First, a disclaimer: I know I look pretty damn awful. It’s intentional. I was faced with either shaving and grooming myself… or working with it! Anyway, it’s what’s on the inside that counts, right?

I have a basic idea of where the story’s going, so I’ll try to update fairly regularly. They’ll probably just feature into-the-camera style monologue, but who knows… maybe I’ll start getting creative and exploring ‘the bunker’. Don’t be surprised if the style changes a bit in the first few installments either; I’m fairly new to the video thing, so I have to play with the software a bit and see what works!

Make sure you don’t miss an example of one of my, um, flexible facial expressions towards the end. And don’t give up until you get to the end — it’s short, and it’s worth it! You might also have to turn the volume up!

For those of you expecting something else entirely: sorry for the interruption; programming will resume as normal tomorrow.

I went with the going-slowly-insane route for the plot of Day 37, my new epic video diary/vlog. Who needs sanity anyway? It’s a totally overvalued trait… Right?

As always, it was rehearsed and recorded in about 45 minutes, so don’t expect fantastic production values. If you titter, just once, I’ll be happy. If you grin broadly, laugh out loud, or — dare I say it — gigglesnort, I’ll chalk it up as a massive victory for hairy, yeti-like British men the world over!

Enjoy!

It is with great pride, and with almost no hesitance at all, I give to you the third — and final (for now!) — chapter of Day 37, a story that chronicles the poor plight of a Brit destined to spend all of eternity in a bunker, where no one can hear him fart.

There will be proper pictures of the half-beard to follow, don’t worry!

Well, to put it as simply as I can --
Good and evil are so close as to be chained together in the soul.
Man isn't truly one, but two. Now what if we could break that chain --
separate those two selves --

(his face alight, lost in his subject)

To free the good in man, and let it go on to its higher destiny... to segregate the bad in man --
and let it destroy itself in its own degradation!

Spencer Tracey said it so eloquently in the 1941 film version of Jekyll & Hyde, the story of a brilliant scientist — Dr Jekyll — trying to separate good from evil. While the book itself isn’t considered a ‘classic’ it has created a massive amount of spin-off works — other books, films, TV shows and, most importantly, a musical! The story looks at the duality of the human psyche: good and evil. It actually seems to be very close to the Freudian theory that evil thoughts banished to your unconscious mind impact on your conscious (’good’) mind, ultimately resulting in an the eruption of your very own Mr Hyde.

We should embrace and nurture both our naughty and nice sides, basically, lest we turn into weird and depraved creatures of the night.

Regarding the musical (which many people consider to be overly dramatic and a bit lacking in substance), it’s well worth watching just to marvel at a single actor performing a duet on his own, both as Dr Jekyll and the beast Hyde. Lots of frantic head turning and make-up is required! It’s actually one of my favourite musicals, and I have my first girlfriend at university to thank for introducing me to it (she’s the one I turned gay, for those of you trying to keep up…)

Anyway, that attempt at intelligent discourse brings me neatly onto the topic of the split personality that I developed in Chapter 3 of Day 37, my epic video diary of a poor guy slowly (well, not so slowly it seems…) going insane in a bunker. It occured ot me that you probably couldn’t quite appreciate my good and evil ‘duality’ with the poor quality of my video camera. So, not wanting to disappoint, I prepared this lovely composite showing both my good and evil sides.

Have a nice weekend! I’m off now to go and terrorise some local grocery stores. I’m going to walk in once, only displaying my evil side and ask for booze and cigarettes. Then I’m going to walk in again, this time displaying my scarily-young-and-pretty side, asking the shop attendant with a straight face ‘Have you seen my evil twin brother?’ I’ll let you know of the results…

I don’t have long to write today. I’m not ashamed to admit the reason why, either: in the last 2 days, I’ve played 20 hours of World of Warcraft.

Okay, actually that does sound shameful… but only a little! It’s not like the time I played 60 hours of Final Fantasy VII in 3 days…

The last two days have been positively tame in comparison!

What is shameful however, is that this blog entry will resemble one of those awful mash-up ‘clips’ episodes of The Simpsons when Matt Groening was obviously too lazy to make an entirely new episode. Instead of entirely fresh content, I’m going to serve up the blogging equivalent of re-fried re-fried beans (repetition intentional, because seemingly, you’re meant to refry them at least once before consumption). You know, this is a rare case of me having to actually bite my tongue: I just looked it up, and it turns out ‘re-fried’ is actually a mistranslation, and ‘re’ should actually be translated as ‘well-fried beans’. How about that; funny and educational.

