The toy soldiers never let me down

The Last Post

2010-06-27T11:51:00.000-07:00

First things first - I'm not going to be updating this blog anymore.(1)

Regardless of how I came to be in this position, the point is, I've realised that this blog, much as I have loved writing it, is too unwieldy to be used for anything really.

It falls between too many stools; not nerdy enough to be a nerd blog, not anonymous enough to be confessional, too silly to be taken seriously, too serious in parts to be properly funny.

I'm going to leave it where it is - there's some writing I'm really proud of on here, but it's all too squodgy & intermingled to really make me want to keep on with it.

But: I still want to write, and occasionally cheer you all up, and show off models and things.

That's why I've set up some new blogs. I feel a blog is like a book; you can draw a line under one and say "It's finished now" for good or ill.

So, the Blog is dead. Long Live the Blogs.

The new blogs are: -

Armageddon Tourist Board: http://armageddontouristboard.blogspot.com

Hemingway & Orwell's Kitchen: http://hemingwayandorwellskitchen.blogspot.com

In the Meeja: http://meejadarling.blogspot.com

1.)Ahem.

Regular readers may notice it has been some time since my last post. Rather than give you the prosaic & dull list of why I haven't been writing, I've just decided to give you a list of things which might be true, and you can just decide which one you like the most.

So, I haven't been able to blog for the last six months because:

A.) I was incarcerated in a tiny windowless cell, chained to a radiator and beaten day and night by hooded men demanding to know where Don Eduardo Monteaz was.

B.) I started fighting crime under the Super-hero name "Dr.Miracle".

C.) I wrote a best selling Self-Help book entitled "Lie yourself thin", made a million dollars and toured the US. I arrived in Las Vegas in a $60,000 Cadillac; but, after only one night on the craps tables I left in a $180,000 Greyhound bus.

D.) I lived among the Chapultec Indians in the Argentine, and learned their ways, becoming an indolent, chubby yet powerful Shaman. Tlaloc is now my God.

E.) I travelled back in time to 1955, and spent my time writing the great american Novel. I am in fact JD Salinger. And Marty McFly. "Back to the Future" is, in fact autobiographical.

F.) I found a beautiful girl who I'm in a lovely relationship with, have secured my housing, and have a steady & regular job with a decent firm.

Most of you who know me well will be saying, "Well, it's definitely not F".

Everything changes - everything stays the same.

2009-12-18T14:17:00.000-08:00

Hiya all,

it's been a busy few weeks since my last couple of posts. Still, as the year draws to a close, I'm struck by how much has changed, and how much has stayed the same.

When I started this blog, almost a year ago, it was my stated intention to:

Get a job.
Get a nice place to live.
Get a lovely girlfriend (1).

I did get a couple of decent jobs - I've made documentaries, carried on jobbing at Auntie, written articles all over the place and I've been the managing editor of a magazine publisher, but as usual, a combination of bad luck and bad decisions have derailed that for the moment. While the CV and portfolio look considerably more exciting, I still don't have an actual job.

This is not unusual in the Media at the moment. In Scoop, in 1938, Evelyn Waugh said "Every year in Newspapers is a year of Crisis" - it, like most things Waugh wrote, seems like a comic exaggeration at first, and then slowly it dawns on you, as you understand the milieu better, that it is horribly true.

With 2,000 jobs vanishing from the BBC, and both London free papers going down the tubes, there are literally thousands of unemployed journalists chasing about four jobs. Newspapers - a funny business - one day you're writing them, the next day you're sleeping under them.

That said, I almost got a job at the Economist the other week, and have multiple inf0-digits in multiple delicious sticky media pies(2), but, in short, I have just as much of a job as when I started the blog... i.e. none. Well, almost none.

I've dusted off a collection of old business ideas, thinking vaguely of starting my own magazine; in short, I'd like to be able to sing I ain't gonna work on Maggie's farm no more, and mean it. Equally, the book I chose to write (Second Brightest Star) has ground forward in all this free time I've had.

Also, I'm involved in a couple of documentary projects, which I can't talk about, although excitingly one of these enabled me to score a Flak Vest on the BBC recently. My wardrobe now has the entertaining division of : White Tie, Black Tie, Highland Formal, Ceramic reinforced bulletproof vest. Willard Foxton, a wardrobe for every occasion.

Hopefully, one project or other will come to fruition, and I'll just be able to loaf around on a bed made entirely of Caviar and Diamonds.

Still, until then, I have just enough cash saved from the ahem, "good times", to keep my lovely, lovely house in Belgravia, for the time being, at least. It still amuses me that I live somewhere so charming, and yet am basically penniless. "Penniless yet Presentable" could be on my business card, like a 17th century gentleman who has spent his enitre inherited wealth on a fabulous selection of exquisite wigs.

Much like said 17th century gent, my social status is such that I'm regularly invited to big rah rah rah events. It is strange going to "I'm in the Meeja" type launches of things(3), where people will give me things like Mirrored business cards while we eat tiny canapes made of champagne and the hearts of rare snow leopards, with basically enough money for the tube fair home in my pocket.

Still, there's a ticking clock on the property, the social life, generally everything else. So, still have a house, but there's a sword of Damocles hanging over it the whole time.

As for a ladyfriend...well, I've tried. Back at the magazine, I literally astounded some of my staff with my willingness to go on grindingly bad date after grindingly bad date. Still, they were, in the most part entertaining. The "Cheese Festival" girl, The Fox news producer and the "Mind if I Tweet this date?" girl (4) are all right up there in the classic dates like "The Knife Girl" and "The Snake Collector".

I met quite a few lovely girls who just weren't interested in me, or lovely girls who live in far off places. I went on a date with a Baroness. A real live hot Baroness.(5) I dated ladies from 4 continents. I increased the all important figure of "How many?" by 5%. Still, nothing long term, nothing serious, nothing to compare with one of my close friends from university, who announced her engagement this evening.

So, in short:

No Job.
Have a nice place to live, until March.
No Girlfriend.

Well, one out of three isn't bad is it? Ahem.

Still, back when I started this blog, the one thing I said I could always rely on was my Toy soldiers, and they have excelled themselves this year.

Remember when I said I was going to the big gaming (tm) thing this year? Well, I actually did really well, coming 25th in the UK, was the top player using Mechanised Infantry and qualifying for the Grand Final, which is held in Nottingham on the 13-14th of March.

So, in short, I will be spending my thirtieth birthday playing with toy soldiers...fitting. This is probably not the ideal way of achieving any of those goals up above, but fuck it, there's more to life. Like playing games, having good friends, watching films and having adventures.

What follows below is a big report on exactly how I pulled off qualifying. Civilians, fear not, it's been edited for your consumption... still, if you don't want to hear me gush about little lead figures, best to stop reading now. In fact, here's a false ending.

Anyway, hope this finds you well,

Willard

Right, still sure you want to read this? Sure? You could watch a video about kittens instead?

To take a leaf from the book of the excellent Mr.Ben Brooks -

health warning

Those with a serious aversion to geekery of a toy-soldierish nature should not read any further - click here to watch video footage of a kitten fighting with an electric toothbrush instead. Or, alternatively, if not a girl from the 1950s, click here for a trailer for what may be the finest movie ever made (6).

Right, just us nerds left, or maybe the occasional curious civilian. Debaters, please note, I missed the Oxford IV for this, and regret NOTHING.

Preparation

Well, I'm assuming you've read my earlier post about the army I've been playing for ages - the one which relies on mechanised infantry, and about how that had (apparently) become flavour of the month, and how that made me unsure of using it.

I had a Grand Plan, which involved me painting up an all new army, probably consisting entirely of wave after wave of teenage conscripts riding quasi-phallic underground drilling machines, taken in sufficient numbers I could conceivably bury the enemy under their corpses, or alternatively an exceedingly small high tech army consisting of elite Buck Rodgers style rocket men, armed with laser pistols, riding in big shiny gunships.

Sadly, this went rapidly out the window as I realised that running a magazine AND trying to meet ladies devoured all my time, and then when i lost my job, I realised I need to spend money on things that weren't model soldiers. Things like rent and bills. You know, unimportant shit like that.

So, I feel back on the old army, and decided to stay true to the way I'd used it for ages, with a few new school tweaks. Essentially, it consisted of 7 armoured personnel carriers (little tanks), 55 men riding in the little tanks and 3 main battle tanks (big tanks). The 55 men riding in the tanks were armed with a mix of rifles, flamethrowers and light anti-tank guns - basically, nothing excitingly sci-fi. The tanks were armed with cannons and machine guns, with the occasional flamethrower mixed in. Nothing excitingly sci-fi.

Are you getting a theme here? I even resisted the temptation to make my men veterans, which opinion on the internet maintained I was a fool to not do. You see, in sci-fi heroic wargaming, being in lots of wars doesn't make you a wreck of a man, unable to attend a fireworks display without screaming "THE DRUMS!!! THE DRUMS!!! THEY NEVER STOP!!!!" and fleeing in panic, they make you a super cool badass. Maybe with a couple disfiguring scars, but tough as iron nails, and a bit homoerotic.

Normal Veteran vs. Sci-Fi Veteran

I briefly considered selling out, and cramming my army with all the trimmings - veterans armed with telekinetic mountain blitzers, choirs of psychic apocalypses, nuclear missiles, poison gas - even midgets with Sniper rifles. I could have put in enough Weapons of Mass destruction to make Hans Blix weep, but instead I settled on rifles, machine guns, flame throwers and artillery shells.(7)

Why? Well, it's just more cool that way. I want to use an army with normal soldiers and cool tanks. I can live without all the silliness, and it's more fun to smash ludicrous sci-fi silliness using nothing you couldn't buy in the average Alabama branch of Wal-Mart.

Game one: -

I rock up to Nottingham, getting on a train out of London at the crack of dawn. I sit there, with my stomach grumbling, worrying, not about all kinds of real life problems (e.g. house, job, girlfriend, whether Chuck Norris really "plays his roles for real"), but worrying about thinks like "what if I run into that random army with the evil mindcontrolling winged tentacle beasts?" and then, being one of the most clumsy people in the world, spilling coffee all over my trousers.

I get to Nottingham, and get a taxi to GW HQ, where the tournament is held. One thing that amazes me about GW (the company who make the bulk of the world's toy soldiers) is that they are such a big deal economically in Nottingham, that all Taxi drivers know how to get to their Headquarters. Now, the HQ looks, lets face it, a little bit fascist. If you ever want to go there, ask a Nottingham taxi driver to take you to "The Reichstag".

All Toy companies would look like this if the Nazis had won the war.

I get there, and start chatting to old friends I haven't seen for a couple of years, including one very sweet couple who met and subsequently married after meeting at a gaming tournament. They're lovely, honestly.

Anyway, first game, I'm playing against a charming Italian. Now, Italians have a bad reputation on the Warhammer gaming scene. There were a bunch of Italians a few years ago who were all unbelievably ruthless cheats. Fiends. So, I was a little worried.

I needn't have been - he was a lovely guy using good, balanced army consisting entirely of giant green alien savages with a taste for human flesh. He had a couple of huge swarms of these bastards on foot, a bunch of mobs of them in ramshackle trucks, led by the biggest, greenest savage of all. This is the Green overlord who had made his name by devastating my army's home planet.

It's basically like playing a WW2 wargame and the other bloke picking Hitler to lead his army. Of course, this is Sci-fi Hitler, so he's about twenty feet tall, and has huge crushing hydraulic claws instead of hands. Here's a picture for scale.

Look at the size of the claw! He's clearly compensating for something.

It was very close - the Green alien horde was pretty massive, but I had lots, and lots, and lots of machine guns, tank cannons and flamethrowers. Now, these Aliens are pretty rough if they can get to you, but their usual response when shot with a heavy machine gun is to burst like over-ripe fruit hit with a mallet. The main answer they have to being shot at is to hope you run out of bullets before they run out of scum.

I narrowly lost on points (I lost 67% of my army, he lost 66% of his), but won a moral victory by killing Alien Hitler - I crushed his bodyguard under tanks, torched him with a few flame throwers, then surrounded him with 40 men and then had them all empty assault rifles into him, until I was sure he was dead.

Game Two -

I was playing against another nice guy, and he had an army similar to mine - even from the same fictional planet as mine - except all of his men were Veterans. Tragically, none of them seemed to be in wheelchairs or suffering from traumatic war neuroses. Presumably I'd failed to observe a minutes silence or something.

Now, what's the difference between veterans and regular infantry? Well, aside from the cosmetic scars and homoeroticism, they are much better at hitting things when they shoot, have a much better set of options for guns, and carry a bewildering array of special purpose grenades, including unpleasant and highly dangerous nuclear anti-tank grenades.

On the other hand, they do cost more. Lots more. He got seven light tanks full of veterans, I got seven light tanks full of regulars, plus three heavy tanks. Amusingly, while my army is led by a quasi-nameless female Colonel, his army was led by the heroic de-facto ruler of my army's planet - so, I'd gone from effectively fighting Hitler to effectively fighting Churchill (8).

We decided that the game was clearly a training exercise, and christ, we rolled dice like we were firing blanks. I think for the first twenty minutes, nothing really happened, as he drove at me with high speed, and all my guns missed completely. Then, just outside of nuke range, my guys managed to smash most of their tanks, and then cleaned up the remaining infantry with flamethrowers. Hopefully those flamers fire blanks.

At the end of the game, I'd killed 95% of his army, and had lost a couple of tanks - but we still drew, as the specific variant game we were playing required me to actually capture an objective in his half. So, I smashed his attack on me, but got all my tanks stuck in ruins and tank traps and things trying to take his. I was a bit unlucky to only take a draw out of this, but it was a cool game, so I didn't mind.

Oh, and the game ended with my Colonel pointing her pistol at "Churchill's" head, and the other player raising his hands and saying "Pretty impressive - you'll do", which was a highly memorable and fun conclusion to a game.

Game Three -

I was slightly horrified in this game. The other player put his army on the table, and it was...well, it was pretty ridiculous. He had two giant horrible Lovecraftian winged tentacle monsters with mind control powers, 30 or so immortal superhuman killing machines in powered armour, armed with plague weapons, and several giant Terminator 2 style things that could turn into practically any gun they wanted, and a couple of tanks firing nuclear demolition shells.

This army, is to say the least, ridiculously badass. Also, it's totally lacking in any kind of coherent theme, just a collection of models that have one thing in common - they are really mean. Oh, and to make it worse, they attacked at night.

Still, I won this game in the most ridiculous way. You see, I am canny enough to have equipped all my tanks with searchlights. Seriously.

He went first, moved everything closer, failed to see anything. He packed his superhuman plague killers in tight, to get them through a narrow ravine - and of course, I won't be able to see them, there are all these complex rules about locating things at night. They're packed so tight even one tank round could be catastrophic, but I won't be able to see them, right?

My turn, I realise...night fighting...Oh cool, every tank has a searchlight. So, I start lighting up them up with light tank searchlights. CLICK WHUM CLICK WHUM. Three light tanks in, I pick them up. They freeze. BOOM BOOM THWACKOOOM go the main tank guns. Ahem, problem largely solved.

The tentacle monsters advance, into a hail of heavy machine gun fire. Turns out, no matter how many tentacles and eyes you have, 21 machine guns firing 600 rounds per minute will ruin your day. His tanks got wrecked by my tanks.

All in all, I was pleased to so convincingly win against one of "those" armies. To be fair, it's a bit rubbish vs. my army, as my squads aren't really worth mind controlling, and I have enough guns to kill everything he has three times over. I killed everything but one of his tanks, and that had the tracks wrecked so it couldn't move, and I lost five men. Not bad.

Game Four -

This was on the second day. I'd been very kindly allowed to crash in James Torrance's bed, doubtless a dream of any number of nubile young lady debaters. Sadly, he wasn't there at the time, and I was so exhausted I managed to sleep through his housemates' fairly raucous party.

Superhuman, power armoured army, with lots of very quick rocket pack equipped guys balanced by lots of men wearing so much armour they can hardly move. And before breakfast too!

It wasn't a huge problem. I sat there drinking a pint of cranberry juice and eating croissants, like a first world war general. The rocket pack men arrived first, got gunned down, then the very slow heavily armoured suits arrived, and inches before crushing everything I had with their mighty fists, I ambushed them with 12 Flamethrowers, and they obligingly melted.

This only left the two heroes to kill, and they did lead me a merry dance, until eventually they succumbed to sustained machine-gunning. Ha.

Game Five -

A really tough game.

He was basically playing the aliens from alien.

He had 5 Giant Aliens covered in tubes that piss acid everywhere like garden sprinklers full of Toxic custard, an Alien Queen thing bastard with huge spikes replacing all its vital organs, and then far too many little Alien nasties with far too many arms.

Fortunately, I was there to wipe them out, not to study, not to bring back samples. There was a great deal of driving tanks away from roaring monsters, skidding round them, and unloading men to isolate and kill one giant thing at a time.

Occasionally, monsters would catch tanks and eat them, and men would be reduced to greasy stains by acid custard piss. Equally, the little aliens died almost instantly when exposed to burning petrol or speeding lead, and sooner or later, even the big ones dropped when you blew so many holes in them you could use them for fishing nets.

By the end of the game, I'd lost about half my men and tanks, but every alien was dead.

Game Six -

I was up against the Italian player round one - you remember, the one who had Alien Hitler. By this point I was at the top of the 3 wins, 1 loss 1 draw bracket, while my opponent was on 3 wins, 2 draws. Both of us felt we needed a draw to qualify for the final.

Anyway, we both played really, really cagey. I held everything in reserve, as did he, and our units arrived in dribs and drabs - except for a band of savages armed with giant long range autocannons, which he deployed at the top of a huge building, where they could hit anything.

The one really interesting move in the game was when he spun his buggies and ramshackle trucks all the way over to my side of the board, so they could hide behind a building, and still have a chance to get me. I realised he was very close to my board edge...and, in that variant of the game, your reserves can come on from anywhere on your table edge....hmmm.

I brought on two of my main battle tanks, and shouted "GIVE ME RAMMING SPEED!" This led to seventy ton tanks hitting the equivalent of second hand Fiat Unos at a combined speed of about 100mph. Needless to say, there was a great deal of crushing. I also managed to squash Hitler's personal vehicle, meaning he had to get out and run across the open ground being liberally hosed with .50 calibre rounds as he went.

He sent some scum forward, which died, as it had six feet (about half a mile to scale) of open ground to cover.Other than that, I lost the Tanks on the daring commando ramming raid eventually, but not before they caused an amusing amount of havoc. Hitler managed to escape this time, but only just. All his bodyguards died, I wounded him twice, and I smashed his car.

The game ended on turn 5, in a draw. My silly risky tank rampage earned me lots of points for the cost of two tanks, and dominated the course of the game, as the aliens on foot struggled to catch them at speed, let alone kill them. We probably could have played an extra turn, but my opponent looked at his watch with 20 minutes to go and said "I don't think we have time for another turn. It's a draw now. Shall we call it a draw?"

Needing only a draw to qualify, I took the Arsene Wenger route, and gladly accepted qualification in lieu of glory. Had I won that game ( and I'd have had a fair shout at it) I'd have been 7th in the UK.

7th in the UK at Toy Soldiers! What woman could resist that:)

Anyway,

hope this has been an interesting read!

