Clearly the most risky topic of conversation relates to web design. Something I know nothing about, and am happy to maintain this status quo. Therefore when this very site was being formed in the intellectual crucible of TS’ brain (or being sketched out on the padded walls of her cell with crayons), there were a number of aspects that I just agreed to without really comprehending. These included Google Analytics.

If, like me or any normal person, you have no idea what Analytics does, I’ll try to keep the explanation brief. It shows how many people have visited your site, where they live (generally… though I wish I was able to track each and every one of your home addresses down. For nice reasons of course), and how they found your site.

Having looked at this a few times over the last couple of weeks, it’s been very encouraging to see that there were approximately 20-30 people who’d stumbled across this little meaningless jumble of words, and some of them had returned and possibly enjoyed the experience. One of you even posted a comment, which was extremely encouraging and for all my gruff exterior touched me in a way that was not entirely unpleasant.

All was nice, simple, and I’d sort of forgotten about my ability to spy upon you all. Then I was encouraged to have a look today.

WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED ON WEDNESDAY?????

The graph showing the number of views on a day to day basis has a massive spike for Wednesday 6th May, where no fewer than 240 of you beautiful and intellectually elite people came to the site!

Some of my posts may suggest otherwise, but I do tend to be quite modest and sceptical about people’s desire to read my thoughts. It has therefore become a mystery why I experienced a 1000% increase in visitors on one specific day.

Not to worry though, I won’t let this go to my head, and normal service will be resumed soon… particularly after seeing some of the worst TV programming ever on Sky TV recently. More of that another day though.

I would, however, like to take a moment to comment on the details of visitors to this site. It’s probably unsurprising that the majority of visitors come from the UK (335), followed not very closely by the US with 73.

Surprisingly in joint third, are Germany and Japan. Wilkommen and Konichiwa to you all. The really unexpected results were my determined following in Sweden and Switzerland, as well as Yemen, Qatar, and Bangladesh. What an intercontinental phenomenon I appear to be!

Anyway, enough ego-stroking. It’s time to point out some of the more unusual Google searches that have led people to this site. Now if you are responsible for any of these, I am not mocking you and hope you weren’t too disappointed with what you found. And I swear these are true:

“Beauty in a depressing world”- I’m sure I cheered you up no end!
“How many people play the lottery”- I have no idea, but you ended up reading about Richard Dawkins
“Brian Sewell is shit”- Speaks for itself really
“Celeb tentacle sex”- Now you really have some explaining to do!
“Teens with muffin tops”- You’re even worse than Squidworth above!

Now I’ll be honest- I’m happily amused by these results. Actually, I’m totally overwhelmed! Given that there seems to be some regular (and irregular) visitors to the site, I’d welcome any suggestions or comments you would like to make. Within reason, everything except spam will be posted- including any criticism.

So tell your friends, graffiti the site name on walls… today the Netherlands and Qatar, tomorrow we shall crack Lithuania!

So after a night in a ridiculously over-sized bed, in which it’s actually possible to lose TS if I’m lucky, we made our habitual trip to the Trafford Centre. For those unfamiliar with Manchester and it’s landmarks, Trafford Centre is a giant shopping mall (using American terminology for those who require it) to the west of the city. It combines well-lit glass domes, with some hints of classical Roman architecture. In other words, it’s brilliantly tacky. A recent extension near the food court has the ugliest attempt at marble imaginable! We love it.

The aesthetic oddities don’t end with the building though. While I believe that Manchester is the best city in this country, I have to accept that there are some unusual looking creatures residing in the region. Yesterday while steering TS away from shoe shops, and trying to find clothes that we can both agree would look ok on me, it was like window shopping in a circus. From the chronically optimistic women who don’t realise that their flab is oozing over the tops of their jeans (thus displaying “muffin-top” syndrome), to the local scallies with the most preposterous haircuts since Mr T. I hadn’t seen a genuine mohican for a while, but yesterday I didn’t hesitate to point and laugh at the finely sculpted afro.