Bear in mind as you read this entry that I’ve been doing pretty well. I’ve posted once a day, every day, for months! If you’ve only just started reading this blog, you’ll probably learn a whole lot of new stuff about me; if you’ve been here from the start, you can probably come back tomorrow, when I’ll hopefully have some pretty photos to show you of the seaside city of Brighton.

So, first of all (because apparently, a lot of people who read this blog don’t know this): I’m tall. 77 inches of semi-lean geeky goodness. 196cm of prime-cut, intelligent Britishness. That’s 6′5″ of witty hairiness for you fellow Imperialists. I had a look through my blog, and there’s only one entry about me being tall, but it’s quite good: ‘Wow, you’re mighty tall‘. Unfortunately, this means my cousin will kill me again for publishing the above photo of us; a small price to pay for such a great photo, though. Also, I’m aware that it looks like I have a huge moustache on my upper lip, but it’s actually my shadow! I’m aware that I look short — but if I tell you he’s 6′8″, 200cm — that makes me look a bit taller, right?

Talking of moustaches… (and a lot of you know what’s coming)… did you know I once shaved off half my beard, purely for your enjoyment? OK, I enjoyed it a little.

Sorry, I must’ve used that image at least 3 times, but I can’t just leave it to gather dust in an old entry. I even went to the post office, with the dual-beard, to prove that I am, without a doubt, a fearless weirdo.

Right now, you’re probably thinking there must’ve been a really good reason for shaving off only half of my beard. Unfortunately, you’d be wrong: I did it for YouTube. Yup, I sold my soul to the appreciative, 5-star-rating masses — all 250 of them — for my short video blog series ‘Day 37‘. It’s in 3 short parts, and features, at its pinnacle, the dual beard. I’m told it’s actually quite funny, so perhaps you should go ahead an watch a hirsute Brit babbling bullshit for 5 minutes.

Finally, way back when, in the ‘early days’ (read: February 2009), I did a series of podcasts/audio blogs called ‘The Penis Monologues‘. They actually get a lot of hits from search engines, but people don’t navigate there from the blog itself. This is me plugging them, and my fantastic array of awful accents. Marvel as I attempt a Scottish accent and fail. Dismally. The Irish is actually passable, if you’ve never met a real Irish person. If you enjoy them, you might like to read about the ‘creative process‘ (a fancy term for ‘I enjoy the sound of my own voice, so let’s record something funny!)

As you read this, I’ll be waking up at ungodly o’clock and hopping on a train to Brighton, to have some fun and do a little research at the same time. I want to talk about this little business venture I have planned, but I don’t know if it’s safe to!

I’m afraid, because I spent the whole day sitting out in the sun capitalising on the rarest of mythical beasts ‘The British Summer‘, I didn’t get a chance to write anything exciting.

Instead, you get a photo story about two annoying terriers that somehow found their way into our garden. Probably chasing rabbits, or each other, or just being plain annoying — I think that’s in the ‘Being A Little Dog Job Description’ somewhere. You can just picture the cover-letter of the mongrel mutt’s resume:

About Me

Hi. My name’s Wheezer, but you can call me That Ugly Little Gash-face White Terrier. When I’m not dry-humping your leg, you can find me terrorising the local neighbourhood, picking on cats that are larger than me and abusing innocent rabbits. I have a major inferiority complex. In fact, I’m like one of those small kids at school that have no friends and burn things with a magnifying glass.

My Skill Set

• Yap. A lot. Yap yap yap. Grrr. Yap.
• Annoying. I can even irritate a Samaritan into aiming a kick at me.
• Easily-excitable. Sometimes I pee when I get excited.
• Endless energy channelled into my feeble barking abilities. What I don’t have in balls, strength or intelligence I make up for with yapping, and running around like a spastic.

Why does anyone even want a small dog? Why not get a cat? Why not get a proper dog? You know where you are with a big dog. A terrier’s not going to find you in a snowdrift and haul you to safety. A terrier doesn’t do a whole lot actually. Just get in the way. At least you can kick small dogs without feeling too bad about it; a big dog will just bite your foot off. Perhaps people get small dogs because they can’t handle having a big dog, the same way mean, aggressive, wife-beating men marry docile women that they can control. Hmm…

Anyway… (sorry, it’s late as I write this. I was probably abused by a small dog as a child. Remind me to ask mum.)