I'm off to the Final in March, seeing if I can get either of the grand plan armies painted by then.

Willard

1.) Well, actually, I think the desire was to "get a girlfriend", but non-lovely girlfriends are a bad idea. I have proof.

2.) Willard Foxton; self-facilitating media node. I wrote that sentence with (almost) no irony, went back to that sentence on the re-draft reading and made it slightly more ridiculous...

3.) In theory, I'm there to "network", but free food and booze is a powerful incentive to turn up to these shindigs.

4.) By the way, I'm on "the Twitter" now, as all self respecting meeja people are - although as far as I am concerned, it's a bit wank, has peaked, and is essentially the 21st century analogue of the Hula-hoop - a brief craze that will evaporate sooner or later.

This view was confirmed when I found my 70-year old mother had beaten me to it. Still, if you want to randomly tune into my thoughts, you can follow me here...

5.)Not Margaret Thatcher, before you ask.

6.)I love that the trailer attempts to warn you, "the roles he plays, he plays for real." The implication being that for this movie Chuck Norris, in classical method acting tradition, actually killed everybody who disobeyed him, kidnapped an old man, and then enthusiastically raped a Chinese woman. Hollywood eh?

7.) I felt resolution 1441 would be ineffective if I had no WMDs. Ha, topical joke for 2003.

8.) The fellow to the left of Alien Hitler is Space Churchill. In space, world leaders fight. Makes sense. I reckon Gordon Brown could take Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Or, at least I'd pay to watch them fight. With hydraulic claws. Snip Snip Klang, Mr.Speaker.

More Meta-Blogging

2009-12-08T08:59:00.000-08:00

Hmmm, Meta-blogging.

In Marvel comics, meta-humans are people with super-powers(1). Meta-Blogging sounds like I'm much more powerful than the ordinary bloggers.

Sadly, this isn't the case.

Not only do I fail to update this blog so regularly it all but hibernates at times, but also, it confuses people, who assume that it is a mission statement about my Journalistic ethics, rather than a string of gags for my friends.

This earns bold text because I couldn't quite believe people would genuinely judge me by any of the posts on here, as they are mostly filled with what are quite clearly jokes. I have recently had comments made on here thrown in my face by members of the reptile press, who quoted a post about me designing Zeppelins as unvarnished fact.

Now, partly this is down to me bothering to read the comments at the bottom of articles I've written. In case you've never read the (excellent) Speak your Branes blog, it is a collection of articles based on quoting the stupidest things said on the BBC website. It's worth five minutes of your time; no comment left by casual newspaper readers ever is.

Now, I realise that in this age of web 2.0 and so on, we should all care about what every "citizen journalist" has to say.

This is total bollocks.

I'm making it a rule to NEVER read the comments at the bottom of articles I've professionally published. Now, of course, having a modest amount of fame for being involved in the Madoff affair, I'd say about 25-30% of any comments on my articles are basic lunatic anti-semitism.

Apparently, this comes largely from the American Nazi movement, specifically the website Stormfront, who apparently, have identified me one of the Liberal Media's most dangerous Jews (2).

About 60% of the rest come from people who spell so badly I can only assume they are writing their comment on a submarine in a fatal death dive, in the dark, while being savaged by a left-wing octopus (3) or reveal themselves to be fools in other crucial ways, like leading off a sentence with "As I said while voting Bush in '04..."

Admittedly, some of the other 10-15% are sensible and interesting, but some are so infuriating they will eat up literally days of your time with depression and rage at the kinds of things you are accused of. Yes, boo hoo, journalists have feelings too. It is not nice to accuse them of all kinds of awful things, or phone them to tell them your opinion on those things.(4)

So, yes, in short, web 2.0 - great, and simultaneously not so great. In the spirit of nightmares like this, and never having to write things like :-

I would not expect material from my stand-up routines to be quoted as truth or verbatim statements of intent. The same is true of my blog. While I'm quite happy to defend myself in an open and reasonable way from all other accusations, I do think this one in particular is deeply unfounded and borderline offensive.

Considering the title of the Blog Post you refer to is "Zeppelin Designer seeks real job", where I talk about my ambition to become the UK's leading amateur zeppelin designer,and it contains a fake business card where I claim to also be a bongo player, I would say, yes, the reasonable man on the Clapham Omnibus might not take this as a mission statement about my Journalistic Ethics.

..my plan is to start a second blog! A serious (well more serious) blog, and relegate this one to talking about toy soldiers and relationships and only very, very occasionally being about serious stuff. And to have a disclaimer on this one saying "DO NOT TAKE THIS SERIOUSLY - EVEN IF YOU ARE A REPRESSED SAD CASE WITH AN AXE TO GRIND"(5).

I have no proof this man is a repressed sad case, even though he is grinding an axe. Of course, maybe I'm just saying that. It never pays to offend men wielding axes, I suppose...

Oh, for the record, I actually have a fairly rigid code of journalistic ethics. That's why I, you know, have actually on occasion (three times now) (6) been fired for doing the right thing - because I have principles. Wow, principles AND a sense of humour? I know you're asking, how is he still single?

Anyway, looking forward to the new blog, and this one will be updated several times in the near future with stuff about model soldiers and pretty girls. I promise!

Willard

PS: - Any suggestions for the name of the new serious politics/current affairs blog?

1.)Unless they're Mutants, who you should hate and fear like the bigot you are. Yes, I realise it makes no sense. Professor X - hate and fear, Spiderman - we love him. One is part spider, the other a harmless bald cripple who has special powers to make you like him.

I'm sure any reasonable survey would find people are more likely to hate human-spider hybrids than cripples. Just saying. I think JJ Jameson is possibly the only person in the Marvel universe who is sane as he hates them both.

2.) Part of me wishes this was true in any sense. I'm not even properly Jewish, for god's sake. Still, you can't really criticise Illinois Nazis for being wrong only on minor points of fact, can you?

3.) I can tell it's a left wing octopus by the way it BOLDFACES IN BLOCK LETTERS or puts in Funny Clashing Colours or adds 1,000,000 exclamation points to otherwise sensible words like "Cameron", "Tory" or "Inheritance tax".

4.) For the record, it's also irresponsible for small Music Magazines to give out your contact number, even if the person phoning claims to want to offer you freelance work.

5.) Unless you're called Dan Bradley or Matt Smith:)

6.) Sadly I cannot talk of these things in public, as I am barred by contract about talking about one, the official secrets act from talking about another one, have talked about the one that got me lashes in detail before.

To tell the stories very briefly - Contractually barred from talking about being asked to conceal self-harm, can't talk about being fired from a government job for having opposed Rendition, and oh, yeah, I told you about my lashes in the UAE:) If you want more, ask me in person one day:)

Life after Warcraft

2009-10-28T21:02:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone,

in one of my regular fits of navel-gazing, I decided to re-read the blog. My it's been an eventful few months, hasn't it? Back when I started this blog, I predicted I would probably either get bored or delete it in a panic in case a pretty girl found out I was into model soldiers. Well, I'm going to push that boundary today, by revealing new hidden depths to my nerd-core.

Part of the reason I'm having this fit of looking down the retrospectoscope is because amusingly, in many ways, I am back where I was when I started the blog. I have no job, no girlfriend, and my house is on a ticking clock before I lose it. Living in house you know you may lose in sixty days is almost the same as being homeless and living with my mum - you can't do anything permanent, you don't feel like leaving your stamp on anything because you know it might all end very soon. Balls. I'd even moved in lots of my books too.

Sigh. I'm even re-reading the Media Guardian.

Now, to me, the Media Guardian is a publication which is like a much loved but deeply unreliable friend. You know, the kind of friend who is always, always there for you when you need to make a phone call to talk about why your life is "over (sniffle), because she's left me (sob sob)" but when you invite them to parties, they then end up getting drunk, screaming rude words at respectable lawyer friends and spectacularly murdering all of your Neighbour's deeply expensive Koi carp (1).

The Media Guardian is the place where I think i have found practically every deeply unstable but exciting job I have ever done (2). It simultaneously gives me hope, sets me on a course for success, but usually conceals some crucial flaw which eventually dooms me to, oooh, i'll give you the list: -

Working for a Lunatic or a Criminal. Or often, a lunatic criminal.
Working for a company that is choking to a slow death just as I arrive.
Working in a warzone/fascist state.

Now, a close friend has argued that a journalist/PR with a masters degree in international criminal justice is always going to be in one of these situations, because Publishing and PR are dying industries, so only criminals or lunatics operate publishers or PR companies, and the masters in International Criminal Justice means I will always pull the assignments where I am either in a warzone looking for a war criminal, or in a fascist state working with the war criminal on his legal defence. Or, as it turned out, taking photos of his Giant evil monuments. (3)

Well, I'm trying to break the cycle (ish). I have a job interview with a very respectable Non-governmental organisation this week, to be their director of PR. This seems like an excellent opportunity to do something stable, funded and not at all odd. Oh, I know once I get there I will discover they have a pit of acid spitting snakes in the basement or something, but it seems like the sensible move. Equally, while that interview came from a headhunter (4), the Media Guardian has reliably coughed up a job hunting war criminals with the ICC(5), and i'm off to that interview on Friday.

Still, for now, life is at a still and sedentary pace. So i've read highbrow literary books, like Vanity Fair, Wolf Hall and Blood Pact (6), and done other highbrow things that any 18th century Romantic poet would be proud of, like wrote short stories (7), started a new novel (8) and painted (9). I've also applied for a shitload of jobs, but found that the horror of yet another application form is alleviated by having decent TV on in the background (10).

I've also been writing freelance, messing around on facebook, having long involved conversations with someone I'll call Mme. D'Afrique. For those of you who have been following this for a while, that's a different woman in Africa, aside from the baroness.

One thing I haven't done is turn on the computer and play World of Warcraft.Why? Well, thereby hangs a tale...

Willard and the World of Warcraft

Now, I wasn't in to World of Warcraft from "the beginning".

I remember talking to my good friends Pat, Bob and Dan, who were excited about the game's release. They showed me the trailer. It was pretty FMV, and those people in the gospel choir seemed to like it... but it didn't really make me stop and go "Wow!". I didn't realise I was looking at something that would take up huge amounts of my time, give me tremendous amounts of pleasure, but also be something I would regret getting involved in, in some ways. Do you ever think back to the first time you met someone you later grew to love? Well, thinking back, it feels a little like that.

At first, when I saw the devotion WoW was breeding in them, it sort of worried me. I'd never seen anyone play a computer game with that sort of intensity before. Just to gauge that level of intensity in gamers that shocked me, I'd seen people lose their jobs because they got literally addicted to a GW game called Blood Bowl. It was much, much worse than that. I distinctly recall Pat turning down a trip to the pub because his "guild" were going to kill a dragon that night. I remember Smithy (my long suffering former housemate, Er ist keine Nazi) and I thinking that was weird.

Why would anyone want to pass up a night talking about girls who we weren't going to sleep with in a dingy pub called The Artichoke?(11) To stay at home and kill a computer Dragon? Oh, we'd all played computer games religiously - about the same time, my particular method of "studying for my masters" consisted of staying up all weekend playing either Fable or Knights of the Old Republic, and then asking Smithy for a Cornetto from the shop on Monday morning. But I never missed an evening out as a result of that. What was going on?

Every week, at our regular roleplaying sessions, a new vernacular developed. We're all familiar with it now, but at the time "lol", "kek", "omg" and so on were like a strange language. Before any game could start, there was a thirty minute discussion on the latest "patch", and a frequent diversion into youtube videos inspired by WoW. Pat, previously the clean cut type who was pretty switched on, started to miss classes, then days, then whole weeks of university. Dan, never the most stable and well organised individual, started to look even less presentable than normal, his unique all skunk and sainsbury's basics noodle diet making him lose weight at a prodigious rate.He really should market that - it's certainly more efficient than Atkins.

Still, despite the impact it was having on my friends, it was intriguing. I was interested to see why this game was so good it was worth putting off all other things. I got involve reasonably early, in august 2005 - about patch 1.6, for the real nerds out there. Dan "The Man" Vallely, got me involved. He came round, installed the game, and insisted I play on a "PvE" server, which he had just moved to, away from the server him, Pat and Fuzz were on. He was, like, totally going to play on that server from now on.

The choice of server in WoW is a somewhat vexed question. There are two sides in the game - the alliance, who are unquestionably the good guys and the horde, who are all baby-eating deviant devil worshipping fascists. At the time, you weren't allowed to have alliance AND horde characters. So, you had to pick. Good or Evil. Bob, being the kind of man who incinerates harmless fish for giggles, had opted for Horde, and thus played on a different server to Pat and Dan.

And now Dan was moving server. You see, the server that Pat was on was a "PvP" server, meaning that at any time while harmlessly picking flowers in the shire, a giant Orc played by some 14 year old norwegian listening to Darkthrone or Man O'War (11) could turn up and slay you to pieces. Without you having any chance to hurt him at all, because you're armed with a rusted blunderbuss to keep away inquisitive crows, and he is armed with a telekinetic mountain blitzer and wearing approximately three tiger tanks worth of armour. And, if he was a particular type of 14 year old, he would stay there, killing you over and over again. Until you or he got bored.

Or, alternatively, until you get bored, load your ludicrous top level character, and come down and reduce him to a greasy stain with a spell that makes all of his bones turn into white phosphorous. Of course, if you don't HAVE a top level character, your only option is to turn the machine off and come back hours later. And, sometimes, he will still be there. Waiting. Bob, in particular took a delight in doing this, and would keep a brain eating zombie character hidden at the bottom of a swamp in a low level area, so when the mood took him, he could emerge and begin wreaking bloody misogynistic havoc for a few hours, like an electronic Jack the Ripper.

You can always spot someone from a PVP server in wow. It's the way that if you tell them you're from the opposite faction, they will look at you with a contemptuous look normally only given by Holocaust survivors to germans. They know that maybe it wasn't you who inflicted hours of pain on them, but it was someone just like you - and that if you met them in game, they'd kill you soon as look at you.

Now, that PVP lark sounds like a bit of a nightmare to me, as I'm very vulnerable to feelings of unreasoning hatred, and years of working at games workshop had left me with an unusually keen understanding of the evil lengths to which teenage boys will sink. Also, humans and the other traditionally "nice" fantasy races, like cute midgets, beardy midgets and pointy eared emo types have always appealed to me more than dark, gothic monsters, so I decided to play Alliance, with Dan, on a PvE server, called Shadowsong.

There are hundreds of servers, all with silly names. Pat, as I recall was on Daggerspine (aka "Laggerspine" because of its poor connection). Bob was unlucky enough to be on a server called Bloodscalp, which had been unofficially adopted as the national server of Hungary, so when Bob tried to get groups he would be met with a tide of "magát üzemanyag tartály?"(13). Now, there is a cynical part of me which thinks that Blizzard, the creators of WoW, actually want real life friends to end up on different servers. It makes you make friends outside of the bubble of people you know in the real world.

Now, within weeks of me starting WoW, Dan had quit - not quit wow (of course), but he'd quit to go and try playing horde and "like, totally level a shaman, dude". So, I was on my own. In a big bad scary world full of dragons and monsters. Not that I was seeing any of those big dragons or monsters. You see, WoW is fundamentally a team game. Solo, you will often be tortured and eaten by scavenging pygmy fishmen - just like you would be in real life if they came for you with their tiny stone spears and frustrating nets. This is somewhat difficult to take, the first few times it happens. You're playing a computer game. You're the hero, right?

No. You are one small part of a much greater whole. If you want to save the kingdom from the evil pirates, you can't sit in the BBC newsroom and write about it, or go in single handed and kill them all. If you try to take those pirates on by yourself, their chained drugged slave miners will beat you to death before you get within 100 yards of a single blouse wearing, parrot loving sea dog. You need at least four friends to come with you. Oh, and none of those friends can be shit.

Because if they are shit, then they are unquestionably more of a liability than an asset. Now, when you're fighting evil pirates, then 5 of you may do. But if you're fighting a giant god made of lava, or a really big dragon masquerading as the Queen, or a giant tentacle monster which shoots lasers from it's million sanity blasting eyes, then you need 40 people. And generally, while your actual contribution to the fight drops off in a 40 man fight, the potential for one smacktard to ruin everything remains roughly the same.

So, you not only need to find friends, you need to find lots of friends. And you need to be bloody good at the game as well, otherwise you will never get invited back. There are few social faux pas greater than "wiping a raid" i.e. getting everyone killed through your actions. It is roughly equivalent to being invited to a swanky dinner party, turning up massively under-dressed (e.g. wearing green instead of purple), then somehow puking all over every morsel of food, just as it's served.

So, I started to develop friends on WoW. People I'd never met before, people who I may have had no more in common with than a desire to kill Orcs and have epics drop. Oh, that's the other reason you bother to, say, kill the evil pirates. You see, as in any good fantasy world, the pirate chief will have a magic sword, which you can take from him when he dies. You can use this to show off how hard you are, to impress the girls (13), and also, it helps to stab it into other powerful evil people, so they drop their magic swords, which you can take, and so the cycle repeats itself. The best kind of magic items are "epic quality", hence the term "epics" and "epic fail", which you may have heard bandied about.

Of course, if you're there for the magic sword, instead of the magic sword, he happens to be carrying his magic trousers, which are great for your sneaky friend, but sigh, you're going to have to come back tomorrow. Or, alternatively, when the magic sword drops, one of your other friends wants it, and you have to have an argument over who gets it. Now, when you can have 40 people squabbling over one piece of loot, you can understand why you need to be playing with people you like.

The other thing about WoW is it has bizarre, unfathomable depths. I'll give you a quick example - like most games, WoW has little side elements, to keep you interested, but WoW's side elements have a truly mad, legendary quality to them. For example, fishing.

If you want your wow character to be able to fish, it's easy. You just buy a fishing rod for a couple of coppers, and off you go. However, later on fishing starts to become mental. To learn how to catch really valuable fish, at one point you have to find a legendary magic lost fisherman, and on his orders travel literally all around the world, catching rare fish in four different dangerous rivers - and travelling in WoW take a long, long time. There are four continents, and to ride on the fastest horse from one end of a continent to another takes an hour. And that's assuming nothing eats you or kills and robs you on the way. So, you do about four hours of real-time travelling so you can learn how to catch better fish. Nothing else. Just a chance to be bit better at fishing. It's like driving to Newcastle to buy a copy of the Media Guardian.

If you think that sounds bad, then pretty much the pinnacle of fishing is a point you get to where you find out that there is a lake on a plateau in which live magical, immensely valuable crayfish. The only problem being that this plateau is above a city of evil devil worshipping birdmen, and that their evil god lives on this plateau. Oh, and to even get up there you need to buy a super-fast flying mount, like a Griffon or a Wyvern, which sets you back an amount of money that in the real world will cost you about £50 to buy - about 5,000 gold pieces. To give civilians an idea of how much time 5,000 gold pieces takes to make, it will require you to loot the treasure of the aforementioned pirate king around 3,000 times to buy that griffon.

It is the Maserati gran turismo of magic flying things. And you need it to get up to the top of the plateau. And, once you're there, you will find that the fucking crayfish can only be fished up by someone with the highest possible level of fishing skill, wearing a magic hat that makes you better at fishing, a magic pair of boots that makes you better at fishing, having found a grand master enchanter to enchant your gloves so they make you better at fishing, having equally found a grand master engineer to build you an aquadynamic fish attractor to put on your fishing rod. Oh, and you will need a fishing line made of pure eternium.A metal which can only be mined at the top of a Volcano where the king of the Dragons lives.

