the bravery to take it back.

So does anybody out there know how to sell software?

The events of Wednesday distracted me but I'm now trying to get my brain back to my current project. It means I have to face a big problem I've run up against. I'm really unsure what to do next. I might, in fact, be stuck.

The situation is like this. I've spent the last twelve months retraining myself in skills I haven't used in too long. I've always found programming easy but I've never got as much satisfaction in the finished product as I do from my writing or my cartoons. However, I wanted to widen my skill set and I think I've done just that. I wrote a few things for Android, taught myself to code in Unity, resulting in a couple of games. All that gave me a fairly good understanding of C#. I hit November not thinking I'd write anything else for a while but, one day, I found myself wanting some software I just didn't have. It didn't take me long to figure I should just write it myself. So I did.

The program runs under Windows and it has turned out, in my humble opinion, surprisingly well. I've looked around the web for other pieces of software and there are examples out there that do the same thing but, again IMHO, not as well. My software can do things that that other software can't.

So, I'm now thinking of putting it online for people to download and I hope a few will find it useful.

Except I'm also wondering if I can charge something for it.

And this is where I have a problem. I'm no businessman. I can do everything else on my own but I have absolutely no skills as a businessman. I can write books but I just can't sell them. I can draw cartoons but I'm useless when it comes to promotion. I can produce these apps but my limitations soon become apparent. I do not have a mercantile bone in my body. I want to give my work away for nothing but it's making me a pauper.

I figure if other people can make a little money from their software, I don't see why I can't do the same. However, I just don't know what to do next. I wasn't thinking of asking £100s  for the software. Perhaps £10 - £20 a time seems quite reasonable and cheaper than its competitors. I know I could build a website. I could install a shop and link it all up. A person could buy the software, download it, use it, and I'd get money in my account. That's easy.

The big problem I face is figuring out a way of making the software available without making it easy to pirate. And that is a problem. I know software piracy can't be defeated but I really don't want it to be easier to grab my software from a torrent site than it is to buy it. I could write a basic registration key into the software but I'd need a method of automating the creation of those keys in a website. I don't want customers waiting 24 hours until I've created the key for them. I want the keys already uploaded to the server, to be issued with each sale.

There are free website 'shopfronts' out there but none, as far as I can see, that provide a free means of licensing software. 'Software keys' and 'software licenses' become one of those 'premium' features for which I'm supposed to spend £100. And one thing I do know is that I'm not throwing any money at one of these software solutions when I also know I'd be lucky to get a dozen sales from a new website inside the first few months.

In other words: I've developed a unique piece of software which might attract a niche audience but I can't figure out a way of distributing it to that niche without giving it away. And I really don't see why I should give it away. I'm really tired of giving everything I do away for free.

So, that's my problem and I'm hoping there might be somebody out there with a solution I've not thought about.

Perhaps It Was My Hat...

An odd thing happened today.

This afternoon I escaped to Manchester. I hadn't been there in a couple of months and I needed a break from the constant work and yesterday's grim news.

It was just after noon when I emerged from the Maplin store on Oxford Road and found myself needing to get to the city centre. I had a little shopping to do, plus I wanted to spend some time looking around Waterstones where I knew they have quite a good collection of books about C# and the NET framework, which I've been using these last few weeks to build myself an interesting app. I vaguely hoped one might be in the sales, though I'd be ultimately disappointed.

The obvious way into the city centre is to walk but it is a bit of a hike and I was in no mood for testing my ankles so soon after Christmas. Thankfully, Manchester is an enlightened city and has free buses that run the main routes. They're not normal sized busses but are adequate for the job and very regular. Not long after I arrived at the bus stop, a bus arrived. I was also in luck. It was pretty empty.

So off we go...

Not many people get on or off the bus until we arrive at the Museum of Science and Industry where a group of adults is waiting. The adults were a variety of ages and there might have been fifteen or twenty of them. It was also very obvious, looking at them, that they very had some quite severe mental and learning difficulties. There was also too many to fit on the small bus. However, the bus was fairly empty and we all cleared our bags from the seats to allow as many as possible to sit down. So, after a few minutes of people squeezing between people, the bus is loaded with loud, raucous, but happy customers. All is well. On we go.