Here’s the photo story of how I chased the two little noisy shits out of one of our fields.

At first they were unsure of what to make of the hairy beast that had come out to greet them.

‘So what do we have here… He’s bigger than us… but…’

Failing to work out why I had invaded their field, and confused as to why I was still here, they resorted to their one sure-fire defence: yapping. Yap! YAP! YIP! Grrr! YAP!!!

Time to show them who the big dog is around these parts. The picture fails to capture my deep and manly rumbling bark. Grrrrrwoof!

Seb: 1, Little Shits: 0

(Click for larger! You can see my tongue… cool.)

I vaaant to suuuck yourr bluuud!

Just kidding, I don’t really. I mean, I like nibbling soft, fresh flesh as much as the next guy… but I’m not a blood sucker or anything like that!

This didn’t quite work out how I intended… but again, I ran out of daylight (how fitting!)

I actually have huge incisors — you know, those canine teeth that vampires have — which is the main reason I rarely smile in photos, because I look a bit stupid. I tried to take a photo of them without making me look retarded… but I failed. So the photo doesn’t really go with the text. But it works… just!

A girl really did beg me to bite her, by the way. Pleaded, even. By the sound of things she really enjoyed it too…

[There's more too-much-information over on Lilu's blog. I expect I'm the only VAMPIRE-THEMED one this week though...!]

(Click for larger… and more dribbly…)

Soooo…

Yeah. This one didn’t quite work out the way I had intended. Originally it was simply going to be called ‘Oops’. But it doesn’t look enough like POO! Damn it. I guess it could be liquid poo, but that doesn’t tend to be quite so dark brown… does it? At least I don’t think so…

In the process of making this blog entry, I actually researched shit, faeces, stool, scatological wunderkind — sometimes being a writer is one of the best jobs ever… and sometimes it is not. Did you know that there’s a ’stool scale’? That there are seven (7) ranks of crap consistency in medical science? No? It was actually invented nearby at the University of Bristol and it’s called… the Bristol Stool Scale. What you see here, all over my feet, is something like a 6.5 — pushing towards diarrhoea, or at least a shit that would usually be delivered unto the porcelain goddess with some urgency.

You learn something new every day.

I only got one attempt at this photo for obvious reasons… so when I had a look at them on my computer, I was a little disappointed. But hey, even if it doesn’t really look like poop, it’s still a great photo. Next time I’ll definitely use something a little more… lumpy. If there is a next time.

[More issues regarding leaky and unfortunate dribbles of bodily fluids can no doubt be found over on Lilu's blog this Thursday.]

OK, bear with me here… I have two really conflicting themes going on in my head right now.

The original plan was to discuss some of the great Christmas presents I’ve got over the years, and their importance or significance throughout my formative years.

But then… well, I went and shaved my beard into a Hitler moustache.

So… a little bit of a dilemma, as you can imagine, me being a Jew and all. Then, to make things even more confusing, it was Hanukkah (the Jew-Christmassy thing) AND… I watched Inglourious Basterds last night.

It’s all a bit, you know, CONFUSING. I guess this is as close to a bona fide identity crisis as one can get — and not really the kind of internal conflict you want to go through, you know? I used to think I was about as far removed as possible from the Fuhrer… but then I wrote that manifesto for my galaxy-spanning empire last week… and now the moustache…

And you know the worst thing? THE MOUSTACHE LOOKS GOOD! What the… scheiße?

I have dimples that I didn’t even know about. I look about 10 years younger. It gives some filter-fed morsels to snack on when the munchies kick in around midnight. Seriously, what’s not to like?

I don’t know why I’m doing the peace sign. It just… came to me…

Seriously, I keep looking in the mirror and smiling. Bursting out into random displays of cheerfulness. Wait, now I sound like the Hitler from The Producers…

Oh, yeah, I kept the chin puff too, just in case people took offence to the ‘Hitler moustache’, I could pass it off as just some experiment gone wrong — I’ve been referring to it as the ‘funky Hitler’ on Facebook, but I don’t know if that name will stick. It probably will, knowing my luck.