Anyway, once you've done all that, you can start fishing for crayfish, although you will occasionally be interrupted and murdered by evil birdmen and their evil god. And, maybe alliance/horde players. BUT, the reason you're doing this is because one time in 100 catches of crayfish, you will catch a magical wish granting crayfish. Amazing. That would take...I don't know how long. A long time.

But you see the level of dedication people put in? I don't know if there's another game that has such rewarding time-sinks. Part of, in fact, most of, the reward is that when you pull out your magic crayfish in the middle of a city, everyone in the know who sees goes "Holy shit, that guy has the magic wish granting crayfish". And they are impressed. So, it's not just an accomplishment - it's an accomplishment that your peers can see.

And, to an extent that is the appeal of the game. Not only do you get to meet people from all over the place, who you'd never ever have met without the game, but you get to fight against that mediocrity you felt at the beginning of the game. You may be only a part of the wider whole - but if you work hard enough, are good enough, are sociable enough to be close to a group of really good players, you can show off just how awesome you are. You're wielding the magic sword that only comes from the hardest monster in the game, or you have the trinket that shows you killed the supreme necromancer. Which I have, by the way. Ha ha.

My experience of WoW really came into it's own in the first expansion for the game. Blizzard released two new races and allowed players to play types of characters which had previously been limited to one side or the other. I created a new character, and decided to play very, very hardcore. My new character was called Strawberry, and damn, I loved that character.

Strawberry, the only set of pixels I have ever loved.

I was one of the first people on my "side" to get that kind of character to a high level, so I was always the person with the new tricks, the different things to do, the ability that surprised people. One of the best of these tricks was an ability which let me come back from the dead, on command. Useful for inspiring religions,if nothing else. After a couple of false starts, I managed to find a group of 25 people who were good fun, enjoyed listening to rambling stories over the radio you use to speak to each other, all of (ok, most of) whom were very good at the game.

We had a worked hard, and in civilian terms, beat every single level of the game,. That's harder than you might think. To put it in perspective, Blizzard estimated that around 1% of the player base had completed the "last" level of the game.

My guild kill the biggest, hardest monster in the game (at the time). I think the sharp-eyed in this picture will note I am the first to cheer it's demise:)

That's one area in which computer games are unlike any other type of media. It's not like when you're reading a novel, you get to chapter three, and there's a test which says "are you sure you're getting the complex interplay of character, setting and tone? If not, go back to chapter one and start again". Christ, in Wow it's even worse - imagine being in a book group where you can't move on until all 25 people get Remembrance of things Past.

But, that said, we did have a great time doing it. It still brings a smile to my face to think of the precious first kills of particularly hard bosses, especially Illidan, Archimonde and Kil'Jaden (15). It's a similar memory of the pleasure I've had on seeing a magazine or newspaper come off the presses with a story I've written in it, a similar memory to hearing your name announced in the break of a debate competition.

It wasn't always good. Occasionally, we'd spend literally weeks dying time after time while some people got their act together (15). But most of the time, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Now, I was all keyed up for the release of the new version of WoW this year. But, a bunch of real life problems - problems readers of this blog are familiar with - stopped me really getting into it. When I came back, the old gang had split up - most had quit altogether, or had joined other guilds. Even though the people were there, the critical mass of old friends that had kept me coming back in the slow times wasn't there.

So, I cut my losses, and at Bob's prompting, moved Strawberry to a new server, where a bunch of real life friends were playing. But, I'm sorry to say, the group of people they are with are all a bit shit at playing - charming, but total liabilities. Without those regular shots of excitement of first kills, of seeing new things, of seeing things most people hadn't seen, WoW got a bit stale.

So, I haven't played it much. Oh, sure, Strawberry is the top level, with all epic gear, but it's just not the same any more. It feels hollow. Empty. The reasons I found it fulfilling - the people - just aren't there any more.

Looking back on my experience of WoW now, from a distance of 4 years, it seems like I'm remembering a good but ultimately dysfunctional love affair - in the sense that the emotions are similar. Ridiculous perhaps, comparing the two, but I can't help but feel that my time in wow was sometimes frustrating, sometimes infuriating, but largely fun - although, viewed objectively, perhaps a waste of time in the actual sense.

Still, that could be said of every single career decision I've ever made, and like every career decision I've ever made, it has left me with a crop of excellent friends. So, Seraph, Kenjy, Amber, Geeves, Arthran, Lovelorn, Firien, Harry, Dreycor, Dunmail, Libidor, Schwick, Blaadjes(16) - it was fun, wasn't it?

Enlightening, for some, I hope. A good walk down memory lane for others.

Willard

1.) That's right, I have the same relationship I have with the Media Guardian I have with my tattooed, 6ft, ex-housemate, Mr.Bobbins.

2.) i.e. all of the jobs I have ever done. Even if I wasn't applying for jobs in this hallowed notice board for the strange, I was putting adverts in, asking other people to come and work for me. Which usually got them mixed up in something wonderful and strange, like carrying Gore Vidal on a makeshift sedan chair through a swamp, or being spoonfed roast Swans by arrogant French chefs.

3.) But I can't really talk about my time in *that* country without getting in trouble. Ask me about my photographs some time.

4.) Not a tiny Papuan pygmy warrior, but a lovely young woman called Jana. Still, part of me would like a tiny savage bringing me the skulls of potential employers as tribute.

5.) The International Criminal Court, rather than the International Cricket Council or the Internet Chess Club. ICC is a pretty common acronym, it seems. Probably a good cover if you are ever surprised by an angry warlord... "Me? A war crimes investigator? Oh, no, General Katanga, there's been a terrible mistake..I just play Chess on the internet..."

6.) The astute among you will notice that one of these is not, by the strictest terms, a good novel. Wolf Hall by Hillary Mantel is shit, booker prize or not:)

7.) About Zombies.

8.) About Battleships.

9.) Watercolours of sunsets. Actually, that's a massive lie. I was painting a massive tank with a super-laser on it.

10.) Dexter and True Blood at the time of writing although not sure how many firms would like to know I applied for a job with them while watching TV about sympathetic serial killers or "Buffy on a porn channel", as Miss Marlboro memorably described True Blood.

11.) The girl that Matt was talking about that was called Laura, and as I recall I was telling him it was "never going to happen" and he should move on. Ahem. I have been known to be occasionally wrong, especially as they are now moving in together, 4 years later.

12.) These are Metal bands, in case you don't know.

13.) "Are you a tank?" in Hungarian. The reason the text is in pink is an in-joke for WoW players, and the nature of the question will tell you everything you need to know about bob's character. Kenjy, Seraph, he feels your pain:)

14.) No, really. A friend of mine, Kenjy, quite regularly hangs out carrying in one hand the legendary Hammer of the Supreme King of the fire elementals, and in the other the legendary Sword of the Supreme King of the air elementals, riding on a magic zombie horse he stole from the baddest Vampire in the world. You really, really don't spill his pint, and the ladies love it. Honestly.

15.) "Big Monsters" to civilians. As an aside, a particular claim to fame of mine is that I was always, always, top of the "Death Meter" at the end of any given night of playing, meaning I had died the most times. Now, I maintain this is largely because of my character's ability to die, and raise herself from the dead instantly, which I was in the habit of using tactically. Yes, a tactical death. Like my patented "tactical thirds" in debating. Seriously, in one of these "wipes" I was mentioning earlier, if I was playing well, I would die twice as often as everyone else. This adds up.

I was also terribly, terribly unlucky. If there was a death laser which would instant kill you, a pit full of acid, a swarm of carnivorous bats, whatever, it would unerringly be drawn to me. On one occasion, I was thrown into the air by a giant demon, cursed by him in the air, and then landed in a lake of napalm. Random abilities my arse:) I was so famous for this, by the time we were near the end of the game, other serious guilds would encourage my guild to run the death meter in the general chat, so everyone could see how often I had exploded. Sigh.

16.) I bet I have forgotten someone important. Ah well.

It's that time again - getting fired o'clock

2009-10-22T17:06:00.000-07:00

So, where were we. Ah yes, telling stories about fish. That was back in the wonderful balmy days before I got fired (well, was "let go"/"was made redundant"/ "parted over artistic differences"/"was exposed as a Rootless Cosmopolitan" - i'm still not 100% of exactly the legal justification behind my sacking) - the point is, I had a job, now I have no job and a big cheque instead.

I've been bothered by all and sundry to tell the story. And it's a great story.

Suffice to say, there's derring do. Cloak and Dagger investigation. Lunch meetings with beautiful women, where we were so convinced we were being spied on we ended up conversing in code. Me becoming a wanted man in 7 states. An old man being lashed by a burly Arabic torturer. Courtroom drama. Imagine it as a montage. There are probably explosions. Wow, I'd watch that movie.

Until the film comes out, you'll have to make do with the story.

***Sadly, if you're reading this after 26th of October 2009, the remainder of this post was removed for reasons I cannot disclose.***

Death to the Usurper

2009-10-09T02:39:00.000-07:00

In a classic case of great minds thinking alike, George Monbiot has also started telling people fishing stories.

In his words, Bon Apetit, and death to the usurpers...

The Emo Reset

2009-10-05T18:25:00.000-07:00

You have to be careful with this Blogging lark - it can have negative consequences. It's not like the sort of negative consequences that the invention of sherbert had for climate change (1), but consequences you may rue for the rest of your days. This is part of the reason I haven't updated this in ages - I've been wrestling with a dilemma.A few months ago, I was writing this blog pretty regularly. Then, the blog started to have consequences I didn't forsee and I got all emo about it. I had to hit the big red button marked 'EMO RESET' and reconsider what I was doing with it.

This is actually a panel from a Lancaster bomber - cool eh?

You see, when I first started writing this blog, I assumed it would be read by the tiny hard-core (2) of my friends who like toy soldiers, and approximately no-one else. Thus, I felt I could comfortably write about things that were going on in my real, non-toy soldier afflicted real world life, without any risk of anyone from the real world ever reading the blog. Equally, I felt that perhaps I could say things on the blog that I would normally only reveal to close friends of mine in the long, drawn out telephone conversations I know they all dread (3). The combination of occasional modelling nonsense mixed with juicy gossip about women I wasn't sleeping with and people you didn't know at the job I don't do anymore was intoxicating to write and fun to read, at least if your comments are anything to go by.

I reasoned that while it was just about possible that random strangers might happen upon my blog, that wouldn't matter, because they wouldn't know anyone involved. Thus, the perfect separation of people I don't know and people I know really well ensured I could talk about things in a totally open, honest way. Unfortunately, when this theory was tested in the real world, it broke down, badly. In a rare example of modesty, I had completely forgotten that people I know from the real world might like to read this. In fact, some of them might even be sufficiently interested to track it down by their own selves.

Now, initially that was fine, but I never put two and two together and realised that some of these people were exactly the sort of people I might not have called up and randomly explained close and personal secrets - in fact some of them were exactly the sort of person I definately wouldn't tell that sort of thing to. People like employees, bosses, cute girls with tissue-thin aliases and my mum (4). In essence, the Ven diagram of this scenario looks something like this: -

Suffice to say, I have had several brushes with the 'vortex of disaster' (5), and thus feel a bit nervous about being so open and honest on the blog again. In fact, as this blog post has slouched towards bethlehem to be born, someone I slept with has got in touch to say how flattered they were by their description in the blog. Phew. The flattering sleazy sex story.

This is part of the reason why I haven't updated it in ages - part of the reason I enjoyed writing it was the 'knowledge' I could write it without any sort of fear of anyone spluttering with rage and firing me/disowning me/dumping me, because they'd 'never read it'. Now, ever time I write anything on here, I second guess myself, and think "Christ, what if that belgian midget table dancer from last night reads this? She'll be terribly upset."

So, difficult, difficult, difficult. How to make my blog 'interesting' without it destroying any chance I have of career advancement, finding love and ever being invited back to my mum's house? How, in short, do I pull off my Emo Reset?

My first answer - write solely about toy soldiers. Hmmm. Didn't quite work. I just don't really do enough modelling at the moment to justify it (but watch this space, ok?) and civilians find it dull. Some toy soldiering is acceptable and interesting, but the whole thing on model soldiers just isn't enough. Besides, there are much better special interest blogs out there - big shout out to Mat Rodger and his excellent football blog, which I actually enjoy reading, despite finding football tediously dull. I don't care about what Mat is writing about, but the quality of the writing makes the reading worthwhile - he's much like the equally excellent George Monbiot, in that respect. The major difference is, what I don't care about in Mat's case is a bunch of overpaid foreigners kicking a ball, whereas what I don't care about in George's case is the fact that the world is in massive crisis, and is ruled by total bastards. (6) More on George later though.

Still, Matt's football blog did give me an idea. In one of the posts, he talks about notorious football hooligan turned brutal warlord, Arkhan (7). Now, one of my claims to fame is, I attended Arkhan's wedding, where he married a Serbian turbo-folk pornstar named Cesca. Now, most people haven't been to a war-criminal's wedding, a pornstar's wedding, or indeed any wedding in Serbia, let alone a nuptials where half the guests look like surgically enhanced gay cowboys (friends of the bride) or are wearing first world war serbian uniforms and firing kalashnikovs in the air (friends of the groom) (8).

Basically, I am the king of weird shit happening. So, what I'm going to do, as perhaps I originally always intended, is use the blog as a venue to do what I'm best at - tell implausible stories that have a grain of truth. In the spirit of doing that, I've decided to start by telling all the stories of the times I've been involved with the catching or killing giant fish. Well giant Sea creatures anyway. And some of them were merely arrested rather than actually killed. Anyway, these stories are: -

Willard and the Biggest Lobster in the World, Willard and the attack of the Ice-Eels and Willard vs. the War Crime Walrus.

Willard and the Biggest Lobster in the World

As some of you know, until recently, I was working for a famous broadcaster. What you may not know, is that I have freelanced for them on and off for years. I have a weird attitude to my published work you see. I almost never show it to anyone. In my mind, showing it off is a bit like being that weird kid who reads you his poems when you're 16. I mean, it's not as though my accountant friends show me the spreadsheets they've written, is it? Or my Cartographer friends show me maps they've drawn? Or my Gynacolegist friends... well, you get the idea.

My first job there was pretty special. I'd just given up my nightmarish life on the breadline (9) as a freelancer in Bath, and was shortly afterwards to return to Bath, to head up an international Music festival (10). But while waiting for that to start, I did my first bit of freelance work for News Channel. I walked in on day one and thought "This is it Willard. Finally, normality, sanity, an escape from all of this bizaare weirdness that chases you around. Respectability is only a few weeks away."

There was no way this could possibly be weird, or strange or in any way odd.

Then, for my first assignment, I was assigned to report on the catching of the "biggest lobster in history". Seriously. Apparently, there was a fishing competition, and during this fishing contest, a 16 year old boy had caught the largest crustacean ever found. Look at the size of the bastard -

I sometimes used to wonder if my presence makes things odd, or if I notice odd things more than other people, or if I volunteer to do odd things. Whatever the reason, they happen. It's not everyone who has to deal with the biggest lobster in the world. This sounds like the sort of job that, back in the 1950s you'd get a tank, and a few jeeps, and a mad general with 'the bomb' to deal with. Sadly, in New Labour austerity Britain, the state only had Willard Foxton, and a man with a camera to defend it from those giant clacking claws.

The cameraman jumped on to a train, to shoot picures of this leviathan of the deep, while I began researching exactly how big the beast would have to be to be the largest crustacean ever tamed by the hands of man. The answer was...pretty big. 44lbs 6oz to be exact. Now, we'd been told that the lobster in question was "The size of a 16 year old boy", so we thought we had a pretty good shout at this being the case.

Tragically, while the lobster in question was the size of the 16 year old boy, a.) the boy was quite small and b.) Lobsters, even really big ones, don't weigh that much. Our Lobster, while 4ft long, with claws that could almost certainly sever human heads and doubtless was worth a small nuclear bomb, it tragically only weighed in at a measly 11lb 3oz.(11)

It hadn't even won the fucking fishing contest, as some pointless jobsworth pointed out that technically, lobsters aren't fish. I personally could not believe that anyone had been petty enough to claim victory in a local fishing contest over a 16 year old boy who had caught a Lobster the same size as himself. What bastards.

So, our story, "World's biggest Lobster caught in epic contest of man vs. monster" was actually "Boy catches bigger than average lobster - ruled ineligible for fishing contest". The best quote we could get was some berk at a Kentish Fishing quango (who I really had to push) saying the lobster was "exceptionally large".You can imagine my distress. We had to run it anyway. So, my debut at the BBC was the most embarrassing story I have ever written.

The moral of the story is, never assume anything. I assumed the BBC would be not-weird. I assumed the Lobster the size of the boy was the biggest lobster in the world. Equally, I assumed catching a Lobster the size of a man would guarantee victory in a fishing contest. Shows you what I know.

Willard and the attack of the Ice-Eels

Many years ago, I used to work in a big gay supermarket. It was the worst retail job I've ever done. I'm not going to name which one, but suffice to say, it was a supermarket which really loved its kitsch touches.

Quite regularly, things would occur like renaming its plain old ham on the bone, "Drury Lane Prime breaded butcher cut Ham", and making all the people on the delicatessen wear straw hats, to make us look like proper old-timey butchers, rather than the motley assortment of bored pensioners and bored school kids we in fact were. They also made us hand cut it. Of course, as shaky handed imbeciles, the delicatessen staff would usually deliver an unrecognisable pile of meat ends, and then charge the earth for it.

Sadly, shortly after the introduction of the hand-carved ham, my total inability to handle sharp things without dropping them was clearly going to lead to hand-carved hands if I carried on. So, I was transferred from straw hatted faux butchery to wearing a Hygiene Fedora on the most dreaded job on the shopfloor - the fish counter. Now, aside from having to wear a fedora to work (12), you also had to stand around the fairly repulsive smell of fish, handle fish all day, and thus would smell of fish for at least three to four hours after you finished work. The rules were you had to make sure all the fish that came in were properly gutted - so a large part of my job involved going into the shop early to stick my finger into hundreds of slit open piscine bellies.

Needless to say, this was not conducive to dating pretty girls as a 16 year old (13). Still, the smell of the fish, the horror of the gutting, the early mornings, were not the worst part of the job.

The worst part of the job, was dealing with that most loathsome of beasts, eels of the family Congridae, specifically of the genus Conger. For those of you who aren't familiar with these hideous, poison blooded monsters, here's a picture of one with a man for scale.

That one weighs 113lbs (14). For those of you who think that must be from Barbados or something, these nightmarish sea beasts are quite common off the coast of the UK - that 113lb-er is well under the world record holder of 200lbs, and Mr.113lbs was caught off Brixham in Devon.

I'm sure by this point, the brighter among you are saying "Poison blooded?! Then what were they doing on a fish counter?" Yes, the Conger Eel is indeed inedible. But the big gay supermarket liked kitsch touches, and a Kentish tradition is to put a Conger Eel out with your fish, to prove your fish is fresh - because, back in the day, the only way you could get the eels was to buy them direct from the boats. So, the order came down, "Let the eels be displayed", and every week, we'd receive a huge Eel in a bag. Authentic.