At the next stop a few people get on. A few people get off. One woman squeezes though the crowd and into the seat next to me. I'm at the back, central because of my unreasonably long legs mean that I just can't fit into normal bus seats without either sitting sideways or tucking my knees under my chin.

Off we go again.

A couple of stops on, we're pulling approaching the stop outside Forsyth's music shop. I always look in the window of Forsyth's at the guitars I'll never be able to afford. I was looking that way, probably dreamily waiting to see a Les Paul Sunburst, when I felt a tapping on my arm. I turn around. It was the woman. She starts to speak to me.

'Can. You. Move. Your. Legs? I. Want. To. Get. Off.'

That's how she spoke. Very, very slowly. I immediately thought 'what an odd woman' but I didn't say anything. I just smiled and moved my legs. She squeezed past and moved down the bus.

And that's when I saw her mouth the word 'Aw! Bless' to a friend. They both gave me sad little smiles.

That's when it struck me. She thought I was with the museum group.

Now, this doesn't happen to me very often. I might not be the best looking man in the world but neither (I hope) am I too much of an eyesore. My biggest fault is that I dress a bit shabbily and refuse to make any fashion statements. I refuse to be a walking billboard for companies so I wear nothing that endorses brands. About the only thing I wear that endorses anything is a Ralph Steadman T-shirt emblazoned with Dr. Gonzo. That's what I was wearing today beneath a blue sweater and my coat. My jeans were just black jeans. On reflection, it had to be my hat: thick navy blue Peter Storm 'thinsulate' number from Millets.

Meanwhile, I didn't know what to think or what to do. You can't suddenly start saying 'Oh no, I'm not with them' for fear of upsetting people who don't deserve upsetting. At the same time, I was by myself. I couldn't start discussing politics or goat metaphors in Dostoyevsky's novels simply to prove a point. As it was, I just sat on the bus as it pulled out of the stop and the two women disembarked. As we pulled away, they looked at me from the pavement and gave me a small wave.

I won't tell you how I responded.

I might, however, have to buy a new hat.

Je Suis Charlie

Not sure if I have the French right but my language skills are non-existent. I also suppose that if I had any guts, I'd have had Muhammad lying on the ground cowering beneath the pen of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists. Did I censor myself? I like to think I simply wanted to draw one of the cowards who committed yesterday's atrocity in the name of a supposedly peace loving god.

The thing I've taken from the day was a revelation. It might seem a trite or even obvious revelation but for me it was quite profound. I suddenly realised that despite all the wars that have raged across the Middle East and Afghanistan, it wasn't a politician or a solder these people attacked. They chose to attack cartoonists. Perhaps it's the cartoonists these people fear the most. That's sobering but it's also a point of optimism. Maybe the best weapon we have against these radicals isn't the bullet but the joke. It's the ability to show the radicals up for the misguided medieval morality police they really are. Maybe the Western governments should redirect a bit of their war chest to cartoonists instead of the companies making munitions. You can't bomb religion out of a person but laughter can sure as hell force a little reason back into their soul.

On The Charlie Hebdo Massacre

It's going to be a day of multiple sadness but the foremost sadness is already the loss of life at the offices of Charlie Hebdo. It's too early to construct a well thought out commentary about what's happened this morning and is still continuing as I write this at 1pm. As I sit here, Sky News are showing video footage of two armed terrorists killing a policeman on a deserted Paris street. They also report that the magazine's editor and lead cartoonist might be dead along with nine others.

My perspective is that of somebody who lives for cartoons and satire and my immediate response is to say that I hope the French government does everything it can to ensure that the magazine continues and continues to do what it's been doing. Satire is the ultimate expression of our freedom and Charlie Hebdo was the most liberated voice we had. This morning's attack on their offices and staff was an attempt to censor all of us who believe in a free press and the right for enlightened people to live their lives without fearing the slobbering dog-eyed enforcers of a medieval morality.

However, I'm not sure that point of view is either reasonable, rational, or popular. Around the TV this morning, my family had varying points of view but a common theme was that the magazine had made itself a target. I was the only person who tried to make the case for the magazine's defiance.

'But would you be brave enough to draw a cartoon if you knew your life was in danger?'

