Red Bull Extreme Sports

Red Bull ‘extreme’ sports such as “Flugtag” are among the more annoying aspects of the potentially sick-inducing fizzy red caffeine-pop.
The drink itself is an overpriced miniature can of what could loosely be described as “Tizer Espresso”. It is bought in pubs by people falling asleep under the weight of their friends conversations as a method to prevent their eyelids from closing . In order to reinforce its “Might just keep you awake” energy-boosting power, Red Bull has associated itself with some of society’s crappiest, most unwanted and unwatched sports.
So Flugtag, which sounds almost nouveau-German chic like Fussball (Table football, directly translates as ‘pinball for wankers‘) is a Red Bull ‘extreme’ sport, and people are invited to create their own flying machines and be launched off a pier into the sea.
It all looks innocent enough but the Red Bull version of Flugtag betrays the sport’s roots. Flugtag is German for their annual “Idiot push”. Idiots would be rounded up and herded off a high pier, tricked into agreement by being told they were about to fly away in a bizarre shed-like contraption for shits and giggles. In fact, they were being erased from existence by a society intent on destroying the subhumans who were still voting on television talent-shows and lacking in German efficiency.
So when this societal medicine sport reached the UK, far from thinking how delightfully jolly the participants looked in their Heath Robinson contraptions, I initially wept with joy that the government had finally begun to tackle our nations growing ‘idiot problems’.
It was not to be, the vastly pointless event is in fact REAL, and plays up to the “Red Bull gives you wiiings!” slogan. I immediately ceased weeping for joy and began weeping in despair.
The event had gone from the joyous – “let’s push these retards into the sea once and for all!” to the hellish realisation that none of the event marshalls were shooting the survivors as they bobbed grinning next to the wreckage of their shed-planes. Oh, shit and fried eggs.
There they were, clambering out of the sea. Like normal cretins, only slightly damper – and still alive.
Red Bull had reinforced itself as the pumped-up can-crushing goon’s beverage of choice and our nation’s idiocy pandemic continued for another day.
The same happened with the damn “Air Race”. Middle-class, middle-aged people in their miniature flying machines poncing around above the Thames doing “death-defying” turns and such between giant coloured flags. Well whoop-de-shit! The sort of people who go to the pub for a ‘real ale’ after a race and talk engines were now being celebrated by a company desperate for wing-related sports to fit their brand. Well they can cock right off, all their sports are rubbish.

The common cold

A completely pointless illness, the common cold is surely the most rubbish malady of all time. In the top five weak illnesses it’s up there with athlete’s foot, pink-eye, excessive sweating and Delhi belly.
In many humans an instance of the common cold is marked by a production of a great deal of pus and mucus, which is in turn expelled through the nose, mouth or something. They ache more and blow their nose alot. In a recent bout of the common cold, I found myself producing enough phlegm to fill a bathtub and blowing my nose around 500 times. When a cold attempts to take hold of me, my body’s reaction is to become incredibly red and drippy and so unpleasant the cold just loses interest and walks out. After producing and removing from my system around three litres of effluent, I wondered whether or not my body’s reaction i.e. producing this junk, was the most appropriate way of dealing with the cold or whether it could just get on with it quietly in the background without making too much of a fuss – the British way.
Instead of doing that, my body put me through a grand opera of discomfort and awkward, mistimed fluid production. Leaking from every facial orifice I put myself in self-imposed exile Quasimodo-style until the bastard thing had been killed off and shat right out of my system, which it now has.
It was naive of the common cold to think that it could set itself up in my body and live there happily ever after, but…what if my immune system hadn’t been up to the job? Perhaps it would have taken control of me like the Invasion of the Bodysnatchers and used me to spread more cold until the virus had everyone on earth under its control. I doubt it. The most it managed was hurting my feelings when someone said it was only ”man-flu”.
Maybe all it wanted was few days in me so it could spread to someone else again and repeat the process again and again, maybe that’s the tawdry life-cycle of the cold virus. The sorry existence of the most rubbish illness there is.