The kids and old men, who are actually sensible, would not gut the Eel, given the choice. First off, they were massive and slimy, and thus horribly hard to gut. Secondly, they were inedible and only there for show, so there was no point in removing their guts (15). Sadly, those of you who are familiar with the way supermarket retail jobs work will realise that the sensible people were not in charge. People who are supervisors in supermarkets are a unique breed of worthless idiot, with uniquely unmotivated staff who those in power simultaneously both fear and hate (16).

Thus, the tiny porcine moron-fiend who ran our fish counter insisted that not only did the Eel have to be gutted, but that I, Willard, had to gut it every week. This was punishment for being the sort of smart-arse who would come up with jokes about him and his shitty little Hitler moustache, and also the sort of person who would regularly have my friends phone in sick for me, pretending to be my mum.

However, I realised he never actually checked the Eel. I mean, it was massive and slimy and poisonous, and crucially, the gutting cuts had to be invisible from the top. So...I started to pretend I had gutted the Eel, whereas, in fact, all I would do was read a book for twenty minutes in the cutting room, then emerge with the huge carcass, dump it on the special platform, and voila. Surely...surely nothing could ever go wrong with that brilliant plan?

Of course, it went wrong. One day, about eight am, the girl I was working with, who was called Sarah, grabbed my arm, and said "Willard! Look! Look at the EEL!" And I looked. And the Eel was moving. Just a little. A waggle of the tail. A swivel of the horrid soul-less glassy predator eyes. Just enough for me to know it wasn't an involuntary spasm. That the fucker was alive. Since, I have learned since that Eels can survive out of the water for ages.

How does an animal that lives in water manage to do this? Well, fucked if I know. Still the bastards can survive out of water for DAYS. Part of the reason is because they have a very thick skin, which seems to cut down their rate of water loss and stop them from drying out. They are also able to use oxygen very sparingly and don't need an enormous amount of oxygen to keep them going. Ugh. They could be anywhere (17).

Anyway, so, I had a big, live fish to deal with. Not something my training had covered. Preferably, I was going to deal with it in a quiet, subtle way. Now, my plan was this. We'd open the cabinets, then I'd hit the Eel in the head with a brush (it was the only club-like thing to hand). The plan was that clubbing the eel would stun it, then we could rush it into the gutting room and slice it open, killing it - and covering up my slackness.

So, who's ever hit something in the head with a club? In Hollywood, the response is *dunk* Out like a light. Sadly, that's not the way things work in the real world. In the real world, if you hit something in the head with a club, it goes batshit crazy. Which the Eel did. With only a brush in my hands, I then proceeded to beat the Eel to death.

So, who's every beaten something to death? In Hollywood, the camera sort of pans out to the face of the person doing it, spattered with blood and with a crazy look in their eyes. However, it's pretty fast. No more than a few seconds. Unfortunately, once I started doing my De Niro in Untouchables impression on the Eel, it just wouldn't die. I had to smash it until its entire skull was crushed to a messy paste. Of course, as those of you who've beaten something to death in a freezer know, blood and crushed ice sprays EVERYWHERE.

All over £5,000 of fresh fish. All over £150,000 of freezer. All over me. All over Sarah, who was screaming like a banshee from the moment the Eel bashing started. Poisonous blood, remember. Of course, once all the clubbing and screaming started, we drew a pretty big crowd, pretty fast. By the time the beast was dead, there must have been twenty people watching. I looked up, covered in semi-melted ice and Eel blood, while the creature's ichor dripped from my brush. I met the eyes of an old man, who with remarkable sang-froid remarked,

"Well, at least you know the fish is fresh."

Needless to say, I was fired pretty soon after beating a live animal to death on the shopfloor. It was the most literally "Gross" gross misconduct I have ever perpetrated. The moral of the story is, don't slack off. Actually, that's not the moral at all. The moral is - never, ever trust an eel. Kill them before they kill you.

Willard vs. The War Crime Walrus

Well, Walrus aren't technically fish I suppose. But, they do live in the sea, and that means they make the list. If I caught a Walrus in a fishing contest, I'd definitely claim victory. And beat to death anyone who disagreed. Just for the record, the average walrus weighs 4,000 lbs. Now, the war crime walrus was substantially less than the average weight of walrus. I'd guess he was no more than 200lbs, but that still makes him the biggest "fish" I've ever been involved in catching.

Who or what is the war crime Walrus? Well, here's a picture of the world's most evil Walrus, and John Bolton, US ambassador to the UN. Compare and contrast.

Left: - Evil Walrus Right:- John Bolton

Now, I may have deliberately mis-labelled that image. Maybe.

Just to give you an idea of what sort of a bastard Bolton is, there is a UN resolution (admittedly tabled by North Korea) which identifies him as "Human Scum". Oh wait, that probably doesn't hold much water. It's amusing though. Clearly wrong, since the correct term of abuse would be "Walrus scum".

He was something of a failure as a diplomat, as the fact that the world's most Diplomatic body voted him scum. But then again, he did say that the top ten floors of the UN could be removed and no-one would notice. Equally, his most famous diplomatic stance was "I don't do carrots, only sticks".Progressive. He was so bad at diplomacy, that when his term of office came up for renewal, 102 of 168 US ambassadors signed a letter demanding his removal.

He was responsible for the manipulation of evidence of WMD in America prior to the Iraq war, complicit in the setting up of Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo bay, and, most loathsomely, was the architect of the policy of extraordinary rendition.

Ok, so how did I catch the War-crime walrus? Well, back in 2008, I was working for a large literature festival. A literature festival that Mr. John Bolton was coming to, to promote his new book, How to open oysters with my mighty tusks. That wasn't really the title of his book. His book was really called 10 Steps to destroying centuries of legitimacy and rule of law through torture. Well, it wasn't really called that either. Essentially, as I mentioned above, Bolton is the kind of person i'd happily feed to Conger eels and lobsters, and he was there plugging some book about why all muslims are evil and the USA is great.

Now, on a quite unrelated note, for a long time, I've been an admirer of Simon Wiesenthal.

Who? I hear you ask. He was the world's most famous Nazi hunter - and, it turns out, he may have exaggerated some of his claims of war criminal hunting. Now, some people may think less of him for making up a string of amusing stories about what he did - but I rather respect him for it. Ultimately, the point is, no matter how much exaggeration may have gone on, Wiesenthal definitely busted lots of nazi scumbags - which may explain why the Daily Mail has lead the charge to discredit him.

My favourite of the Daily Mail's "revelations" about Wiesenthal is that he was "only" in six concentration camps, instead of the twelve he claimed. Woop woop - good scoop boys. Equally, they claimed he exaggerated the number of Nazis he caught - true he did used to say he had caught over 1000 nazis, probably an exaggeration, but he did catch the commandants of Sobibor, Treblinka and Madjanek death camps as well as 55% of those who carried out the Lvov ghetto massacres. I just think the Mail are Nazi sympathisers, but hey, that's not news is it?

Anyway, back to the story. So there I am, at the literature festival, and Bolton is swanning around, honking evilly, eating his weight in seafood in all his evil war criminal glory, surrounded by very serious, very mean secret service bodyguards. So, there I am, thinking "what would Wiesenthal do" (18), when in walks none other than one of the journalists I respect most in the world, George Monbiot. Now, I don't agree with lots of things that George has to say, but I do think he is a spectacularly talented and interesting writer, and he is totally fearless. George decided he was going to take Bolton down - he was going to citizens arrest him for war crimes.

All George needed was a press pass to Bolton's big evil walrus party, in his evil palace made of misery, ice and oysters (19). Now, obtaining this for George was a foolish thing to do. The sensible thing to do would be to refuse him the pass, tell Bolton's henchmen, and be secure in my job. Now, given the opportunity, to be a.) sensible or b.) be able to tell the story of the time I helped a noted campaigning journalist try to arrest a war criminal who looks like an evil walrus, what do you think I did?

Of course we tried to take the evil walrus down.

First off, we spoke to the local police. Few things have been better in my life than George explaining to a bemused welsh police constable that a "major war criminal" was in town. The desk sergeant told us, in a thick welsh accent "If you see 'im, just bring him in, and we'll lock him up in the big cells over in Daffyd Powys until the proper authorities arrive". Then George entered Bolton's lair (20), and laid down the law, telling Bolton exactly what sort of walrus-shaped bastard he is. It was pretty amazing to behold.

Of course, we failed to have Bolton incarcerated, as within moments the secret service swarmed all over George like, well, secret service agents protecting a chubby war criminal. Bolton may have won that round, but it was worth it for the tale alone. The moral of the story is, even if you weigh 4,000lbs and have an army of secret service goons protecting you, some people will always try to mess up your life if you're a total shit.

Right, so there you go. Tall tales. About fish. Well, about Eels, Lobsters and Walruses, which are all pretty much fish in my book:)

Believe what of it you like, but bear in mind that while writing this, I can wholeheartedly truthfully say I've been talking simultaneously to a beautiful baroness on one hand, and a stunningly attractive ice skating champion who once made my eyes bleed on the other. No, really...

Hope to write this more regularly in the future,

Willard

1.) You've seen Al Gore's graph of industrialisation vs. rise in ambient temperature right? The bit in his interminable snore fest where he has a mechanical ladder to make his points? The graph is exactly the same if plotted against sherbert production vs. climate change. It's even more stark if you plot climate change against the last time I had a relationship that wasn't horribly destructive to my self esteem.

Ergo, according to Gore-logic, Sherbert must be causing climate change and thus something must be done. The truth is, there is a correlation, not neccesarily a causal link between the two, but we really don't know what is causing climate change. Maybe it's man made. Maybe it's a normal climactic shift. We don't know, and anyone who says that we definately know climate change is man-made is lying or wrong. Of course, things are getting warmer, but the why is difficult. Maybe it is all caused by sherbet. Of course, if the 'Foxton Sherbert Hypothesis' turns out to be true (and hey, I have just as much evidence as Al Gore) then John Pearson (the inventor of sherbert, for non-sweetie experts) is the moral equivalent of a paedophile badger baiter.

Although, if any badgers deserve to have to fight to the death, it's the paedophile ones.

2.) Many of these people will be thrilled to be described as "hard-core".

3.) You know you are a really close friend of mine if I occasionally call you with absolutely no agenda and talk nonsense for 45 minutes - usually at a deeply inopportune moment - possibly while I'm wearing nothing but a Towel. You know who you are.

4.) The sentence 'My mum found out about my Nigerian gential parasites from my blog' should be enough to caution anyone from being too revealling too much detail on the interweb.

5.) This amusingly and appropriately abbreviates to 'VD'.

6.)The fact I don't care about either of these things probably indicates that my Deputy editor may have been right when he described my political viewpoint as "Neither right nor left - you're basically smartarse with a dash of contrarian".

7.) As opposed to flying chariot riding lord of Nagash, Arkan the black. There will still be toy soldiers in the blog. Just, I'm not sure I want the entirety of the blog will be taken up with them - but the occasional bonkers in joke is fine.

8.) I do live in hope that my friend Jeff's wedding will live up to this trope though.

9.) You know how sometimes you buy people things in cans as a joke? You know, really horrible things you'd never eat, like tinned pies 'guaranteed to have AT LEAST 12% meat!!" Well, while freelancing, I was once so poor, I was once forced to eat a can of 4-year old "squid chunks in real squid ink" because I was too proud to ask my housemates for money for food.

10.) No, really.

11.) Presumably the 44lb one was large enough to be worshipped as a god, and was only caught because it presented a hazard to shipping.

12.) Something which is only cool if you're one of the Untouchables.

13.) At least, this was what I told myself aged 16. Later experience may suggest the fishy stench was merely one of a string of factors contributing to my total inability to hold down a girlfriend.

14.) Still not sure it could beat the "exceptional" Lobster in a fight though...

15.) Or so I thought.

16.) Hit them on sixes, but reroll misses, I guess

17.) The next time you hear your bins going over in the night, just think, it could be an urban fox. Or more likely, a 113lb urban eel.

18.) The answer is clearly catch the war criminal, then make up a story about it. Which is pretty much what I ended up doing.

19.) This may have been a tent in the real world, but let's stick to the walrus theme.

20.) The 25 man hard-mode of Bolton's lair. Oh, btw, I'm going to be doing wow jokes now, kk?

The Grand Plan

2009-07-16T17:10:00.000-07:00

Things are going well, for once. Some of you may be wondering why this post starts with a picture of cool soldiers in Gas Masks. Well, that's all part of The Grand Plan. Still, on with things going well. More on The Grand Plan later.

Things going well for Willard is slightly amazing, as I am living proof that there is a great deal of weirdness in the world. Usually this is the kind of weirdness that leaves my car at the bottom of a "protest trench" dug by anti-capitalists, or having my house invaded by mud-eating hippies(1), or ending up homeless in the world's pinkest hotel, sharing a bed with a British army officer called Captain Jim Bligh.

Don't worry, things haven't got less weird; they've gotten a good kind of weird. Obviously, this is a bit of a pisser for the blog, as it was much easier to write when I was semi-employed, depressed and had lots of emo drivel to whine about. If nothing else, writing the blog was considerably easier when I had nothing else to do apart from write it, and shiver in the BBC's draughty corridors.(2)

Of course, I still haven't achieved all the goals I set myself when I started the blog. These were, it's best to say, modest. What I wanted was a proper job, a nice house and a relationship. Of course, since I sat down to write that post in January, I have got a proper job and a nice house. And 2/3 isn't bad. Still, as I pointed out, the bubble of random weirdness that seems to follow me around hasn't abated.

The proper job, at a respected publishing house, is a little weird. For example, I was promoted from investigative journalist to magazine editor in 3 days (3), and then from editor to as-yet-unconfirmed-title-editor of multiple magazines after 4 weeks. At this rate of promotion, I will own the entire company by November. Equally, my immediate deputy is a hugely talented journalist, but a brief internet search for his articles revealed to me that he is a decorated Soldier, Thespian and Homosexual Nudist.(4)

Equally, the house I share has been the site of numerous scrapes with the odd; aside from having the world's orangest housemate (tm) and Poirot's Lift, we have an unbelievably fastidious cleaner (5) who is apparently eastern European; not that we'd know, as we never see her. Ever. It's like having a fairy who cleans for you. If you wait in or leave for work late, she calls in sick. So, life is still strange, but in a good way.

Of course, I'm still single. It was correctly pointed out today by my old friend Ms.Marlboro, that I'm not looking for a relationship, I'm looking for the relationship. If I wanted some random girl who I wasn't that keen on to take to the pictures while I looked to trade up, I could have her. But I'm really looking for Ms.Right, rather than Ms.Right-Now(6).

So, how do I pass my evenings, aside from the obvious failing to meet eligible ladies?

Do I think deep thoughts about saving the world through cap-and-trade emissions reduction? Do I look at the stars and try to divine the meaning of the universe, to understand the purpose of being? Do I fuck. I spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about, painting, or playing with toy soldiers.

Thus, in short, I could have written an article about religon this week. Or about the environment. I actually have clever and pertinent things to say about those topics. But i've decided that it's been far too long since I wrote about a topic close to my heart: Toy Soldiers. Specifically, my beloved Armageddon Steel Legion. Those of you who are debaters, or "civilians" of other sorts, keep reading; I promise it'll be at least as interesting and relevant to your daily life as that article you were planning to read on the economist website.(7)

In 1992, Games Workshop released Battle for Armageddon, which I rate as one of the best games ever released. Essentially, one person controls human defenders of the industrial planet Armageddon; the other is the cartoon-supervillain overlord of the invading aliens. It's a bit like 2 player Monopoly, only one player starts owning all the railway stations, hotels and utlilties,and the other player decides to bugger this "paying for things" lark, and spends all his money on 200-foot tall nuclear powered death robots crewed by green alien savages, which he then uses to melt and/or enslave everything.

It has all the craziness that I love about the background of warhammer 40,000 - for example, it's quite common for the alien savages to being doing quite well, until you surprise them with a barrage of Intercontinental Missiles carrying the amusingly-named flesh-eater virus. You can have the Missiles guided into the Green alien horde by predictions from Psychic Tarot readers, if you want. Oh, and once the flesh-eating plague has done its work on all the fleshy aliens outside of sealed enviro-suits, you then demolish all their Giant robots with the giant Lasers mounted on your super-heavy tanks...you get the idea.

It also captured lots of the iconic images of warhammer 40,000 - Armageddon is a "hiveworld", with 8 giant hive cities, each with hundreds of millions of people crammed into them, which are riven with gang warfare and governed by a hedonistic elite. Each of the cities are separated by dangerous radioactive ash waste deserts, which are full of mutant bandits. The only greenery on the planet is in the equatorial jungles, which are full of horrible giant gribbly monsters with more legs than teeth.

Basically, the future is rubbish. And that's cool.

I was always a big fan of the human defenders of the planet. At the start of the game, they have everything stacked against them; they are outnumbered, outgunned, and they live in a place which even the most dedicated tourist board would have trouble describing favourably (8). I think it was Battle for Armageddon that convinced me that playing the rubbish humans in wargames was cool. Sure, everyone else gets to use the HR Geiger esque giant drooling sex monsters, or the comedy Alien space pirates, or even the genetically enhanced power armoured supermen, but you get to beat them, using just courage and discipline - the machine guns, tanks and rifles help though.

If a super elite, power armoured superman blows up a giant multi-limbed drooling alien bastard, so what? But if a normal human kills one by emptying a .45 pistol into it after its eaten ten of his friends, then that's cool. Equally, when you lose, you can say, pffft, you killed 60 normal humans. So what?

Anyway, so this put me on a path to playing with the human defenders of the slightly rubbish planet armageddon. In 2000, Codex:Armageddon was released, which was a set of rules which added the to the excellent (silly) background. It explained a bit about the human regiments from Armageddon, called the Steel Legion. They're called that because a.) it sounds cool and b.) due to the radioactive ash wastes, gribbly monsters and flesh eating viruses, the troops from Armageddon have to travel in air-sealed armoured light tanks, and fight from inside them. Hence, guys in tanks = Steel Legion. Are we all on the same page? Even when they got out, they packed fully sealed uniforms and gas masks to protect them from Nuclear fallout, Bioweapons and Chemical gases. This has no game purpose other than to make them look awesome.

At the time the standard human army looked like hideous monkey bodybuilders on steroids, sat in trenches shooting, then got devoured around turn five, or had repulsed the enemy battle of the Somme style by turn four. The Steel Legion had far less men, but they had more mobility, much more interesting tactics and they looked fucking awesome. I was excited, and wanted large amounts of light tanks and cool gas mask wearing infantry.

Fortunately, at the time, I was working for Games Workshop. Quite aside from the long-lamented weight discount (9), there was at the time a competition where you could win the army of your choice by selling the most soldiers in the whole firm. I dug in my heels and sold like a fiend. I was a monster. I sold to anyone who didn't actually come into the store on a tricycle. I sold to kids. I sold to drug dealers. I sold to gullible retards. This morally reprehensible selling marathon meant I won the company prize; in the ensuing comparison we found that I personally had sold more soldiers that month than the whole of GW Scotland. Thus, all the gas-masked soldiers I could want were mine.