It was a good question but, perhaps, a question for another day. Today I know there were people who were brave enough to draw and publish those cartoons and it unfortunately looks like they've paid the ultimate price. Questions must now be asked. If they were such an obvious target, then why wasn't more done to protect them?

The problem is that satire has to be an ugly business. For satire to function well, it must be at the apex of bad taste and taboo. The very best satirists will always make enemies, even among the people meant to protect them. Politicians might not like to admit so much but it's the satirists who keep them honest. It is the satirists who keep us all honest.

So it's too easy to simply say: they shouldn't have published those cartoons. Everybody who writes a gag, from the highest paid TV comedian, to those of us who pen lousy gags on Twitter or through a blog, do so because we have certain freedoms. Those freedoms exist because previous generations fought for our freedom to think, say, or draw whatever we wish. The moment we accept the first taboo, we begin to accept them all.

None of us live outside the context of history and history has, for a very long time, been a struggle for the rights of the individual against the forces of oppression. It was the very cornerstone of the French Revolution, so perhaps it's not surprising that the fight continues in the country that gave the world the modern conception of liberty.

Today we mourn the loss of life at Charlie Hebdo. Tomorrow we should remind the world that Charlie Hebdo is an ideal that we'll never relinquish.

Prince Andrew Revisited

Last night I redrew a gag I previous published some time ago. To be exact, it was published on the 9th March, 2011. I hadn't been cartooning for long when I first attempted to draw Prince Andrew. The context, I believe, was the publication of the now famous photograph months after Wikileaks had revealed how Andrew had insulted American business leaders by saying that 'Americans don't understand geography. Never have.'

I always liked the joke I'd written but never liked the drawing. This (below), was actually the second attempt, probably drawn well after the 9th of March.

The first attempt was so bad, that I'd revisited it to improve it.

Anyway, I've redrawn it again. My 2015 self is (hopefully) a better cartoonist. It's odd looking at the three versions and how my style has evolved. My second attempt was probably my trying to draw like the 2015 version of me but with 2011's skill set. I still don't think the 2015 version is great but I think it's getting better. Hopefully, by the time Prince Andrew gets involved in another scandal, I'll be able to revisit it again and have another crack at his absurdly hard to draw face.

Why You Shouldn't Sign Another Ched Evans Petition

Ched Evans is probably a vile person. I probably wouldn't like him if I met him. But that means nothing. There are many vile people out there and many are in the most lofty positions in our establishment. Open the newspapers today and you'll probably see dozens of headlines which make you suck your teeth and think: hope the bastards get what they deserve.

'Getting what you deserve' is the cornerstone of our system of law. It's important in a modern legal system that we find a more humane version of the old dictum about 'an eye for an eye'. Ched Evans was convicted of rape and the system did whatever it is that the system does to convicted rapists. He then left prison.

And now he can't find a place to resume his former life playing football because any club seeking to sign him is immediately the subject of campaigns to prevent the signing. The media, of course, treat it lightly. This is new territory and everybody is afraid of Twitter justice, where things escalate quickly and without serious debate. It all feels like being the subject of a schoolyard vendetta, where everybody turns on you for no reason other than you're the person they've chosen to victimise this week. Of course, there is a reason to victimise Evans. He's a convicted rapist. And that's why it's very noticeable that the news channels report the Evans story but rarely comment on it. To comment would be to raise points which are unpopular. One unpopular point would be: how is this any different to mob justice? How is the Ched Evans case different to so many cases we see? How is it different to the example of Mike Tyson, another convicted rapist, who is now lauded as a boxing great and with cameo appearances in hugely popular films which earn millions at the box office and without any word of rebuke from the Twitter enforcers.

How is it that one high profile public figure can be accused of villainy without the public seeming to care much of a hoot about bringing him to justice, whilst some other high profile figure is locked up for committing far lesser crimes and then treated as Public Enemy Number One.

None of it makes sense.