This made me think though about the fact that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Some people, ie TS, are under the delusion that I’m good looking. Without a hint of false modesty, I can’t see it myself… still, I’m not going to argue too much. Anyway, I have to confess to one of the least acceptable things in decent society: I think my nephew is bloody ugly.

Usually, my folks are quite honest about whether babies are cute or look like they were mauled by the stork before delivery. However, the birth of my brother’s kid (the first grandchild) seems to have created some kind of naive prejudice in favour of the little sprog. Somehow, they see this blob of blonde-haired gormlessness and think he’s gorgeous. It may of course be me (and TS) who think he looks like some kind of hellspawn.

There is one thing missing from the North’s ugly folk though, and that’s the variety of beards that are displayed down in the midlands. The other week, we were in the local doctor’s waiting room and I was surrounded by facial bush!  old boys were discussing the problems of modern society (which was a very balanced discussion as you can imagine… the cause of the problems with young people is that they are bored, but no-one was ever bored in their day). I didn’t listen for long, as one looked like someone had stuck his face in a candy-floss machine, while the other looked like he was in the process of morphing into a werewolf.

As someone who has had a goatee in the past, and is currently under a moral obligation (or emotional blackmail) to keep a little bit of chin-hair, I often wonder what level of dedication it takes to grow a proper beard. I think though, that it’s a pasttime best suited for the retired gentleman who can mentally devote himself to proper cultivation. Who knows, perhaps many years from now I’ll look like a castaway, and people will be writing a blog about seeing me in the street.

A few years ago, courtesy of being dragged on painfully lengthy runs by a mate of mine, I was a much more streamlined version of my current corpulant self. However, time (and more significantly a love of fast food and kebabs) have caused my physique to become well wrapped with a few layers of flab. The ultimate humilation has come by virtue of the internet, which informs me that I have a body mass index (BMI) that just slips into the “obese” category. Now, however, it is time to do something about it.

Luckily for someone who’s arse has gradually expanded to try and fill an entire sofa, there are plenty of dvds released in January that are full of minor (and I mean very minor celebrities) showing you how to exercise. Obviously I had more sense than to actually go along with these bits of crap, but I thought I’d share a little bit about the figures we should be aspiring to:

First, let us aim high and slowly sink to the depths. I present Danielle Lloyd. Readers may not be aware of who Ms Lloyd is. Truth be told, I’m not entirely sure what she did to become famous, but last year she was on the ill-fated Celebrity Big Brother, and was possibly the worst of the coven of small minded “racists” who were picking on Shilpa Shetty like vultures on a prize winning cow. Somehow, she managed to avoid the tabloid crucifixion, and unlike Jade Goody didn’t have an effigy burned in the streets of Bombay. When trying to understand why she would escape professionally unharmed, compared to professional pig-dog Jade Goodey, perhaps we should compare the 2.

As opposed to:

Now, I’m not suggesting that the papers would focus attention on someone who had said less offensive things, but was less photogenic… but they REALLY did!

Anyway, Lloyd’s dvd is “…all about having fun whilst giving your body a serious full upper and lower body and cardiovascular workout. Together with the help of personal trainer Steve Rich and celebrity fitness instructor Troy Dureh, this programme has been designed to be fun and energetic but still give you a complete workout. ” To clarify, that means that there is a personal trainer and a fitness instructor who are actually responsible for the workout, but they needed some jumped up bint in lycra to stick on the front cover to appeal to the sweaty Heat-reading huffers who will be deluded into thinking that the model used to look like an orca whale before she started doing a 30 minute aerobic workout once a week.

It’s worth noting that one chunky monkey who did release a dvd after a miraculous weight loss was none other than the moose pictured above… well, the real Jade Goodey at least. Unfortunately for her, she failed to mention the cosmetic surgery that also took place around the time of the reduction in her arse-girth, and inadvertently gave the impression it was all down to her workout dvd. What a mistake to make!