Anyway…

I should probably dedicate some of this post to actual Christmas-related stuff, huh. OK.

Notable Christmas presents from the past quarter-century

I might get the year wrong on some of these gifts, but I’m sure my mother will pop up and make any necessary corrections. She’s an elephant like that.

Age 6 — Christmas 1990

The present that changed it all: The Nintendo Entertainment System… and Turtles! The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (or ‘hero’ in the UK, because ‘ninja’ was too violent, apparently) were the first crush/infatuation that I can recall having. It was exacerbated by the fact that my cousin’s dad knew the creator Kevin Eastman — we got given a lot of free stuff… toys, stuffed dolls, etc. It’s safe to say, when I finally got a NES (it had been out for five years!) and the Turtles game, that this was the beginning of something big.

I still have all four of the stuffed toys — Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo and Donatello — in my cupboard. I have a lot of stuffed toys in my cupboard actually… not many people know that. They’re probably worth quite a lot now.

Age 10 – Christmas 1994

I remember this one so, so fondly, perhaps more so than any other gift, including the mass of PCs that would follow in proceeding years: a chemistry set. This was back when ‘health and safety’ was much, much less of an issue — it didn’t really exist, thinking about it. Some of the phials had skulls on, but that was about as far as warnings went with these chemistry sets (I received a few of them over the years — I guess they were quite expensive as I only ever got them for Christmas or birthdays).

Now, I recall igniting many of these mixtures… but I have no idea how. I must’ve had some kind of Bunsen burner, but they need natural gas… which I’m sure I didn’t have a cannister of in my bedroom. But, anyway, there were many explosions and close-calls with concoctions-gone-wrong ending up in my eyes and nose and mouth and… well, those chemicals got everywhere. I think we famously got some nasty stuff in the eyes of my friend, and we thought he was going to lose his eye — but that was just my mum being dramatic. You can hardly see the scar now.

Blowing things up was a love of mine that would continue into my high school years. They had to evacuate my school on numerous occasions, all thanks to that chemistry kit I was given one fateful Christmas eve — thanks, mum.

Age 11 (and up) — Christmas 1995… and beyond!

Now we enter the Age of Computers. After the Nintendo, I didn’t actually have another games console until the N64 in 1998 (and I bought it with my own money!) — it was all personal computers. The first one was a monochrome Olivetti 8086, which I think was an Olivetti M24 but it might’ve been something more contemporary. I’d already played with a lot of the early IBM/Amstrad PCs at my dad’s workplace, so this was more… a continuance of my nascent and quickly-developing computer nerdiness. My parents have always encouraged my outreaches — I hope I can do the same for my progeny.

Around this time we also had a ZX Spectrum (via my adopted brother). I programmed that first, and then later the Olivetti and many, many Amstrads (QBASIC!) I played surprisingly few games on my early PCs — it was more exploration, investigation, taking-apart-and-putting-back-together-again. Educational!

I don’t recall getting anything else of note in the following years, other than more computers. Nowadays I just get socks. Back then, it wasn’t unusual to get both a computer for Christmas, and for my birthday five months later.

There was a BMX bike at one stage, but I never really got into that. There were a couple of Scalextric sets actually, which my mother will probably tell you inspired my love of cars — but I think it’s the other way around: I love cars, thus I loved Scalextric. I was never very good at driving those cars around the track, truth be told. But I still long to be a rally driver.

* * *

And now I go to photograph the Geminid meteor shower, so the next you’ll see of me is Tuesday morning! If my fingers haven’t frozen off!

(Click for larger… you know you want to!)

Have I done enough to secure my spot in hell? Surely I must be getting pretty close… [More hell-seekers can be found over on Lilu's blog!]

This photo’s for everyone out there that’s been caught without toilet paper either at home or in a public bathroom.

For everyone that’s tried in vain to find a scrap of paper in your pocket or handbag that can be shoehorned into anal submission.

For those of you that have done the ‘John Wayne Walk’ across the bathroom to get the toilet paper that has either a) rolled away from you or b) been left in the wrong place by someone else (WHY??)

But most of all, this photo is dedicated to those of you that have BEEN THERE. Those of you that have exhausted all available options. To those that have actually used your hand to scrape warm and squidgy-brown shit from between your legs.

[By the way, my mother took this photo. Yes, ours is a special relationship. Freud would have a field day.]