The only difference is that we live in the age of memes of all things. These active 'ideas' spread like a virus and infect the particularly dumb. The Ched Evans campaigns have the intellectual depth of a grumpy cat meme. We're all meant to shout 'bastard' but we could equally be shouting 'cute' or 'LOL' or whatever the current dumb phrase happens to be. There's no debate about the allegations, the fact that the legal process has been served. If there was a problem with his conviction, then anger should be directed towards the system and the Attorney General. Yet it isn't because this is about something else. It might well be something new: new ways of raising a mob and the way powerless individuals can feel a sense of power. It might be about class and privilege, the understandable envy of people who don't want to see a convicted rapist earning a fortune for his footballing skills, but wouldn't raise the same objections if he'd been some ennobled toff who went on to live a life of sleazy privilege without an ability to call his own.

Yet at what point should do these people decide that Evans can carry on with his life? If he quits football, would they allow him to become a pundit? A broadcaster? A reporter? The bloke brushing up in the Sky Sports studio? Would vagrancy be too good for him? That's an important question. Not because Evans deserves our sympathy but because any of us could become the next Ched Evans: a person hounded by a loud braying mob for reasons that go beyond the simple rule of law.

Ched Evans may well be a scumbag but furthering his punishment outside the court of law makes scumbags of us all. It's a dangerous precedent and just as much a symptom of these brutal bestial days as his original crime.

A Doodle

Spam and Website Crashes

Both this site and my inbox are currently getting hammered by spam. It's got to the point where I've stopped even checking my email when I hear it ping into my inbox. I hope for real human contact and all I find is this (right) by the yard. It's depressing. The site is also suffering from these 'attacks', crashing repeatedly. So, if you see an error message, please bear with me and keep coming back. The problem of running my own server is that I have to figure these problems out and without a great deal of experience in Linux, it's a bloody nightmare. I wish I could get blocked by China, since the majority of this crap is coming from there. It's getting to the point where I wonder if the internet can even survive. There are people seriously interested in bringing it to its knees and I have more interesting things to do than spending my days keeping on top of every security update just to keep this blog active.

No Explanation Necessary

Two Cartoon Doodles From Way Back In 2014

Two cartoons I wasn't going to bother publishing but I might as well. It's the first day of a New Year. For months now I've been telling myself that I wouldn't blog in 2015. I intended to quit last week. I don't know why I'm doing this except the first day of a year is always significant on a blog. I should really post something I can look back on and think it a fair representation of my standard at this point in time. Perhaps these two cartoons are just that but I hope they're not. They're not my best. They're the kind of thing I draw when distracted. New Year Resolution Number 2: must try harder.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.


 

I Pity You If You Welcomed In The New Year With The Moronic Gemma Cairney

33 minutes into 2015 seems like a good time to wish you all a Happy New Year. Well, I say 'all' but I really mean my regular readers. I also wanted to say that one of my resolutions for this year was to remain upbeat, non-judgmental, less critical of our culture, and stop insulting anything that I feel is too lowbrow...

Except I started the year watching BBC1, presented by the deeply irritating Gemma Cairney, all inverted snorts and open mouthed excitement,  who told me to 'grab somebody to snog' and to 'carry on drinking'. How much do the BBC pay this witless oaf to come out with this stuff? Is this what we've become as a nation? It sometimes feels like we've handed New Year over to be produced by the brassy and brash, presented by the loud and guffawing. Village idiots are in charge at the BBC and they're earning a bloody fortune.

It's a shame because the fireworks in London were spectacular but they always are. Yet every year my first thought is: does actually find this hyperactive looped XFactor shite bearable? Why is our national celebration run by the US Army's psychological operations group, clearly trying to get some South American dictator out of a church? Wasn't there a report recently saying they shouldn't be allowed to torture innocents? So why do I end up having to watch the fireworks with the TV muted just to stop the looped abattoir sounds from inflaming my auditory nerves?  Why must we endure such a deeply depressing example of our national mediocrity at the start of the New Year? Has the entire country been taken over by the zombified acolytes of bad ITV talent shows? Are we all spray tanned orange or wearing muscle vests? Or in the case of the slack jawed Cairney, a jacket made from the blue plumage plucked from the arse end of Rod Hull's emu.

Speaking of the crass and unnecessary: I never much liked Queen when Freddie Mercury was alive but this reanimated version feels like something dreamed up in hell by Jimmy sodding Savile comiting his last crime against humanity. Why does every national event have to involve Brian May doing his splay-legged whining 24th fret bollock fiddling?