Next, we come to Natalie Cassidy, aka Sonia the frumpy huffer from Eastenders. Now I have been forced to watch Eastenders for the best part of 3 wonderful years with Binky the clown… I mean TS. During that time, I have had to watch this turgid mass of misery slouch round the screen like one of Jabba the Hutt’s sullen teenage nephews. However, it would seem that since leaving the show, Sonia has been unable to afford food, and has lost weight as a result. Unlike danielle Lloyd, at least this celebrity endorsement is made by someone who needed to lose the pounds (says the man inhaling Smarties as he types)

As we can see, she has had some benefits from this workout, and good for her. I hope she lives a longer and happier life as a result. It is quite odd though that she’s morphing into Sarah from Hollyoakes (look it up yourself… I really can’t be arsed finding more photos to titilate you!)

Not to be outdone by their mockney-cockney rivals, the producers of Manchester’s third best export (after Indie Music and mass-marketed MDMA) Coronation Street have pulled out the big guns. Yes, the improbably named Vicky Binns (Molly) has also shed 2 and a half stone as a result of following an easy to follow dvd routine.

This cover also shows the progress made, as if we couldn’t quite imagine that loosing 35 pounds of flab would be a good thing. I particularly like the fixed stare to the left of the picture, like proud citizens earnestly facing the flag in a Soviet propoganda film.

Anyway, that’s probably enough discussion of sweaty celebs in lycra, gyrating passionately on dvd to capture a few more perverts from Google. I took a different approach, on the basis that I am a man and couldn’t give the pope’s scrote about celebrities or aerobics. I spent a small fortune on joining the gym (and a proportionately larger fortune on getting TS a membership as well). Lost over 120 pounds in a single day… now that’s a result!

.

I am of course talking about Can Fat Teens Hunt, and the naked boobs I refeered to belonged to the chronically tubby lads taking part in the “weight loss” programme. That’s not to say that there weren’t teen girls on there as well, but given that they were so fat that they actually seemed to have a spare set of breasts hanging down their backs. Very fetching, ladies!

The idea for the show is that teenagers from the UK are too fat because of their crappy diets of pizza, burgers, chips, and congealed fat. Obviously what they need is to be transported to live with a tribe in the Malaysian jungle, to experience the hunter/gatherer lifestyle. They then experience killing their own food before eating it, and actually getting off their monstrously large arses once in a while.

The real enjoyment though comes not from seeing them develop as people and learning new skills (because they don’t manage either). Instead, the highlight is watching these buckets of blubber sweating from the exertion of lifting their flabby arms to pick up rice. In the course of one episode, we saw the highlights of one lad suffering heat exhaustion, while a girl was being treated in hospital for gall stones brought on by dehydration. The dippy orca doesn’t deserve sympathy. One of the reasons she had to be admitted to hospital was she hadn’t had a dump for 9 days!

That’s right, it seems that these teenage tubsters have accepted this offer of a trip around the world to lose weight, but expected proper flushing toilets. When faced with the prospect of having to park their lunch in a hole in the ground, they think it’s worth trying to hold it in for a few weeks. I can understand their reluctance, as I think indoor plumbing is one of the highlights of western civilisation. For that reason, I avoid situations where I may need to have to crap in a ditch. Camping is therefore not my idea of fun, and I would not live with a tribe in the middle of the Asian jungle. Perhaps that just illustrates the real problem with Britain’s youth: they are fucking stupid and will do anything to be on TV without actually thinking it through!

During last night’s show, the lads had the privilege of joining the tribal hunters on a search for frogs. Apparently they are a very good source of protein for relatively low calorific cost (not that these greasers would ever eat anything as unusual). However, despite being told which frogs are nutritious gems, and which ones have highly poisonous skin that will kill you if you touch them, the pasty pastie-lovers always seem to be about to pick up a big handful of death!
Personally I think the show would be better if they went for the full-on Lord of the Flies/Battle Royale experience and just dumped the fat bastards on an island. That way we could really enjoy their suffering, and they would have no choice but to adjust to the harsh necessities of survival… or die! Every now and then, drop a small case of sausage rolls in the middle of a snake-infested jungle, and arm them with weapons ranging from rubber mallets to crossbows. Last sphere standing gets free liposuction or a fatal amount of bacon!