Of course, this was back in the year 2000, and I've been playing with the army ever since. I've used my guys through thick and thin (10). They were great fun to play with, and owning them had been well worth the bad karma of the ridiculous power selling I had to do to obtain them even if they weren't "by the numbers" the best army in the game. I used this army successfully in national and international tournaments; just to give civilians an idea how "bad" the normal humans are, I was one of two people who qualified using them in an international gaming tournament one year, and the other guy was an Italian who was cheating using an arcane method of time-wasting.

The Steel Legion had always been a rarity until recently; then, this year, just after I got back from the USA, this all changed. Essentially, the rules were changed, and now, my army is the flavour of the month. I'm not sure how I feel about that; I quite liked being a weird iconoclast with an army no-one had ever played before. Now, while I am the grand old man of the Steel Legion, acclaimed as probably their longest serving serious player, I do want to do some stuff to make my army "unique" again.

Hence, I've come up with "The Grand Plan" to make my army stand out and be unique. But I'm not going to say anything more until I can take some pictures of the cool models I've made...

See you again next week,

Willard

PS:- Next week, I may talk about politics or religon or cathode ray tubes. No promises on unveiling the plan until I can show you the cool toys.

PPS:- Seeing as the bulk of the people who read this are debaters or wargamers, I reckon the debaters should try to come up with a motion based on the fictional planet Armageddon. Ultimately, I can guarantee that Euros will have a sillier motion than whatever we come up with here...

1.) These hippies were subsequently chased off by my terrifying Somali then-landlord, who was brandishing a crowbar and screaming at the Hippies, who hurriedly packed and left while the Somali was restrained by several policemen. I can still remember the incredulity with which he said "I cannot believe it Willard! They steal from ME and the Police protect them!?!?! This would never happen in my country. Never." He was probably a war criminal on the run, but he always fixed things like leaky taps quickly and returned my deposit in full, so I can't really hold the atrocities against him.

As an aside, I shared that house with an Iranian bodybuilder who would boil and eat ten eggs a night, every night, at ten pm sharp. That ladies and gentlemen, is weirdness.

2.) And yet I still managed to be regularly late with it.

3.) This is coincidentally the same time it took for the Ministry of Justice to fire me. I can only assume it takes approximately three days for an employer to realise that "Oh christ, he's like that all the time." What the civil service considers a sacking offence is considered an asset in Magazine journalism; you can probably tell a great deal about the two different worlds from that statement.

4.) Clearly a man designed for ancient greece far more than modern publishing.

5.) Not only does she clean the windows, polish the wooden floors, fold and iron all of our clothes, she does mad things like folds the ends of the toilet rolls into origami shapes, tidies our drawers, polishes the brass doorknobs and irons our duvets. It's definately worth the £7 a week, put it that way.

6.) Miss Right-Now has a double barrelled name anyway, and socialists tell me I can't trust people like that.

7.) If you doubt this, think about the title of the last article you read; will it have any bearing on your life? Would it matter if all of the protagonists were 2" high and made of metal?

8.) I think "Home to the universe's largest stock of Flesh-eater virus" is hard to make into a selling point.

9.) At this point, the company would sell staff models for the cost of the lead in the soldiers; that is to say, around £30 a kilo. Needless to say, you get alot of lead soldiers in a kilo of lead; by my estimate, it's around a 95% discount on the shop price. Unscrupulous people could make a great deal of money by abusing this system and selling models on ebay; some made almost enough to put down the deposit on, say, a two bedroom flat, eh Smithy?:)

10.) Despite occasional forays into other silly armies; for example, I briefly used an army of Imperial Guard which arrived on the table via a giant underground drilling machine. This was once hilariously combined in a doubles tournament with - I kid you not - an army of power-armoured nuns with rocket packs. The one plus point of this erm, "unorthodox" combination was that nobody, but nobody, expected it.

Vote Tory or Lord Voldemort wins

2009-07-09T16:24:00.000-07:00

In what is becoming a regular feature of this blog, I have to explain why it is late, and why my previous post promising to be on time for ever more was, in fact, a big lie.

Well, the answer is this time, wizards did it. Evil Wizards. Oh yes. Before you read any more of my ranting, you must read the following article(1), entitled Harry Potter: Fascist Ubermensch.

http://www.liberalconspiracy.org/2009/07/07/harry-potter-and-the-fascist-ubermensch/

It is one of the maddest articles I’ve ever read. (2)

What follows is my slightly ranty deconstruction of said article, based on my political prejudices. In effect, it is the long promised “rant about politics” I originally said I’d deliver in late January.

Presumably, JK Rowling has not been informed about this article.

Let’s face it, even if she had, no doubt as a Racist Homophobe Misogynist her comments would have been deleted by the left wing blog's message board moderators. (Check the comment policy)

I assume this article is a mildly amusing, well written (3) joke. I’d like all my comments to be taken in the same vein. Unless, of course, the author is serious, in which case I will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes; well, maybe second after the Reichcommissar for Corrupting children’s minds, JK von Rowling.

Basically, I think the author, and three other people in tinfoil hats, have realised that Harry Potter is the greatest revolutionary political tract since Marx. (4)

We Tories are planning to subvert politics by indoctrinating your children through the sinister medium of good quality children’s stories. We even fooled Steven Fry into reading them on tape! Ha ha, the world is ours!!

To quote the article (5), “However, they would be far more likely to be born Muggles, and be subject to an ancient, corrupt system of political and racial oppression in which they do not even have the right to their own experiences “.

Yes, wizarding is evil and racist by default, I suppose.

Obviously, I support both Racism and Evil, and enjoy the books, because I’m a Tory. And hey, it’s all about public schools, and therefore by default, monstrously heart-eatingly evil. The point of the books is "obviously" to create racists, entrench aristocratic privilege and support corrupt politics.

Seriously, this is something I despise. In the 1980s, the Left in British politics got the idea that it was “Good” and the other side was “Evil”. Good and Evil are fine concepts to have in a book about wizards, but Evil should not be confused with “has a different, equally valid opinion to mine”.

Anyway, back to the jokes. What would a socialist’s vision of Harry Potter’s world be like? Let’s ignore for a second the fact that JK is a major labour donor, and formerly dirt poor single mum who probably has far more idea of the aspirations of the grindingly poor working class than the average left wing blogger.(6)

Wouldn’t the world of the books be better if the Ministry of Magic legislated to allow muggles magic powers or nationalised magic use in a classically socialist way ?(i.e. by chronically overmanning it and then running it inefficiently). Well obviously not, because JK Rowling is calling for racial segregation - “magic” is clearly here crypto-capitalo-fascist code for “money”, and obviously, Laurie has discovered our evil scheme.

At a minimum, wizards should pay higher taxes or something. I can’t imagine why JK Rowling didn’t include a full and detailed examination of the Wizard’s tax system in any of the books(7); I think an opportunity has been lost for a chapter on Mr.Weasley filling out his self-assessment return, and talking at length about how he benefits from a redistributive tax regime that gives his money to disadvantaged communities of Miners.

Equally, why doesn’t Harry pay inheritance tax on the Gold he has in the Bank? More subtle subversion of your children to believe that property maybe isn’t theft. Even more subtly, Harry is representative the classic propaganda victim of the anti-inhertiance tax lobby; if you’ve never questioned why this ludicrous tax is unfair, ask yourself for a second, is it fair for the state to take 40% of his wealth as a penalty for his parents being stupid enough to be murdered?

Even as a Tory, I must admit Azkaban is not an ideal prison - it’s clearly not harsh enough. I mean, the Daily Mail has been campaigning for bringing back hanging for evil wizards, people who misuse plastic bags, uncured gays and immigrants - being locked up in oubliettes having their souls sucked out by evil demons isn’t nearly harsh enough for them.

No, seriously, it fails penology 101 because it has no rehabilitative element, no provision for regular exercise and Soul-sucking is clearly in breach of the Human Rights act, which as a public authority, the Ministry of Magic has a duty to maintain.

Why isn’t there a chapter where Clive Stafford Smith boldly scales the walls to issue an injunction to the Dementors? Probably he’s a bit busy with that whole real world Ghost prisons thing. It is of course arguable that JK was showing us the consequences of a poor prison system - it strikes me that dark wizards are classic prisoners trapped in a cycle of institutionalised re-offending.

All joking aside, is it just possible, maybe, the authorial intent in drawing the patently absurd Pureblood/Muggle-born (8) divide was to highlight and expose children to the dangers of unthinking racism? That’s the meaning I took away from it, and since as a Tory I am a fascist with the intelligence of a six year old, thus I think by the Laurie’s own yardstick I can gauge what children will take away from it.

Equally, isn’t Hogwarts in many ways the ideal meritocratic comprehensive? There is literally no social barrier to get in - your dad can be an aristocrat, senior figure in the labour party (9), whatever, and unlike Oxford, Cambridge or Eton, no amount of money can buy you in - you have to earn your place on merit and merit alone.

The ultimate point is this; even if everything Laurie Penny says is true; even if the motivating goal driving JK Rowling to produce the books (10) was to inculculate every child who read them into being a fascist (her words, not mine), then I’d argue that the sheer impact the Potter books have had in terms of promoting the “cool” factor of reading to a generation of children outweighs this.

Literacy is the cornerstone of civilisation; it is the most important tool in levelling social inequality, more important than any number of half-baked initiatives from Ed Balls and the other fat clowns at the ministry for Education, Families and Croissants, or whatever it’s called this week. This is particularly true if you think of the worldwide impact Potter has had - the book has been translated into 67 languages, and has been read by millions of children in some of the poorest parts of the world.

Potter strikes a chord precisely because he is the opposite of what Laurie Penny claims; he is the everyman, the poor kid made good, the universal human belief that maybe, just maybe, you could be special and amazing.

Even if you believe the books have a bad moral message, the value of making literacy an essential fashion accessory to a generation of children is of inestimable worth in terms of broadening the horizons of children worldwide. I’d go so far as to say, JK Rowling has done more to achieve the laudable goals of the Labour movement than eleven years of Labour government.

Equally, Potter revitalised the ossified children’s publishing business(11); there are certainly fantastic books that would never have been published without the Potter phenomenon. Not just children’s books; Potter has made Bloomsbury into a publishing titan - no Bloomsbury, no Kite Runner (12) for example.

Ultimately, if Laurie Penny is good, then I’d rather hang out with JK in the evil corner.

Willard

1.)When I say “must”, I mean, “my blog post will not make much sense if you do not read this article, but feel free to not read it because it is crazy Marxism of the worst kind." Well, I suppose arguably this article is a better kind of Marxism than the kind that inspired Stalin, but if you can say one thing about Stalin, he certainly made tractors sexy, had a good moustache and won world war 2. Oh, and boy, could that man Purge.

2.) The maddest article I’ve ever read is by a woman called Julie Bindel, who is an advocate for the view that only Lesbians can be feminists, and compares women who believe in equal rights but have heterosexual sex to French Collaborators with the Nazis.

In case you really want your mind boggled, it’s here. Comes with a free tinfoil hat, too <http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jan/30/women-gayrights?commentpage=12>

This isn’t just mad to a Baby-eating Tory like myself. This is mad even to my friend Louise, the lovely, left-wing lipstick lesbian - a former editor of the Pink Paper, who frequently wears a badge saying “Dead men don’t rape”.

For extra Matt Smith “Give her both barrels” value, she has been known to playVampire: The Masquerade, commonly voted the gayest game ever.

She summarised why it was mad by pointing out that it puts most young women off of labelling themselves feminists, damaging feminism as a whole, and even worse, implies that sexuality is a choice. To appreciate how offensive this is to the average gay, think of the implications - for a start, it means those American evangelists offer to cure your Gayness could be right.

Of course, it could mean every right thinking, red blooded heterosexual man is only one listen to YMCAaway from thinking leather chaps look great on thick, hair thighs. That’s obviously mental, Ja hans? Natrulich!

3.)That said, the writer is just bad at English comprehension on any number of points:-

“It cannot be ignored that the Muggle world is entirely unattractive: not a single Muggle of the few that appear in the book is either enviable or positively presented”

Off the top of my head, Hermione’s parents are consistently portrayed as lovely people - Guardian readers, no less.

“There is no evidence of there having been a female minister of magic”

Even if this was true, I could point to huge numbers of strong, powerful, important, well drawn female characters which would make the statement meaningless. Of course, what actually makes the statement pointless are the repeated references to the previous Minister for Magic being a woman , who obviously ran a tighter ship on crushing Dark Wizards than Cornelius Fudge.

Assuming party politics are the same, this demonstrates, Tory Magic Ministers are better than Labour ones.

Maybe they have more regressive tax policies or were nasty to Goblin miners something.

Let’s face it, Fudge has New Labour written all over him e.g. “Dark Lord arises - I’ll spin doctor my way out of this one”….”problem with people who disagree with me - better detain and torture them”…not to mention that at the end of his tenure, the country is a total basket case - tell me this isn’t a clear analogy of the current New Labour government.

“Complete lack of sexuality except for in the context of sterilised, heteronormative dating/marriage rituals.”

Since when have dating, romance and love been heteronormative? Would a scene where Draco Malfoy goes to a nightclub, does some poppers and nails some buff stripper he doesn’t know in the toilets been more appropriate and in some way better represent gay sexuality?

I think the only “Heteronormative” thing pointed out is Laurie Penny’s own opinion i.e. that gays are incapable of feeling Love - and on that evidence, I brand her a vicious homophobic fascist:)

4.) With the obvious difference that Tsarist censors failed to ban Das Kapital on account of the fact it was considered “far too boring to be dangerous”.

5.) Because I know some of you didn't read it through to the end.

6.) I really, really hope Laurie Penny lives in a huge mansion in Hertfordshire, went to public school and owns a pony. All the best socialists are massive hypocrites. Inevitably, the shit policy decisions that are good enough for you and your children are always far too unfair to be tolerated by them.

Witness Tony Benn’s evasion of the death duty he’s campaigned for 50 years for you to pay (<http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/media/2007/10/the-mail-on-s-1.html>); Harriet Harman’s decision to campaign against selective schools while simultaneously sending her children to them… (<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5350450.stm>) Incidentally, Harriet Harman is my housemate Mr.Orange’s aunt.

7.) For those suffering an irony drought, it is because this would be VERY BORING IN A KID’S BOOK YOU SILLY SOCIALIST PERSON. IN CAPITAL LETTERS DELIBERATELY, YES, BECAUSE I’M SHOUTING! THROUGH AN IMAGINARY MEGAPHONE!!!!

8.) Pretty sure muggle is a racial slur, btw, but as a muggle I’m reclaiming the word, ok?

9.) This is a reference to one of the more loathsome figures in politics, the 21 year old prospective Labour MP Georgia Gould. Her father is a Lord, she went to a private school and then Oxford and was then foisted on the Labour voters of an inner city area, who promptly rejected her in favour of, I hope, a pie eating, whippet racing, coal- under-the-fingernails socialist who probably controversially cared about his constituents rather than seeing them as peasant stepping stones on his predetermined path to power.

I have to ask what can any given 21 year-old offer as an MP? The answer, according to Georgia Gould’s PR people, was that she is a “top debater” for Oxford University. I did take some exception to this claim, it’s fair to say. This claim, which seems to be trumpeted as the only fig-leaf preventing her from being seen as a true 18th-century rotten-borough candidate, is broadly untrue.

I was actually one of the UK's top university debaters (I debated 2000-2003 for University of the West of England, 2003-2007 for Middle Temple, was twice winner of World University Debating’s most Amusing speaker award, was 8 times top speaker at UK National Debating competitions) and I know all of the best debaters at Oxford University (including the last 4 world debating champions), and I have never even heard of Miss Gould.

I am told she spoke internally at Oxford on occasion; but being a member of a Sunday League team while unemployed does not entitle you to claim to have been a Professional Footballer. Even if she were a great debater, it would hardly qualify a 21-year old to represent the views of 60,000 hard working people, or take decisions on matters of state.

Christ, as a matter of fact, being a 21-year-old great debater barely qualifies you to find your arse with both hands.

10.) As a capitalist, I’d suggest the huge pile of cash may have been at least a persuasive factor.

11.) See, when you prove there’s profit in making children read, then investment in children’s books goes through the roof. When capitalism works, it really works.

12.) Or The Shoe Princess’ Guide to the Galaxy, which sounds erm, great. On a serious note, I’d also point out The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, a truly fantastic book.

Back on track

2009-06-06T02:32:00.000-07:00

I have been very slack with writing the Blog recently, which may be disappointing to those of you who have just started following it. There are several reasons for this, only some of which are good.

1.) There were Dogs. Big Ones. They ate my homework. (1)

2.) I was seconded by the BBC to Douglas Haig's Lunar army, to advise him on how to fight Moon-Pirates.

Oh, wait, you want the truth, don't you? How awkward of you...

1.) I am pretty lazy.

Quite often on a Thursday evening, I find myself lying on the sofa in front of the TV and the thought "I should probably write the blog" crosses my mind. Then, 45 minutes later, I realise I've been watching Ross Kemp's when Toads attack on UKTV Amphibians +1 instead.

I then rationalise it to myself by saying "Well, it's too late to write it now, I'll sleep and get up early in the morning and dash it off at six AM - that way no-one will notice." I even go to the effort of setting my alarm for six; of course, when it rings, do I get up and write a spectacular piece of citizen-journalism?

Of course I don't. I roll over and go back to sleep until some human hour, then get on with the impressive schedule of things I've set myself to do. Because, recently, I have been very busy.

2.) I have been very busy.

I've been doing a whole slew of things since coming back from America. Writing articles, being the lead plaintiff in a US Class-action lawsuit against HSBC & getting involved with a fan-project to write a comprehensive tactics guide to the Imperial Guard; I'm writing the sections on mechanised and airborne infantry, if you care.

While that's all fun, when I returned from the USA, I really decided that I was really, really, fed up with being semi-employed. While the 16 year old Willard would have thought a job which meant he worked one day in ten would be awesome, 29 year old Willard has realised that while such a job enables you to loaf around in a louche fashion (beloved of my literary heroes like Hemingway and Saki), loafing around with no cash is no fun (2).

I did not anticipate obtaining a full-time job being easy. Since my life last exploded in July 2008, I'd applied for over 200 jobs, with limited success. Applying for jobs as a "creative type" (i.e. the sort of person who is good at making up stories but not actual, you know, work) in the depths of a recession is not the easiest or most pleasant task, but I threw myself into applying for a "proper job" with renewed vigour.

I decided I still wasn't going to do something rubbish, like cleaning toilets or being an economist, but this still didn't stop me applying for lots of jobs which were a bit rubbish - for example, I got to the interview stage for a job as a Publicist with Imperial Tobacco in Bristol.

Now, I was mildly concerned at the shocking lack of morality being a Tobacco publicist required, but I came up with some clever arguments for why it was totally fine, which sounded convincing when I said them, but never really overcame the shrinking feeling in my gut when I said to people "I have a job interview with Imperial Tobacco". I suppose my concern was summed up by that first world war recruiting poster, "What did you do during the war, Daddy?"; I felt I'd be ashamed to admit what I was doing for a living.

Now, it's always been important to me to have an "Ooooh!" job, rather than an "Oh..." job. You know the kind of job I mean - when you say "I'm a wealthy and successful journalist..." people go "Ooooh! How exciting!" And when you say "I clean the inside of the Pig-Crusher at Gristlington's Pork pies...with a Mop..." people at parties go "Oh... what are you planning to do after that?"