Public Transport

It’s official, Britain has the world’s worst public transport ever. And British people are the most ill-equipped to cope with it.
Anyone who’s used the London Underground system will tell you that it smells, bad. The humid bacteria-rich air that wafts at you as you walk along it’s psycho-friendly platforms is a sickening reminder that no matter how practical something is, Britain can make it rubbish. Lots of stops, efficient service and plenty of room, right?
Wrong. There IS plenty of room on the Underground, but at peak times it’s crammed with wage-zombies clawing their way through wave after wave of each other to keep their overlords happy. Possibly. Yes it’s practical, but it’s also 900 years old and prone to silly screechy blackout breakages.
Want to take a bus? Brilliant. But it’s difficult to recommend. As they do on any other mode of transport, British people adopt one of three states on public transport. Ninety-five percent of the population are content with the middle-distance ‘thinking to self stare’, which is generally targetted out of the window and may involve headphone use.
Three per cent are engaged in an activity or conversation, such as reading a newspaper or talking to a baby.
One percent are early-teens roling up bits of paper and throwing them, or calling each other gay and/or whores.
The final percent is the distressing “wot u looking at” crackhead kind usually wearing a hoody and just tweaking on the back seat, looking for stray eyes to make contact with and threaten and thinking of their next fix of sweet, sweet crack.
The dangerous psychotic can insult or murder whomever he likes on the public transport, because British people are not naturally inclined to interfere with people going about their business. He is unlikely to be challenged by the middle-distance masses, who will keep staring out of the window or at the A4 posters dotted around them.
ALL of Britain’s public transport networks are overpriced. Compared to other European nations or the USA, we could rightly expect our ticket premium to pay for killer robot police patrolling the networks, but it doesn’t. It pays shareholder dividends.
You have to suppose that nationally, until we stop pretending everyone else isn’t there, we’re all going to be obsessed with one day being rich and becoming that shareholder, literally anally raping each other to climb the career ladder until we become millionnaires. Of course it’s preposterous to think we can all be millionnaires, there simply isn’t enough money in the world, but until we realise that and start spreading the love a little, public transport is rubbish.

Threatening TV-licence / Road Tax adverts

Your government hates you. Since watching the Matrix in 1999 a select team of Whitehall policymakers latched on to the idea of humans as giant batteries for their evil planet-straddling automatons. Although being reminded about your TV licence or road tax by mail may seem some distance away from breathing nutrient-rich liquid as one of 10-million souls in a mile-high stack of human battery pods, it’s a step in the right direction.
It starts with the letters, a database of every household in the country without a television licence so says the advert. The implication being that they’re constantly visiting these addresses to see if the residents appear to be watching telly so they can fine them. After a while this is going to prove effective. They’re catching the perps but still need to get budget down. So off they go, rationalising the staff. Those weaselly detector-van men are fired en-masse and replaced by robots. The robots get stolen, so they give them knives, then guns…then they go all Terminator on your ass.
It’s ok if you’ve got nothing to hide, but that doesn’t mean you enjoy the fear they’re trying to imbue in you.
Road tax database adverts are similar. They say they’ve got a database of all the cars in the UK and they’ll mail you a reminder when it’s due. Which is fine, I like that. It makes life easier. Eventually there won’t be a single decision it’s possible to make without the government reminding you beforehand.
This is the sort of message that MIGHT be displayed on your personal bluetooth PDApod that’s sewn into your eyebrow at birth.

“A delicious wheat-bisk based breakfast would set you up with complex carbohydrates for the day, allowing you to toil on grimly through the rest of your life until your joints wear out or you have a nervous breakdown. Whichever’s first. Have some Omega 3 and you can extend your toil-span by another 15 years if taken regularly.”

I never wanted to be a civil servant, but the people at the jobcentre laughed if you said you wanted to be a cowboy. So battery-pods it is then.

The wedge with the flexible sole ad from Clarks

This is the advert currently on tv showing a ginger woman attempting to descend some stairs whilst trying to throw an invisible chimp off her back. The woman in the advert leans backwards and forwards and reclimbs several stairs as if to suggest a new-found freedom, all the while a lilting French acoustic guitar pseudo-folk ear-turd is being pooed out in the background.

Of course the strange movements we’re witnessing are more a result of some spinal bending than a revolution in footwear. The shoe in this video is still just the thing between foot and ground, nothing more. Rather than pretending to ‘reinvent the shoe’, Clarks would absolutely make more money if they showed shoes as a thing that humans grudgingly put on their feet to keep them warm and stop them from bleeding too much. If their campaign, was more honest and said “You’re going to have to get some new shoes eventually….why not think about us eh?” I’d have a lot more respect for it.

As for this objectionable advert, bleugh!

Credit Cards

A credit card is an innocuous piece of plastic levered into your wallet by any of a number of giant financial institutions beneath a tide of bonhomie and good-life fantasies. The card allows the bank to offer you a series of triflingly small loans in the hope that you will forget or neglect to repay them and thus they can start demanding interest. Essentially that’s where a credit card’s job ends.
If you pay it off instantly then it’s financial masters are angered, as there is no money to be made in good financial management, least not on the customer’s part.
In truth, if you are monumentally fuckwitted enough to equate ‘credit card’ with ‘free money’ then the bank are well within their rights to send two large bald men round to your house, throttle your budgie and flog your widescreen telly on eBay. Credit cards infrequently offer holiday competitions, but for each holiday offered they merely have to trick five scrotes into thinking the card has made them rich, and sell five of their massive tellies. Like the Great Wall of China, the ’success’ of the financial institutions that offer cards is literally built from the petrified corpses of those that helped build it.