The point is: tastes are diverse so why not aim for something relatively neutral? I'd never subject people to the music I enjoy. Nick Cave belting out a murder ballad might not be for everybody enjoying New Year.  PJ Harvey might not be very festive. Yet why can't other people be as considerate? I'm not a huge fan of classical music. I own, maybe, five or six albums which I rarely listen to. Yet classical music is widely accepted as being neutral. A few pieces were even written specifically for firework displays, and, here's a crazy left of center idea: perhaps, they might distinguish London's celebrations from every other city so paranoid about their history that they're all desperate to be seen as young and vigorous. The only vigorous thing I felt this evening was the need to shake the TV whenever the gormless Carney opened her mouth wider than it already was.

Sadly, I remember when New Year TV was witty and topical and just a little bit intelligent. What's happened at the BBC? Why must these witless bastards subject me to this hell every year? Why do they have to assume that everybody is already paralytic and in the mood to grope? Why do the BBC act as though the whole nation is involved in an extended Caledonian remake of Caligula? Why do the BBC have to put me in such a crap mood only minutes into a New Year?

And yes: bang goes resolution Number 1.

Happy New Year.

Health & Safety

Not a great cartoon but significant in its way. Yesterday, I changed the way the algorithms work in my 'Gag Machine'. I added some flexibility about the way I can produce the results. I also added a different kind of data and took out a few fields which weren't contributing to the finished product. I also took a slightly different approach to my data. Before the changes, the majority of the results were pretty unusable. I already knew that two word combinations worked the best but only when I input certain data. After the changes, I was getting more joke material from the longer gag suggestions. A page of 30 results gave me about eight or ten good ideas for cartoons. That doesn't sound much but, previously, I might get one good joke ever one or two pages. The trick, I think, is to find a good balance between detail and the generality. A suggestion such as: 'two zombies greedily devouring peanuts in a red circus tent' is not going to be as helpful as 'two zombies eating'.

Anyway, late last night, I finished programming and I took the first page of 'long gag results' and printed them out. One caught my eye and sparked an idea and I wrote down 'Hitler dealing with the Health and Safety Nazis'. The point of  using the 'long gag' outputs is that they don't tend to produce the kind of crazy, unpublishable cartoons I've been drawing in the past week. I didn't want to draw a cartoon that was too surreal. The result was the above cartoon. I was a bit tired when drawing it but it's okay. It feels more mainstream but, personally, I think it feels less exciting. Today I intend to spend entering more data. The beauty of permutations is that the more data you can add, the number of possible outputs rises very quickly. When I have enough data to produce tens of millions of jokes, I might not feel quite so bad sharing my app with the world. Then there might even be enough jokes for everybody.

Today's Cartoon

Three sweaters on and I'm still feeling the cold. It's well below zero outside and a freezing fog has descended. Can't get my body going today. Even typing this feels hesitant and awkward.

Today's cartoon was another drawn using 'The Gag Machine' late last night. I'm trying to use it every day, to see if it genuinely produces good cartoon ideas. I usually have my best cartoon ideas in the early parts of the day. However, if I'm distracted or busy, I might not get around to sitting down and thinking of what I'll draw that night. If I leave it too late, I struggle to think of a gag, so having a software backup is helpful. Whether this cartoon works or not, I'm not sure. I quite like it. I wanted to draw a beggar as a skeleton because I thought it might say something about our relationship with beggars. You can read it in a number of ways. Foremost, it's saying that the most successful beggars are those that look the most pitiful. So, reductio ad absurdum: a dead beggar skeleton would probably reap in the money. The other way to read the cartoon is that people rarely look a beggar in the eye and, by throwing money in, they somehow nullify any kind of liberal anguish they might otherwise have. This guy has clearly been dead months but nobody notices.

I draw these while I'm relaxing watching TV, which is why I put in too much time and effort. Once I have the idea and the basic cartoon worked out, I enjoy the process of slowly refining the lines and then adding the shading. I could have worked on this for a couple of hours more and been as happy as the proverbial Larry. The irony is that the more I work on a cartoon, the less use it probably is.

Today I want to see if I can refine my application and improve its ability to produce cartoon ideas. I suspect there might be a better way of structuring my data which will produce better results. I need to test it on a small sample of data to see what happens.