In the back of my mind, a little voice was always saying "I, a fibrotic asthmatic non-smoker will be selling Cancer to the third world (3) and Britain's underclass (4)." However, there were perks. For example, the very generous salary, and all the free tobacco products (5).

The week before I was due to head off to my rendezvous with moral vaccumery, I noticed an advert in the Saturday Guardian. The advert was for a job as an investigative journalist with the Publisher that my chum the Ginger Zero works for. Thus, I called him up, and asked him what sort of thing to expect.

He briefed me that the most important part of the interview was a colour test, where you have to pick the correct colours from a rotating wheel. I said, what about writing samples, qualifications, rapport with the interviewers. He said no; the colour test is the hurdle to leap.

This sounded a bit like a medieval trial by ordeal, or the sort of thing you'd have to do to get an audience with the Emperor of Mongo in Flash Gordon (6). I also asked him to put in a recommendation for me - he replied he'd rather not, as the last couple of people he had recommended had been vapourised by the order of Ming.(7)

I sent the following letter to the publisher in question; I thought it was a fairly professional sounding letter, but since writing it, several friends have looked at it and laughed hysterically, commenting that it was "sensible for the first two paragraphs, then it goes all Willard". I've included it here for reference:

Dear [Emperor Ming](8),

I'm writing to you to apply for the post of Investigative Journalist .

I think I'd be the ideal candidate for this role, with extensive experience as a journalist, as well as a legal background, including training up to the professional level. I have extensive contacts throughout the media worldwide, and across the UK legal community.
I've been a Journalist since 2003, (in fact, I used the money from freelancing to pay my way through my BVC) and have worked for publications ranging from small local magazines all the way up to national newspapers. I recently presented a high profile documentary for the BBC, which will air on June 15th on BBC2 (9).

All of this experience proves I'm articulate, extremely organised, brilliant at establishing a rapport with interviewees & can spell difficult words like "pandemonium" without the aid of a spell checker. I'm also skilled in using a bewildering array of computer programs, from the Microsoft basics through to more sophisticated publishing packages such as Photoshop and Quark.

My six month stint at a London PR agency equipped me with a bulging contacts book, including staff at every UK newspaper, a wide variety of contacts in other UK media, as well as journalists at Indian, American and Australian publications. I covered the 2006 Israel-Lebanon war for the Jerusalem Post, and was shot at, rocketed and mortared, so it's fair to say I'm highly adaptable, it takes a lot to shock me and I'm good in a crisis.

As for my legal education, I have an LLB, an LLM and a BVC. While obtaining these qualifications, I went through the usual rites of passage that all prospective lawyers go through, from mini-pupillage in chambers, to work placements at solicitors both large and small. I had the honour of marshalling for Dame Elizabeth Butler-Sloss in 2002, which gave me an insight into the way the senior members of the judiciary operate, as well as invaluable contacts at the highest levels of the legal system.

Thus, I'm familiar with all aspects of the legal profession, from simple jargon such as OLPAS, BVC and CPR, through to understanding the issues which confront lawyers in day to day practice. While studying for these degrees, I won the World University Stand-up Comedy Championship, representing Middle Temple - so I'm witty, amusing and a joy to work with.

At the same time, I was rated in the top twenty speakers in the World at University Debating; beating people from Oxford, Cambridge, Yale, Harvard (10) – so I'm intelligent, well informed and superb at public speaking. My debating success, coupled with the rarity of having come from a former polytechnic, has led to me being well-known within the inn, at levels from student to bencher.

In short, I think I'd be a great employee for any publication, but I'd be especially good at using my network of contacts to report stories that are of real interest to the UK legal community as a whole.
I've included links to my most recent online work (describing my work in with the BBC on a blog) and my most recent piece in the New York Post: -

http://www.nypost.com/seven/03132009/news/columnists/may_he_live_to_be_130_in_prison_159365.htm

http://thetoysoldiersneverletmedown.blogspot.com/2009/05/i-love-this-crazy-tragic-almost-magic.html

Yours Sincerely,

Willard Foxton

Modest, isn't it? :)

Now, of course, I'd added an extra hurdle to my ability to write the blog; it had to remain reasonably sensible so the prospective employer could have a look at how clever and hard-working I said I was in America.

So, anyway, I went to the interview, and fortified by the information the resistance had given me, was able to pass the colour test without any problems, although the person giving it did look at me suspiciously and ask "Did you know you'd be taking a colour test?" to which I replied "Of course not, what kind of blaggard do you take me for sir...", and then picked the same sequence I'd memorised again (11).

All was well; I returned home pleased, and was duly called for a second interview, before I had to travel to Bristol to enter the Dark Satanic Tobacco Mills. So, on the appointed day, I duly arrive at the tiny rural train station close to my house, thinking about how good this job would be, how great it would be to be able to move back to London, etc etc. While I was musing, it was a lovely kentish rural scene - trees, butterflies, sunshine, workmen restoring the station to it's 1930s art deco glory.

My reverie was interrupted when a workman fell off his ladder, and spilled an entire bucket of white paint on my suit trousers. Disaster.

Now, my house was too far away to get clean trousers before the train would arrive. So, standing there looking like a man in the throes of dying from the Gush (12), I had to make a crisis decision. Was it better to turn up to the interview in paint soaked trousers or be late?

I decided to err on the side of punctuality. I sat on the train looking worried, with my lovely facial tan from the USA, wearing a smart, expensive suit jacket, tasteful tie, immaculate shirt, and then completed this ensemble with a pair of white paint-stippled M&S boxers from which my pasty white, hairy, fat legs protruded. And it was half term. So there were no seats. And lots of inquisitive children.

I think most people assumed I was either a pervert or I was having an emotional meltdown. Or I was a pervert having an emotional meltdown.

I got to London, dashed into the Next which was next-door to the station, and found a pair of trousers which approximated to the jacket I had on. I then arrived at the interview with about 15 seconds to spare.

I had a feeling the interview went well, despite my trouser disaster. The following day they rang me and offered me the job. Hooray!

Needless to say, I accepted. I start on June 15th, and am moving in with Mr.Orange to the beautiful flat in Belgravia on Wednesday of this week.

Hopefully, this represents the start of a new beginning - now I have a job worth the name, I should have plenty of time to write my blog! Expect a normal service to be resumed soon.

Possibly with a long discussion of Toy Soldiers.

Hope you're all well,

Willard

1.) I did actually manage to get my dog to do this once while at school; the secret is to liberally smear meat paste on your exercise books.

2.) This is what passes for maturity in my head. I should really have realised this from reading Down and Out in Paris and London by Orwell, but I think I assumed he was skipping the fun parts to make poverty sound bad.

3.) Overpopulation in the 3rd world causes climate change. Polar Bears are more important than Africans? That's why...selling Africans cancer is good? No, still not convincing, is it? Still, the image of a Polar Bear puffing away on Lambert and Butler while his ice floe melts is a nice one. Maybe a Poster campaign? Arrrgh I can't stop myself!

4.) I have yet to meet a non-smoking member of the BNP; surely selling cigarettes to fascists must be ok? Come on, admit it, reading the headline "Holocaust Deniers in death by respiratory failure irony shock" would make you laugh.

I used to think real hard-core racists were dying out, but while writing this, a skinhead with a Tattoo on his neck saying "Real White Man" has walked into the Starbucks I'm in, and started chatting up a pretty Barista with the inimitable chat up line "Check out my tattoo; It shows how proud I am to be English and White."

I'm not sure what's more demoralising, the fact that he felt the need to Tattoo his racism on his neck (in case he forgets?) or the fact he thought it would make a good way to start a conversation with a young lady. Still, I suppose "I'm a massive racist" is probably something it's best to get out of the way before the first date.

He's now sitting outside smoking, alone. I rest my case.

5.) I had agreed to pass these on to two old friends who smoke like chimneys; Miss Marlboro (irish ex-debating partner) and Signa Esoticofrutta (Italian schoolfriend and fellow veteran of the Kazakh war), both of whom are confirmed Labour voters, Catholics, smokers and football fans, and thus members of the underclass by definition.

6.) I maintain the 1970s Glam Rock Opera version of Flash is one of the best films ever made; I stand by my absolutely heretical judgement as a seven year old that it's better than Star Wars, if only for the Queen soundtrack, and the fantastic costume design, as illustrated by Brian Blessed.

7.) Possibly an exaggeration.

8.) Believe it or not, I did not refer to my prospective employer as Emperor Ming. I actually called him General Klytus. No, seriously, all the stuff in Square brackets is just there to keep up the anonymity of the workplace.

9.) This was true when I wrote it, but the Documentary has now been put back because Madoff's sentencing has been put back as well - it'll now be on some time between the 15th and the 29th.

10.) This is absolutely true, sounds impressive, but in fact is easy to achieve. Anyone who debates competitively will at some point find the Oxford/Cambridge team composed of idiot public school toffs or the Harvard/Yale team composed of Bible-thumping-Flag-waving, gun loving republicans.

11.) The sequence I memorised demonstrated that I was either a.) hard working, moral and exceedingly intelligent, or b.) a six-year old girl, as it seemed to consist entirely of shades of pink. I'm not entirely sure of this colour profile nonsense.

12.) Watch the sketch I'm referring to here if you don't know what I'm talking about. It's very, very funny - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_mOf4kJ7dE

I love this crazy tragic, almost magic, awful beautiful life.

2009-05-10T16:13:00.000-07:00

As Douglas McArthur said, I have returned. (1)

I've come back from the USA a wiser person, I think. I've learned alot. Now, I realise that every perma-tanned public school boy who has ever tried to chat you up in a bar (2) has tried to tell you about how he "found himself" in Thailand on his gap year. I'm not claiming I've learned any great insight into the Human condition. I've just soaked up alot of useful, you know, knowledge in my 16 days in the field as the Journalist-Presenter on a BBC documentary team.

I'll break it down for you; I feel it's part of my duty to educate, entertain and inform, as Lord Reith would want me to. (3)

1.) TV is hard work.

Making TV is probably the hardest I've ever worked in my life. Most days we were working for 16 hours - some days stretched into the 22 hours+ zone. My shortest day was 12 hours, and that was a day where I spent two hours in a hospital in Beverly Hills, being treated.(4) I'd guess I was working at least 100 hours a week, and I was doing less work than the Producer, Director or Cameraman.

Some of it was hard work in the intellectually challenging sense - I was usually given less than an hour to read all the research on any given interviewee, which included the time I had to think of interesting and provocative questions. It's really hard to think of TV questions; it's not like a magazine interview where you can ask leading questions and then interpret the answers in print - you have to ask a very open question which will make the interviewee say what you want them to.

Of course, without mind-control powers, often the interviewee will say something totally different to what you expected. Sometimes, on a totally different topic. Sometimes, they'll just answer in a way you didn't anticipate, often shockingly so - for example, we were all surprised at the level of loyalty some Madoff personnel exhibited towards their former boss.

It was physically tough too. Now, while my Cameraman, known at the BBC as "The Man of Iron" (5) could carry around a 36lb Digi-Beta Camera (6) on his shoulder all day without breaking a sweat, there was a huge amount of gear to move and set up for each shoot, indoor or outdoor. Lights, tripods, film stock, sound booms, a huge device known as a "Torpedo Tube" - I'm sure you can imagine. Now, apparently most "talent" refuses to help move the kit, so I instantly accidentally endeared myself to the crew by pitching in, and grabbing heavy things to carry and manoeuvre.

In fact, they didn't tell me that it was unusual for Talent to help with the setup and porterage until I'd been with them for three days. I was mildly amused to join the ranks of the apparently rare journalist who is willing to carry things and have sore shoulders at the end of the day. Still, I don't regret doing it, and I'd do it again if I ever make another documentary. If only because it gets you to the pub much quicker.

Regardless of my willingness to carry things, acting totally natural, casual and self assured, while relaying complex information to the Camera, often while wearing a suit in 90 degree heats with 100% humidity, could sometimes be a chore. Equally, while I did get some things right first time (7), there were a couple of occasions where I fucked up constantly for a sustained period. The most frustrating thing about it is as you get more frustrated, you get worse and worse, and the tiny piece of dialogue drags on longer and longer.

The most nightmarish moment was outside Madoff's offices, where I stumbled over a complex set of figures over and over and over again. Every time I'd get it right, something else would happen, such as the sound being wrong, or the Director kicking the camera by accident. It probably took an hour and maybe 20 takes to get a three line piece of dialogue right.

It was emotionally exhausting as well. Now, at first, I thought this was down to my own emotional connection with the subject; but I soon realised that the harrowing nature of some of the stories we were hearing was getting to the rest of the crew as well. In fact, in some ways, maybe I was more fortified than the rest of the crew for the sort of thing we might encounter.

More than once, we ran into people who had, or were at risk of losing everything. Several people we spoke to were in truly awful positions. One man sticks out in my memory; a 92-year old, who had taken a job at a local supermarket in San Francisco so he could pay his wife's medical bills.

The amazing thing about this man was he'd been totally ruined once before - in the 1929 Great Depression, his father had lost everything and killed himself, and our man had built himself into a millionaire through grit and perseverance. He'd retired in 1977, before most of the people reading this were born, and devoted his time to philanthropic causes.

He put his money into Madoff about ten years ago as a friend recommended it as a totally safe investment with a good return. Just like my dad, someone better than our man at finance was recommending a really good financial product, and he just went for it. The money came in, whenever he wanted it - in fact, he's had less trouble withdrawing money from Madoff than from his retail bank.(8)

So, he'd lost everything. Again. His attitude was amazing though. I asked what he was planning to do, and he just looked at me, smiled and said, "Well, I'm going to work here at this fine Supermarket until I've saved about $10,000; then I'll go back into business for myself". I don't feel I'll ever be able to feel sorry for myself ever again; if I do, I'm sure his example will inspire me.

2.) Cameras bring out the worst in people.

Basically, if you set up a big chunky professional camera anywhere, it becomes a rubbernecking magnet for everyone. Now, gawkers are fun and quite flattering, but kids who want to be on TV get old fast, and worst of all is the effect Cameras have on Care in the Community types.

At one point we were interviewing a Wall Street financier when a lunatic Homophobe cycled up to us on a rainbow coloured tricycle (9) and delivered a long, barking mad, rant about how Jews and gays were controlling his brain with hair dryers. This made a long day longer.

3.) Bureaucracy is Rubbish.

I did already know this, but my loathing of petty pen-pushers has been reinforced by this trip.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, Cameras and a BBC badge don't always endear you to Law Enforcement officials. We didn't have that much trouble with law enforcement, as we didn't break the law very much, but still, at one point we were ejected from a park in New York City, because we had a City film permit, not a state film permit, and the Park Rangers were from the state.

This is just a typical example; but I've lost count of the amount of times we were told we couldn't do something because it would A.) Endanger Health and Safety B.) Create a risk of terrorism C.) Because we didn't have a permit or D.) I'll have to ask a Manager.

Now, don't get me wrong, I think people below management pay grade trying to commit unsafe terrorism without permits should be stopped, just in these cases it was usually security guards coming out of identical Manhattan buildings to tell us we couldn't film there.

4.) We are all terribly vulnerable to Fraud.

I was quite unnerved by alot of what I found out in the documentary. I think the most shocking thing was how routine the Madoff statements were. It's easy to decry these people as foolish, people who were gulled by a scam similar to those exiled Princes who keep emailing me to ask me to transfer a million dollars via my account; it wasn't like that at all.

It's much more chilling than that. Madoff's was a hugely respected institution. If you were invested, you got statements, every month, like clockwork. Frankly, the statements look more professional than the ones my bank produces. If you wanted your money, you asked, and it arrived, smooth as silk. Bernie himself was the chair of NASDAQ; he was often advising at the SEC, who regulate financial affairs.

If Madoff's could be bad, just about anyone could be.

5.)TV is fun.

I got to do some amazing things and meet some amazing people. To make a short list:-

-In 16 days, I travelled from Boston to Long Island, stayed in the Roosevelt Hotel in New York, flew from New York to San Diego, drove to LA, stayed in Beverly Hills, drove up the Pacific coast Highway to San Francisco, then flew to Miami and then stayed in Palm Beach Florida, America's richest community per capita.

-I met the world's best fraud investigator, a man who was so cool I felt like I was a guest character in his awesome TV show about busting fraudsters. He is a 30-year veteran of the Florida state fraud squad, the man who broke up the Florida Earthworm scam, and until the Madoff scandal broke had busted the world's largest Ponzi scam, a $5 Billion fraud involving mortgaging Ambulances.

- In the very odd community of Palm Beach, I got to drive around in a Yellow Mazerati Gran Turismo, and interviewed a lovely woman who has a dog which rides in her open top sports car wearing a pair of "Doggles"(10).

- I spoke with some of the wealthiest and most important people on Wall St, and not just to say "Spare some change Guv?".

- I got to be driven over the Brooklyn Bridge in an armoured black landrover with a camera mounted on the bonnet.

- I conducted an interview with a former Madoff employee standing on rocks in the East River while an FBI Helicopter buzzed us trying to listen in with Shotgun mikes.

- As well as "The Man of Iron", I worked with a great director from the Golden Age of Television (11), and a top quality producer, all of whom made it easy for me as a novice to learn the ropes.

Anyway, so that was the TV experience.

The documentary is scheduled to go out on June the 15th on BBC2, the day before Madoff's sentencing. I haven't spoken very much about the actual content of the show - watch it! Even if you're away, Sky+ it, or watch it on iPlayer.

Hope you enjoyed reading this,

As usual, apologies for the lateness of the blog, I'll try to not be in America for the next few weeks at least:) And, I'll steer this blog back towards mentioning toy soldiers each week, damn it!

Willard

(1) While I share quote with General McArthur, I have no plans to follow in his footsteps by stealing the Phillipino Gold reserve, levelling Manilla with battleship artillery and trying to start a Nuclear third world war with China. Of course, it will be ironic if I now do any of these three things.

(2) I assume this has happened to everyone, even boys. If you doubt it's ever happened to the most down to earth heterosexuals in the world, ask Matt "Not really a class warrior or a Homophobe, but I'd have given that bloke both barrels" Smith about the "Do you have a flint?" incident.

(3) No matter how informative, educative and entertaining I am, I'm sure Lord Reith would not approve of me. I recently discovered that while he imbued the BBC with some fine principles, Lord Reith was a racist, pro-fascist who campaigned against Jazz music. Well, nobody's perfect, I suppose...

Still, we're probably lucky the founding principles of the BBC aren't Obey your Betters, Hate all that is Other and Louis Armstrong must die. I can believe that draft of the BBC Charter may have been used as a foundation for Fox News though.

(4) When I came down with a hacking cough a day after we'd been in San Diego, we did seriously worry that I had contracted what our Mexican, Panch-Villa moustachioed driver insisted on referring to as "what you call the Piggy Flu". I have no idea what they call it in Mexico - probably something deeply scary like El Negra Muerto Diablo Estornudo (The Death of the Devil's Black Sneezes).

I was sent to have treatment at the Cedars-Sinai Medical centre in Beverly Hills, and after a couple of worrying hours in what I can only describe as a Death-Mask, being looked at like a pariah, I was given the all clear on the Piggy Flu. Instead, I was diagnosed with bronchitis (ugh).

