Saturday, August 02, 2003
Well, I see we've come up the Googles for "Website humor", which is nice. Regular visitors here will know that - rather than a humor, humour or funny website per se - this is a blog of ideas and observations of a funny website maker (me) as well as a diary-style release valve for the two other websites I run:
Trepanning and the 2003 winner of the Channel 4 Comedy Circuit competition: The Department of Social Scrutiny.
I recommend that you visit both those sites immediately - particularly Trepanning as it's popularity is steadily rising and because it's a site I love doing. The Channel 4 site has been in stasis since it went up at the start of the year - it was written and conceived as a static site, though I'm itching to take it back and edit and add to it. From August 16, I'm no longer under contract to Channel 4 and all rights revert back to me, so I have to find the right hosting package and domain for it, as well as make more content...
Sooner or later, I'll get some time between all of these projects and put something funny up here.
Trepanning and the 2003 winner of the Channel 4 Comedy Circuit competition: The Department of Social Scrutiny.
I recommend that you visit both those sites immediately - particularly Trepanning as it's popularity is steadily rising and because it's a site I love doing. The Channel 4 site has been in stasis since it went up at the start of the year - it was written and conceived as a static site, though I'm itching to take it back and edit and add to it. From August 16, I'm no longer under contract to Channel 4 and all rights revert back to me, so I have to find the right hosting package and domain for it, as well as make more content...
Sooner or later, I'll get some time between all of these projects and put something funny up here.
Wednesday, July 23, 2003
The Case for The Attack
Despite my best efforts to prevent them, our nuisance gulls returned to nest on our roof this Summer. The young one has flown now, but here's a diatribe I wrote in the middle of a hot spell when the roof stank of fish and our back yard became an exclusion zone.
No 1: The Seagull.
AKA: The Flying Rat.
Think of seagulls and an elysian vision of a graceful white dart set against a seaside blue sky may spring to mind. Or you may hear their distant cry as a soundtrack to an imaginary desert island with undisturbed perfect golden sand. Snap out of it. Wake up and smell the guano.
One minute they're wheeling through the sky, sunlight through their wings, next thing you know, they're on your kitchen roof, guttural grunts, whelps, hormonal squabbling and shitting for England all rolled into a single arena of rooftop unpleasantness. Living cheek-by-beak with gulls is like living in a colony of sociopathic pterodactyls.
Pushed a long way from idyllic, barefoot beach fantasy by their prehistoric mewling, animal aggression and the more or less constant aura of rotting fish, it becomes a battle of nerves to recapture the kitchen roof. Forced into territorial dispute with them every time they catch sight of you in your own home, it won't be long until you turn into your enemy, a deeply unpleasant world-hating scumbucket with no social grace and the ability to regurgitate raw fish down the throat of your youngest child.
It's the brain skewering noise that's worst. Gulls sound great from a distance, like seaside lazy days spent sundrenched and woozy on a golden beach. At anything nearer than ten yards it's like having an ambulance siren fitted to your nasal cavity. The noise acts as a psychic microwave, boiling away the thoughts in your brain. As with all things though, it's the tiny details that matter. Whereas the adult cry goes for the burn, the young constantly issue tiny infra-sonic nose-whistles that have a drip-drip effect. You fantasise about blunt instruments for a while but finally threaten to bury them under a plate of cold wet mash, after which they hide under one of their parents and continue.
For further evidence for The Attack, look no further than their alleged grace and beauty. Nothing that shits that much is either graceful or beautiful, but that's not their only aesthetic problem. Grace is completely by-passed by the extraordinarily ungainly act of gull love. It's an ugly, brutal-looking affair - Mr Gull's foreplay would be a less than erotically charged throat full of partially digested fish - and there's enough gull fornication about to convince us all that we live in a renaissance painting of the End Times.
Then there's the outcome of the rooftop sex: rooftop chicks. While fluffy and endearing at first, they eventually turn into the cold-eyed, hook-beaked airborne vermin that they must. It takes three years for the nose-whistling, gawky cuddleplump with the enormous feet to achieve the full dubious promise of its genetic code, but it makes a swift start. Within weeks it's first wary attempt at flight will end in your garden where it will stay for several days, unable to leave and whining for food like an abandoned teenager. Any attempt to rescue, feed or encourage it to fly by chasing it around the garden with a stick will result in a blitzreig of unparalleled ferocity and guano from its proud parents.
It will leave eventually and earn its wings. You can expect to see it until winter where it will squeak at every passing adult hoping to score a tasty spot of fishsick. Ultimately, it will graduate into a graceful white dart calling plaintively in a beautiful blue sky. And then it will come to live on your kitchen roof.
Despite my best efforts to prevent them, our nuisance gulls returned to nest on our roof this Summer. The young one has flown now, but here's a diatribe I wrote in the middle of a hot spell when the roof stank of fish and our back yard became an exclusion zone.