(5) He's partly known as "The Man of Iron" because of his prodigious ability to heave large quantities of gear, but also apparently because of his general resistance to pain and ability to, as he puts it "'andle 'imself" in a brawl. He does revel in his nickname; quite often when asked to do something impressively hard, you'd ask him if he was sure it was do-able, and he'd reply "Of course I can; I'm a Man of Iron".

There are some legendary stories about him at the beeb, including one about him rescuing a Chechen fixer from a giant Russian paedophile, and him having to escape from Lithuania with a Journalist after their undercover operation was rumbled by a black gay male stripper who betrayed them to local people-traffickers.

The only problem with him is his predilection for using rhyming slang, which is confusing for us, but utterly baffling for Americans. God knows what everyone else must think. He'd also use his own Camerman rhyming slang, for example "Lens Flares" (which can be avoided with a "Mac Box") were "Dan Dares".

(6) The digi-beta is a heavy old camera, which the Man of Iron has been using for some time, in warzones all over the world. It's so old, it runs on Betamax tapes. It certainly looked battered, covered as it was with tatty name labels and security seals in different languages, with chipped paint on almost every surface.

Still, the Man of Iron swore by it, and it never let us down. He did treat it with far more respect than the camera's appearance would give it credit for; he would even strap it into it's own seat on the car. I became highly attuned to the sound of a grunt of effort as the Man of Iron would heft it, carbon-steel tripod and all, and bellow "Camera's moving!".

(7) Usually, when the pressure was on, I was fine. For example, at one point we were outside one of Mr. Madoff's houses, and worried about having the hounds released on us, I was able to just zing through all my pieces to camera with no repetition at all.

(8) Apparently, Chase Manhattan's computers declared him dead in 2001, refusing to believe anyone over 85 could be anything other than a glitch.

(9) If I was a homophobic demagogue, I might obtain a more credible mode of transport than a Rainbow Tricycle. I mean, where do you even find one of those? Surely you have to go looking quite hard. Maybe the hair dryers tell you where to get them from.

(10) Doggles are Goggles for Dogs. Pure Awesome.

(11) Without going into too much detail, back in the day, this Director was known in the industry as "Mr.Lunch". Sadly, a more restrictive code of what you can claim on expenses has left him bitter and wistful for "The Golden age". Usually, the most vituperative comments about the clampdown on expenses came when he was choking down a bag of Fritos or Pizza Hut.

Think of this as a trailer...

2009-05-01T05:42:00.001-07:00

Hey all,

I've just missed the deadline for the blog, as usual.

We're working 14-hour days; our day starts when it gets light enough to film, and ends when it gets dark. Today I'm flying across the USA. Just got five minutes to say - look for a detailed post soon!

Willard

Letter from America

2009-04-25T21:47:00.000-07:00

As usual, sorry the blog is late.

It's mostly due to the fact that instead of doing what I normally do on Thursdays (1), I was instead, flying to America.

I assumed I'd have time to write something when we landed; however, I reckoned without the Department of Homeland Security and form I94. Now, form I-94 is designed to protect America from the worst kinds of people; that is to say, really stupid terrorists, or the unfortunate innocent.

Now, obviously, I fall into the second category. But I fall into it so hard that it took me Six Hours to clear customs. I'll just run through for I-94 for those of you unfamiliar with it (2).

1.)Do you have a communicable disease; any physical or mental disorder; or have you ever been a drug abuser or addict?

Even without saying the immortal phrase "Nigerian Genital parasites", I suffer a bewildering gamut of lung conditions and am a bit mental what with the whole traumatic war neuroses (3) thing . Neither of which endears you to the average staunch Guardian of the USA. Both of them make you sound like some kind of snivelling left wing socialist menace.

Equally, what's the definition of a drug "abuser"? I mean, as a child, I once got off my tits on Calpol... does that count? Should I write "Brief flirtation with the dangerous fast paced world of sugary paracetamol syrup?

2.) Have you ever been arrested or convicted of a crime involving Moral Turpitude?

Christ, maybe. I had nearly 60 parking tickets on the go at once, which I only escaped from through a brilliant piece of legal chicanery.(4) I have a nasty feeling my arrests for Arms dealing (5) and Drug Smuggling (6) may be considered potentially Turpitudinous, at the very least.

3.) Have you ever had a visa to the USA declined?

Not yet, but dude, did you see what I wrote for answers one and two?!

4.) Have you ever been involved in espionage, sabotage, genocide or terrorism?

Phew. Never. But I can't help but feel you'd be be kept behind in terrorist training camp if you answered "YES! ALLAH MUJAHADEEN AKBAR!!" to that one. Not least because it wouldn't fit in the box.

5.) Betwen 1933 and 1945, were you involved with the persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies?

I like the fact they've added in Germany's rubbish allies, but can't imagine many Lithuanian SS criminals shouting "Jawohl! This was me, Ja?". Presumably because they'd have mentioned any genocide in question 4... I of course, answered no, as my only involvement with the nazi party was living with Matt "Sturmbannfuhrer of Laura's heart" Smith, 2000-2005.

6.) Have you ever illegally detained a child?

Probably covered by the "crimes of moral turpitude" earlier on, unless you were a strict parent illegally caging the child for their own good.

The other reason I haven't had a chance to do any blogging is our truly punishing schedule. You see, in the name of placating the license payer, our filming schedule was cut from 6 weeks to 2 weeks, but the number of interviews wasn't reduced. We just work three times harder. For you.

For example, since Friday, I've crossed 5 state lines, and interviewed five people, including the world's greatest fraud investigator, who's claim to fame was his dismantling of the "Florida Earthworm Scheme" (7).

More on all of this later, I'm tired!

(1) Think about painting some models then be informed I'm going to be digging holes in the garden for some tenuous "mum landscaping project" with the sort of working conditions that would make Colonel Nicholson from Bridge over the River Kwai Blush.

(2) That is to say, if you have an American passport, live a boring life, or haven't come to the USA since 2001.

(3) I prefer this name to the modern-sounding "post-traumatic Stress" disorder; it's what WV Rivers called it, and if it's good enough for Sassoon and Owen, it's good enough for me.

(4) Essentially, i cleared out my house, moving 99% of my thing to storage and the bailiffs arrived, and once I let them in, they removed all of my property in lieu of a £7,000 debt - they left with to mugs and a half-jar of Gold Blend. Touche, mr.bailiff, touche...

(5)I accidentally covered a bag in explosives, while bringing a 155mm howitzer shell case home as a souvenr.

(6)I accidentally moved in with Bristol's biggest drug dealers. The Police assumed I had to be the kingpin because I wasn't on any drugs, everyone insisted I was innocent and on top of that, I had all my money in a shoebox:)

(7) The scheme involved selling idiots earthworms, for hundreds of dollars. I think it might work in the UK; any takers?:)

Interviews, Writing and Vin Diesel

2009-04-16T13:10:00.000-07:00

Hiya all,

Sorry about the lack of a blog post last week.

My feeble excuse could be that I was busy dealing with the fallout from dad's funeral. Totally understandable. Equally, it could be that I was busy with the documentary. Again, totally reasonable and plausible. It could even be the terribly prosaic fact that it was a bank holiday, and my union won't let me work on Bank Holidays.(1)

Or I could just lie and say I was sleeping with Katy Perry, or something. No, you'd never believe that. How about... I was asked by the UN to travel to the Sudan to inventory some watercolours and ended up retrieving General Gordon's skull from the "Mad Mullah" in the Khartoum museum of anti-colonialist skull worship?(2)

In fact, what happened was:-

I was absolutely confirmed as the presenter of the documentary (hooray!), and thus decided to go on the major lash with Miss Z (3), Mighty Jeff (4) and Miss Marlboro (5) in London town. I woke up on Miss Marlboro's sofa, and terrified her very timid housemate by being a.) a fat hairy naked ape-man and b.) a right-wing pro-fox hunting tory. I'll leave it to your imagination as to how we moved from me being merely naked to explaining my politics to her. And what a fat naked right wing pro-fox hunting Tory ape-man looks like.

I was then sent into an Easter spiral of looking after children while hung-over (don't worry, I had clothes on by that point), cooking Roast Lamb for the entire extended family, and then on Easter Monday travelling to Bristol to attend the birthday of a Pig-slaying french chum, who we'll call Les lutin du viande(6), and having my WoW account stolen by Communists (7).

The following day I had what was probably the most fucked up job interview I've ever been to.

It was in Bristol, and was with a fairly large publisher. One thing that was really weird was how it came about. Well, not really weird, like a green meteorite landed in my garden with a note attached to it saying "BLOG FOR US!". Just mildly odd.

You remember a few weeks ago I mentioned I was selling my blog out to the man? Well, last week I got my first check from Google, for five crisp english pounds. Now, £5 for the month of march, considering I wrote approximately 20,000 words for that seems a bit rubbish, right?

Until you realise I get paid £0.003 (one third of a penny) for each person who visits the blog, and then clicks on a link to another site from the ad bar. That means something like 2,000 people who visited the blog were gullible enough to want things like Iranian Brides, Nostradamus' prophecies explained or sweet, sweet, fake tanning products.(8)

The number of people reading the blog weekly is anything upward of 1500 a week, according to Google. Which is moderately exciting. It means you're reading a more credible publication than the Spectator, anyway.

This job interview came about as a result of the head of the company reading my blog, and calling me up out of the blue to ask me if I wanted to write a blog for him.

He said on the phone he wanted to pay me £15,000 for 1000 words a week. Which sounded too good to be true, but too tempting for me to just turn him down out of hand. Also, the job was based in Bristol, which would let me return to the South West, play in the Vanguard 750pt Warhammer campaign, hang out with the Westbury park crew again, and generally would make flowers bloom, the sun shine, and pretty ladies wear less clothing.

Anyway, so I leave the Fuhrer-bunker where I was staying (9), and rock up at the interview venue, where I meet the boss. The interview goes a bit like this:-

"Hello, I'm the boss. I don't like to judge people by CV - so tell me about you..."

"err...I'm Willard, I'm 29, I've been a journalist and PR for about five years...I'm keen to move back to Bristol to be closer to old university friends...that's about it really...surely you know alot of this from the blog right?"

"Qualifications?" (Remember - "I don't like to judge people by CV")

"Well, I did a Law degree originally, then did Masters degrees in International Criminal Justice and Business Entrepreneurship."

"Right. First of all, I want to reassure you that nothing we do here is technically illegal..."

Which sent alarm bells ringing. I mean, anyone who uses the phrase "not technically illegal"in that context is blatantly committing a string of crimes right there and then. In fact, I was surprised at that point to not see something comically criminal, like several burly men carrying a crate marked "DANGER - UNEXPLODED LANDMINES" walking through the office.

He then continued the interview by talking about his great idea, Meet the Boss . Com, which he wants me to blog for. Now, Meet the Boss dot com is basically Facebook for CEOs. And it's not technically illegal, you understand. Oh no. None of the lying about who is on it, or pretending to be them is technically illegal. Hmm, looked like fraud and identity theft to me, but hey.

Now, fair enough, you talk about the company. But he talked about the company for 45 minutes, without asking me another question. He also mentioned that he wanted me to write 42 blogs a week - all on different areas of specialist knowledge, like pharmaceuticals, defence, international monetary policy, that sort of simple thing. And to write articles interesting enough that company CEOs would want to read them.

That's right. A two-question interview. For a job requiring 42,000 words of copy a week. For comparison, as a staff writer on a magazine, you're expected to produce around 9,000 words a month. But this is 20 times the work, on 42 different subjects, for about 2/3rds the cash.

Just for reference, that's 8 blog posts a day, or one every hour of a working day, to write a 1000 word article that a CEO will want to read. For £15,000 a year. Even if this work rate was possible (which it isn't), the going rate freelance for a 1000 word article is about £250.

So, to meet my minimum union agreed rate, i'd have to stop writing for the year after 7 days.

The interview was so bizarre I felt it could have been part of a Banzai style handshaking experiment. I couldn't decide if he was a lunatic or a criminal. Maybe he was both.

It put me in the unpleasant position of having wasted £80-odd travelling to Bristol to have my time literally wasted - as I knew that even if he offered me the job, I'd have to turn it down. A secretary called me yesterday to tell me that some other poor fool had been offered the job and accepted. Good luck to that man, I say. I just hope they don't whip him too much, and occasionally let him make some Jambalya without deducting it from his slave-wages.

Anyway, so, as I may have mentioned, I'm doomed to always have to write for a living. I'm shit at everything else.(10) But writing's hard. Aside from criminals trying to enslave you, the temptations of women, gambling, drinking, toy soldiers, one of the main questions is what to write. So, I'm going to throw the rough skeletons of my ideas out there, and you, the public, can decide on what I write. By telephone vote. With Ant and Dec presenting. Oh yes.

So here's the options; please comment and tell me which one you'd want to read the most:-

Novel Ideas

Second Brightest Star - This is essentially the story of the HMS Canopus (as told in my blog post on Gallipoli) (11), but with a cast of fictional characters. There's definitely a Sebastian Faulks/Louis de Berniers style historical love story in there.

I'd also love to do it with subtle "classical" (as in Homeric) overtones - seeing as Gallipoli is where Troy was. It also strikes me that a good way to represent the politics in London would be in the same way that Homer cuts from scenes in front of Troy in the Illiad to scenes on Mount Olympus.

Les Mutiles - This is a story about a beautiful woman who is horribly disfigured in a terrorist attack on London (probably 7/7, or maybe a fictional one). As she recovers, and tries to rebuild her life, she starts read about a group of French soldiers scarred in WW one who decided to replace their faces with silver masks crafted to look like their young, handsome faces, most of whom subsequently killed themselves.

The story would trace her course through finding out how much people judge you on looks; possibly counterpointing her experiences with those of the French soldiers she is reading about. I'm sure she would end up wearing a silver mask at some point. This is more of a concept than a fully finished story; it's just I saw a photograph of one of those soldiers a few years ago and the image and tale have haunted me ever since.

Duality (working title) - This is a story told in parallel - one book about a young man arriving to fight in the war in the desert in WW2, and gradually his experiences making him a bastard, and the second book about the same character, a bitter and twisted old man, moving into an old people's home, and his experiences at the end of his life slowly redeeming him.

The idea is that you'd tell the story at the same pace, and the two books would be set side by side. So, all the left hand pages would be the young man, and all the right hand pages would be the old man. Equally, events would be mirrored; for example, in a sequence I've drafted, as a young man, he meets a very charismatic Polish officer and is impressed with the man's free spirited approach to life; as an old man, he tracks down the same Polish officer, only to find the man a drooling Alzheimer’s sufferer in a care home.

By the end of the book, you'd have a picture of how he became a bastard, and how at the very end of his life, he tried to reform himself.

Emissary/Exile/Emperor - The idea of these books is to write a Robin Hobb (12) style good quality fantasy trilogy. Yeah, I know fantasy trilogies aren't all that highbrow, but hey, I like them.

My idea is based, weirdly, on a dream I had ages ago. Essentially, an Emissary is sent from an advanced(as in they have indoor plumbing and an army, but are still near a fantasy level of technology - think Romans) near-atheistic empire to a spiritual Tibetan style kingdom in the mountains. He arrives, just, having been waylaid in all sorts of ways, shorn of all his badges of rank, and has to prove his worth to the people of the Mountain Kingdom. The subsequent books would deal with the Empire in more depth, with the main character becoming a Cesar figure.

Basically, it's I, Claudius meets Royal Assassin.

The Fairy Tale - This is the idea I've made the most progress with. If I've mentioned "the book" in the last couple of years, I meant this one.

The core idea is there's a young girl who goes to a boarding school she loathes. The only thing that makes the Boarding school bearable is her best friend. One day, the best friend vanishes, and no-one else remembered the best friend ever existed. The main character starts to think she is going insane, until she finds evidence that fairies stole her friend away.

She starts to sneak around the school at night, making contact with all the different kinds of fairies that live in the school. The story is essentially picaresque; she moves from group to group, learning more and more, until finally she finds here friend, who has been taken by the prince of the fairies to be his bride.

One of the central ideas of the book is the question of whether the main character is mad or not; in an ideal world you'll never know if she's hallucinating all of the fairies or not. The other thing I want to explore is the idea of fantasy and the real world; the idea that living without one or the other will cripple you as a person.

Now, the problem with this is it's a children's book that is very, very, very dark and complex. I've told the story to a bunch of people with all the detail; they tend to point out that insanity, little girls being stolen away to be brides and all the blood and fire (13) are all a bit terrifying. I think kids can cope with it; my pitch would be "It's Lovecraft writing Harry Potter".

Series Ideas

Sci -Fi Series - I have a good idea for a Sci-Fi series, which would be filmable on a British TV budget, and the sort of thing I'd watch. It's basically The Cruel Sea in Space. For those with less of a bent towards 1950s black and white classic war films, Battlestar Galactica without all the Cylon metaplot nonsense.

Basically, it's about a small, rusty, escort ship that is escorting convoys in a huge interstellar war. You never find out why the war is being fought, what's at stake; no-one ever dies nobly saving the universe - it's just a slice of life set in a grimy, attritional war. In an ideal world, the turnover of characters would be high, so no-one feels safe. It's an ensemble show; i'd like to have the sort of frenetic ever-changing dizzy feel that ER does so well, by swapping the "shifts" of characters and having lots of different pressures and merchant captains each week.

The way you make this feasible on British TV is to shoot it all on a real Submarine, with handheld cameras. Now, there are lots of museum submarines around which you could shoot on; the handheld cameras give things a documentary feel, while the submarine is cramped as hell. You could shoot the fighter scenes in the cockpits of 1950s airplanes like they did in Tankgirl. All the rest could be put in later with digital effects, sort of like Sky Captain.

This could also work as a comic in 2000AD.

Comedy Series - Myself, Mr. Orange and the Ginger Zero having compared notes on a comedy series. Ginger's was much, much better than mine, but I was able to churn out some good ideas for them, which I really should have put in an email by now. Guys, I've been too busy doing all of the above to get round to it. Obviously, I can't reveal the idea, as it's not solely mine, but suffice to say it's a Curb your Enthusiasm style comedy of embarrassment, with a British setting, focussing on dating and men without women.

Comedy Drama Series - The pilot for this is based to an extent on stuff that's actually happened to me; the tone would be sort of quirky drama, ala Johnathan Creek or Picket Fences. The idea for this would be a high flying lawyer loses his job, his wife, has to move back in with his parents etc etc.

Shortly after his life is ruined, he's sitting in a local cafe when the cute quirky cafe owner (and love interest) explains her problem to him; her evil landlord is going to turn her out unless she can fight him in court. Of course, our hero agrees to do it for next to nothing. This sets the pattern for the rest of the series; each week a decent person needs help, and the lawyer goes to court and wins the case. Courtroom/investigative drama-comedy; it's not going to win me any BAFTAs, but I reckon it would be fun to write and watch.

Movie ideas

Low Budget Horror Movie - The idea here is the movie starts where most horror movies end; at the funeral of a couple of cute girls. The girls were sisters; the film is about their father trying to work out what happened to his teenage daughters in the woods. There are sinister government agents, and a creepy monster you don't see much of.

About 1/3rd of the way in, after the initial investigations are thwarted by the Govt. agents, who you've set up as the baddies, the dad finds the agents corpses partially devoured in the forest, and then dad is attacked by the monster - he just about escapes, and then the agent's boss shows up. The boss is super cool, and played by someone super cool who never dies in the movies. I'd write the part for Sam Elliott (14).