No 1: The Seagull.
AKA: The Flying Rat.
Think of seagulls and an elysian vision of a graceful white dart set against a seaside blue sky may spring to mind. Or you may hear their distant cry as a soundtrack to an imaginary desert island with undisturbed perfect golden sand. Snap out of it. Wake up and smell the guano.
One minute they're wheeling through the sky, sunlight through their wings, next thing you know, they're on your kitchen roof, guttural grunts, whelps, hormonal squabbling and shitting for England all rolled into a single arena of rooftop unpleasantness. Living cheek-by-beak with gulls is like living in a colony of sociopathic pterodactyls.
Pushed a long way from idyllic, barefoot beach fantasy by their prehistoric mewling, animal aggression and the more or less constant aura of rotting fish, it becomes a battle of nerves to recapture the kitchen roof. Forced into territorial dispute with them every time they catch sight of you in your own home, it won't be long until you turn into your enemy, a deeply unpleasant world-hating scumbucket with no social grace and the ability to regurgitate raw fish down the throat of your youngest child.
It's the brain skewering noise that's worst. Gulls sound great from a distance, like seaside lazy days spent sundrenched and woozy on a golden beach. At anything nearer than ten yards it's like having an ambulance siren fitted to your nasal cavity. The noise acts as a psychic microwave, boiling away the thoughts in your brain. As with all things though, it's the tiny details that matter. Whereas the adult cry goes for the burn, the young constantly issue tiny infra-sonic nose-whistles that have a drip-drip effect. You fantasise about blunt instruments for a while but finally threaten to bury them under a plate of cold wet mash, after which they hide under one of their parents and continue.
For further evidence for The Attack, look no further than their alleged grace and beauty. Nothing that shits that much is either graceful or beautiful, but that's not their only aesthetic problem. Grace is completely by-passed by the extraordinarily ungainly act of gull love. It's an ugly, brutal-looking affair - Mr Gull's foreplay would be a less than erotically charged throat full of partially digested fish - and there's enough gull fornication about to convince us all that we live in a renaissance painting of the End Times.
Then there's the outcome of the rooftop sex: rooftop chicks. While fluffy and endearing at first, they eventually turn into the cold-eyed, hook-beaked airborne vermin that they must. It takes three years for the nose-whistling, gawky cuddleplump with the enormous feet to achieve the full dubious promise of its genetic code, but it makes a swift start. Within weeks it's first wary attempt at flight will end in your garden where it will stay for several days, unable to leave and whining for food like an abandoned teenager. Any attempt to rescue, feed or encourage it to fly by chasing it around the garden with a stick will result in a blitzreig of unparalleled ferocity and guano from its proud parents.
It will leave eventually and earn its wings. You can expect to see it until winter where it will squeak at every passing adult hoping to score a tasty spot of fishsick. Ultimately, it will graduate into a graceful white dart calling plaintively in a beautiful blue sky. And then it will come to live on your kitchen roof.
Thursday, July 17, 2003
So here goes: the end of a full-on day desperately trying to be amusing.
Published the parish noticeboard for Trepanning this morning, after a break of two weeks. It's all part of my game: I really don't know what I'm going to write and I have no notes, just a map of our fictional village on the wall and an over-active imagination that only thinks of stupid stuff. I also have a baby seagull on the flat roof of my kitchen. It comes to nose-whistle in that semi-asthmatic way of theirs. I'm convinced it thinks I'm it's Mum right now, but I don't remember shitting on any Jags, wheeling around in the sky or stealing any pasties recently. More's the pity.
Published the parish noticeboard for Trepanning this morning, after a break of two weeks. It's all part of my game: I really don't know what I'm going to write and I have no notes, just a map of our fictional village on the wall and an over-active imagination that only thinks of stupid stuff. I also have a baby seagull on the flat roof of my kitchen. It comes to nose-whistle in that semi-asthmatic way of theirs. I'm convinced it thinks I'm it's Mum right now, but I don't remember shitting on any Jags, wheeling around in the sky or stealing any pasties recently. More's the pity.
Tuesday, July 15, 2003
Welcome to Funny Website: my new comedy blog.
I'm intending it to be a diary of a writer, a jotting pad for ideas and observations and a release valve for the two other websites I run:
Trepanning and the 2003 winner of the Channel 4 Comedy Circuit competition: The Department of Social Scrutiny which will shortly be leaving the confines of Channel 4 to be updated, rewritten, added to and hosted by me.
That's all for today: This site is still in beta.
I'm intending it to be a diary of a writer, a jotting pad for ideas and observations and a release valve for the two other websites I run:
Trepanning and the 2003 winner of the Channel 4 Comedy Circuit competition: The Department of Social Scrutiny which will shortly be leaving the confines of Channel 4 to be updated, rewritten, added to and hosted by me.
That's all for today: This site is still in beta.