The boss explains he thinks it's a werewolf. They go werewolf hunting. With some difficulty, they trap the monster, and kill it. Here's the twist - after the kill it, it turns back into one of the Daughters. Then, as you're digesting this; and before you realise that there must be two of them, the Boss gets killed by the other werewolf.

Then dad hunts and kills the other creature; insert soul searching if necessary.

Comic Idea

Golden Age - This is basically my magnum-opus Preacher style comic. Essentially, the idea is to tell the story of a WW2 with Superpowers through the eyes of the people who gain superhuman powers. It wouldn't pull any punches; people would die left right and centre - and if you hit a man and you are super-strong, he'd be paste.

The really unique thing would be to shift viewpoints every 6 issues or so; so, the first six issues would be the Brits retreating from France, Battle of Britain, etc - the next six would be decent Germans settling into occupied France, and moving on to invade the Balkans, being horrified by the SS - the next six Russians defending Leningrad in 1941 - then the next six Americans at Pearl harbour, and so on.

Obviously, characters would re-occur between titles; so when you see a German who you like show up in the Russian comic, you'd be thinking "Oh no! Don't kill Hans!". It seems like a good way to create a wider Mythos quickly, a good way to move the timeline one, etc etc.

So, which one do you think I should devote my energy to first?

By the way, what's motivated me to write all this out is three things - firstly, a girl I'm not a massive fan of got a novel published a week or so ago, and I thought, "Man, that should really be me getting things published".

Secondly, I'm off to Paris this weekend to do some work as the DCA of the Paris IV. Now, the main reason for doing this is not my abiding love for French debating, French culture or French Tactical Skill at 40k. It's mostly for private reasons, that Hemingway would approve of.

But the other thing I plan to do in Paris, is to visit possibly the most amazing bookshop in the world. It's called Shakespeare and Company, and is staffed by young aspiring writers, who all work for the crotchety old former GI who owns it. He charges them 300 words a day, on their novels, to live there.

It's got quite a history. Hemingway used to hang out there in the 1920s, along with James Joyce, F.Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Ford Madox Ford. Ulysses was written there. Orwell got barred because his Russian housemate stole too many books.(15) It was closed down in 1941, after the owner at the time refused to sell a signed copy of Finnegan's Wake to an SS officer. Hemingway liberated the shop personally in 1944, having commandeered a tank to tear the bars off the windows.

It's a pretty amazing place, as I'm sure the photo captures to an extent. A good place to get inspiration and motivation. I'm hoping to pick up a good translation of Xenophon's The Ten Thousand when I'm in there.

Thirdly, Vin Diesel was given $247 million a couple of weeks ago to make a Hannibal epic, written by him, starring him as Hannibal(16). Now, between you and me, while I respect Vin for his ability to steam, nay, smoulder, in ever-so-slightly homerotic roles, I'm not sure about his writing talent, or how good he'll look on an elephant.

Still, if in the current economic climate, the Vin can convince some schmuck in Hollywood to part with an amount of money usually reserved for bailing out bankers(17), maybe I can get someone to part with some cash...maybe there will be some left for the Willard.

So, until next week, imagine me sipping a sophisticated coffee on the Left bank,

Willard

(1) My union is the NUJ - National Union of Journalists. Needless to say, the nation will not collapse if we strike. In fact, I have a nasty feeling the nation wouldn't even notice until the next series of "I’m a celebrity, revitalise my flagging career" or "Britain's got a Freakshow" or whatever other reality TV circus Simon Cowell is ringmaster of this week. Incidentally, don't you think a red tailcoat and waxed 'tache would suit him down to the ground?

(2) There is something tragic in the fact that I am much more likely to believed with option two than option one.

(3) My zombie-make-up applying chum at auntie beeb; her relationship is set to "on" this week.

(4) A man who dresses in the manner of a male prostitute, who changed his name by deed poll to "Jefferson A-Bomb McDeath, Urban Destruction" while we were at University. He's a teacher now; I wonder if his students call him Mr. McDeath or Mr. Urban Destruction?

(5) My chain smoking irish former debate partner, who is singularly scathing about my (admittedly appalling) taste in women; for example, a choice quote on a woman I was involved with a couple of years ago: - "My opinion, Willard, is she's always been a Vacuous Whore". Miss Marlboro now works as a high-powered insolvency lawyer in London. Her and Mr. McDeath have an odd relationship based on her bringing cigarettes, him bringing lighters, and then him telling her about all the women/men/goats he's bummed that week.

(6) "The Meat Fairy", which, by the way, is a name he answers to. He works in an abattoir, carries a shotgun to work, and like all Frenchmen who are cruel to animals for a living, is a very happy man.

(7) Yeah, my precious World of Warcraft account was hacked this weekend. At first, I thought it had been hacked by the bastards who stole my laptop, but apparently it was Chinese internet thieves. You see, Socialism ruins everything, even imaginary fantasy worlds.

Fortunately, a crack team of Blizzard employees were able to rescue my characters this evening. Part of me hopes this involved Pat "I sacrificed my life to Lord Ragnaros" Dunford rappelling out of a helicopter whilst firing a machine gun at tiny men in sampan hats, probably somewhere in the Jungshau autonomous rice growing region. But it probably involved a spotty guy at a computer who thinks "Lol" is an acceptable vocalized sentence pressing three buttons. The world is a much more interesting place in my head, you see.

(8) If you are now a beautifully bronzed man, watching his niquabed wife flipping through Les Propheties on your honeymoon bed as you read this, well, I take my hat off to you sir. Thanks for my fiver.

(9) The home of Matt "Just because I like Shiny leather, Flags and Rallies, doesn't mean I'm an anti-semite" Smith and his sinister South African Henchman. "Randal, randal, randal...you wouldn't want to hurt my feelings would you? " - it still sends shivers down my spine.

(10) Except doing DPS on a shaman in WoW, and no-one will pay me to do that.

(11)http://thetoysoldiersneverletmedown.blogspot.com/2009/03/battleships-mateship-and-adventures-in.html if you haven't read it - I warn you, this post is LOOOONG. The Canopus story is told in Footnote 19(!).

(12) What do you mean you've never read Robin Hobb! Buy some, now! My favourite one is Shaman's Crossing - it's worth reading for the amazing command of first-person narrative alone.

(13) There's blood sacrifice, self-harming and incineration at points - the fairies I've written range from the simply untrustworthy to the highly, highly dangerous.

(14) http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000385/

(15) See? Socialists ruin everything.

(16) Hannibal the Roman-crushing Carthaginian pachyderm propagandist, rather than say, the cigar chomping leader of the A-team.

(17) Imagine being that guy's boss -

"Hey Boss! I just gave Vin Diesel Two-Hundred-and-forty-seven-million dollars to make an Elephant movie!" I'd take a long drag on my big cigar, blow out a cloud of smoke, point, and say,

"Marvin, you're fired."

Lies and Old news

2009-04-02T23:56:00.000-07:00

Hey Everybody,

I'm afraid a combination of the documentary and burying my dad means the blog will be a little odd this week.

What I'm going to do is upload an old thing I wrote ages ago that I like, and hope that absorbs the ten minutes on a Friday morning this usually takes to read.

Oh, and I'll update you on my life:-

The Documentary is going ahead, scheduled on June 15th, on BBC2 as part of the This World strand. My involvement is yet to be absolutely ratified, but I passed the screen test, the executive producers said yes; basically, it's on if one key guest agrees to be interviewed by me.

Iran was cancelled, due to the Iranians naughtily selling missile parts to the North Koreans. Frau Reinhardt, and her boss, Ban-ki-Moon (1), were so upset by this they refused to countenance the idea of getting the Iranian's heritage sites protected. Which is bad, as it means a.) The Americans can destroy all of Iran's heritage this week and b.) I don't get any money to service my debts.

Sorry guys. It's Kim-Jong-Il's fault.

Oh, and I found out my suspicions about a former girlfriend's real occupation were true this week; let's call her Miss Bond.

Anyway... one with the old writing....

Willard Foxton and the Thorny Question of Truth

Well, it's always a difficult one for me. At some point, when I tell a story, someone says, "but Willard, what really happened?"At this point I do as pictured below and shriek, like Dracula, "AGGHHHH!! THE TRUTH!! IT BURNS!!!!!!!". Essentially, I consider the actual truth of a story to be pretty unimportant.

In fact, I can't put it better than an old friend of mine, the excellent God of Rock, Mr. Ben Brooks, a long time "Speed Freek":-

"After a while, though, you become aware of what has become known as the "Willanory" effect, whereby his stories become more and more exaggerated before spiraling out of control and crushing women, children and entire cities. After a while, you begin to wonder whether or not his stories are based on any element of truth whatsoever..."

"I personally have decided to not care, since my own concept of what is real and what is not exists entirely within my own head, and as long as Willard Foxton's stories are entertaining it matters little whether or not they are true, or even based on the slightest element of truth. Apparently, he will soon be going the occupied territories in Israel, to spend three weeks helping to teach military commanders how to make speeches. The fact that he has a background in debating and public speaking and what-not makes this sound almost barely plausible... But the simple fact is that if in four weeks or so he reappears with some funny stories, it doesn't matter whether or not they're true. 'cos if we cared more about truth than fiction, we wouldn't bother watching the news on TV, would we? ".

More on Israel later, but the point is, Ben is right. If someone tells you a joke, you don't say "But how can we ever truly DIVINE the purpose behind avian migration! Why the chicken crosses the road, or why geese fly South for the Winter, is one of the great unanswered questions of our existence and you, sir, are making light of it!". And then storm out, a cloud of disgust following you. Well, it's the same with my stories. I expect everyone who listens to, or reads my stories to take them with a pinch of salt, ok?

I promise to include a patented Willard TRUTH-O-MATIC 5000 reading at the bottom of any story i post on here, just for those of you who foolishly give a toss. On the other side of the coin, there IS what another old chum & long suffering housemate, Mr. Matt "I'm Not a Nazi" Smith describe as the "Long Term Willard Effect".He categorized this into three separate stages.

Matt didn't actually write this on a blog somewhere, he was too busy invading Poland. The Three stage theory is summarized below.

STAGE ONE:- The Meeting.

You first meet Will, and he tells you a bunch of wacky stories. You piss yourself laughing and think to yourself "WOW! What an interesting life this guy leads. Mine is so boring in comparison, I should give up watercolour painting and found a political movement".

STAGE TWO:-The Doubt

Will tells you a story you KNOW cannot be true. Maybe you know a participant, who has told you what really happened (ARRGH TRUTH!!! IT BURNS!!!!). Or maybe you were there, and don't remember the policeman being a Belgian midget. Whatever. You then start to think "Ah, well, if this outlandish story isn't true, MAYBE ALL HIS OTHER STORIES ARE LIES! OUTRAGE!". You then organize a Massive Riot/Pogrom targeting Willard's fellow Jews. Maybe call it Crystal Night? But you're not a Nazi. Oh no.

STAGE THREE:- The Horror

It's at this point that you're actually with me when a Willanory story actually occurs. So say, My car explodes into a 200ft Pillar of smoke & flame, or is vandalized by antisemites, all the windows are smashed and you see me drive it home to Folkestone in a massive pair of ski goggles, WW1 fighter pilot style. Or maybe I'm with you in your bunker in Berlin, when the Russians arrive, and someone delivers an enormous Chocolate Cake for your Birthday. You then see me tell the story, word for word, with no exaggeration. It's at this point you realize "Oh my god, some of the stories ARE True! BUT WHICH ONES!! THE HORROR! THE HORROR!!!! IT'S AT THE WINDOW!!!!! ARGGGGHH". (NB - This joke is only funny if you've read HP Lovecraft stories. If you haven't, why not? IT'S IMPORTANT TO MAKING YOU LAUGH!)

Oh, and if you haven't, read them. Lovecraft's sort of like a 1920s version of me, but with less jokes, more sanity blasting tentacles from outside of time. Not to say my stories don't have sanity blasting tentacles from outside of time, from... time to time.

Find his stories at http://www.hplovecraft.com

/ )

There's also a step Four, pointed out by the Lovely Miss Colletta Smith . Colletta is an extremely sensible, down to eath, completely normal Northern Lass. (Quote:- "WHERE do you think York is?!? It's nowhere near the Scots border, you Fookin' prancing Southern Poof!" Actually Colletta said something like this, but in a much more intelligent and sensible way. I'm making her sound more Northern for comic effect).

She's like, the anti-Willard. (BTW,Colletta is the best traveling companion ever, but more on that later.) Step four is best summarized by the following Conversation between me and Colletta, on a beach near Tel Aviv in Jerusalem:- "Look, Willard, We could do that, but it would be stupid! Perhaps stupid beyond belief. Surely you can appreciate the consequences!" "I Know Colletta... But I'm going to do it anyway! Think of the story!".

Now, this illustrates a fascinating evolution of the story doctrine. My life has been focused so much on a quest for narrative, that I now actually seek out dangerous and exciting and amusing situations, just so I can have a story to tell later... Basically, Step Four, as outlined by Colletta, is the willful neglect of personal safety and common sense, it pursuit of a great tale.

Factored into that is my own base level of total ignorance of "common sense" (it's common, and like burberry caps, I want none of it). Thus, often at the root of the tales is a simple bolt that could have been tightened, a letter that could have been answered, that would have avoided say, a Home invasion by Somalis that forced me to live in the pinkest hotel in England with the worlds greatest living Englishman, Captain Jim Bligh .

I'm basically a very sick man. But you can laugh at my misfortune...

Hope you enjoyed that blast from the past, normal service will be resumed next week...

Willard

(1) I've always thought someone with the name Ban-ki-Moon (It's pronounced "Banky Moon") sounds like a 1930s cockney vaudeville performer. You know, the sort of person who plays a banjo while singing songs about washing. Probably best not to mention that if I ever meet him.

Selling Out, Jobs and Telling Stories

2009-03-26T08:27:00.000-07:00

Hey all,

for the first time in ages, I can start a blog post without apologising for lateness! Amazing. So, instead I've decided to start by not apologising. At this rate, I could be a Labour minister.

Anyway, I have to be on time from now on; recently, I recieved an email from Google, recommending I "monetize"(1) my blog because of the level of traffic on it. This means that I, Willard Foxton, your friend, can make money if you click on the links to your left. However, the machine at the heart of the interweb that slices up animals to divine your likes and dislikes really isn't designed to cope with the randomness of this blog.

So, mostly it offers nostalgia tours of Gallipoli. Still if you want one of those, feel free to make we one tenth of a penny by doing it through this site. I'll be rich in no time, no time at all I tell you!

So, to cut to the chase, like all truly great people, I've sold out. Of course, to deploy the Matt Smith defence, it's less like selling out than buying in, as I've never disavowed people making money by the sweat of their brow. (2) Of course, this will be met with glee by my arch-capitalist Merchant banker chum, who we'll call Mr.Orange.

Now, some of you may have met Mr.Orange. He's not called that because he wears dark suits, bleeds alot and is secretly a cop. He's called that because he's orange. I think Mr.Orange is what happens to you when you stray too close to capitalism's beating black heart.

A few years ago, when I met him, he was a typical ginger boy, known as "Ginger Matt". But within the heart of this ordinary finance student at Bristol university, lurked a dark hatred. A hatred of the colour of his hair. So Ginger Matt started to dye his hair black (3). Perfectly normal, right? Slight problem - Ginger Matt had the typically "pale and interesting" redhead skin tone, so once he died his hair magic marker black, he kept being invited to Sisters of Mercy Gigs by skinny goth girls wielding oversized art portfolio folders full of pictures of scary bondage gear.

Ginger Matt didn't want to be a Goth. He wanted to look normal. What was the solution to this problem? San Tropez fake tan products. So much fake tan he looks less tanned, more varnished. So much fake tan he leaves orange murder outlines on sheets he sleeps on. Basically, at first he looked like a promotional stunt in a particularly ill-advised Tango promotion.

Ginger Matt was dead. Mr.Orange was born.

As he left Bristol university and entered the world of corporate banking, more changes appeared. His teeth were bleached to an H-Bomb blast level of whiteness; a female friend related to us that, in her words, "the collars and cuffs match". That's right; he has every hair on his body dyed, by dextrous Vietnamese beauticians in a local salon.

Mr.Orange also continued his quest for perfection into the realm of the corporate gym; his house rarely has any food in it, beyond a protein shake so "powerful" it is illegal in the EU, and he has to buy it from a shady Polish "Healthfood" shop. This protein shake, by the way, retails under the fantastic name "MUSKUL CYTADELA" ("Muscle Fortress").

He has become much better at the makeup and hair dying over the years; he is now so tanned and buff he looks like he is a piece of WAG arm candy from a parallel universe where professional football is a woman-only game. The sort of man who can sell his story to make £££s.

One of the other reasons Mr.Orange may rejoice for the extra source of income is that, with my new found status as a Documentary Film-Maker (rah rah), I may be moving in with him, in his glorious flat, which is just off Sloane Square. The flat is in an amazing art-deco building. So amazing they filmed Poirot there once. It even has one of those 1920s lifts with the Brass Safety cage.

Getting a job. Check. Getting a house. Check.

Right, I can stop writing this blog here! See you later suckers!

Of course, nothing is ever that simple.

Now, the documentary. I am getting paid for my time, which is good. But everyone, and I mean everyone I meet, tells me that something like half of the documentaries that get commissioned get cancelled. Which is a bit scary, as it means I could get a call from producer Alex at any minute to say (adopt Alan Sugar accent) "You're Fired".

I though once the greenlight was lit, and the BBC was actually spending your money on it, it would definately get made. Seems, like so many things, I may yet be wrong. So, I need a plan B.

And Plan B is a bit more ropey than Plan A. Plan B was provided for me by a friend at the UN; a friend with a name like a war criminal, who nonetheless does valuable vork at ze UN. Ja? Now, this charming german chum, was responsible for sending me on my last big adventure, to the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.(4)

Now, the German chum (we'll call her Fraulein UN) want me to go on another adventure. I can't say where, but lets call it Willard's Rogue State Desert Adventure.(5) And this Rogue state desert adventure would pay...well, alot of money (6). And I could use that money. For a whole host of things. Now, having checked, it should be possible to slot the adventure into the gap before we start filming.

The only trouble with this is things might change with the Documentary, and I might ruin everything by being in the wrong country. Note I don't include any possibility of bad things happening in Rogue State X; I always come back from those in one piece. (7)

I've also re-applied to spend my summer at the mad school run by my ultra-idealistic friends who run a school for the children of Dictators, Oil Shieks, oligarchs and minor european nobility.(8) Now, this was fun last year, and well paid, but I'd prefer to be doing something more, well, stable and sensible.

You see, the documentary and the house in London all represent the new, sensible, responsible Willard. The adventure in the Rogue state and the weeks of minding spoilt millionaire's kids (9) are right out of the old school Willard "But think of the Story!" playbook.(10)

Anyway,

Hope this raised a smile,

Willard

PS:- Originally, I was intending to use this post as sounding board for new writing ideas, lay out my grandiose plans for my Steel Legion army and to slag off Vin Diesel a bit. But more on that later!

(1) This is not a good word. I suspect it was invented by economists, a breed of people I inherently distrust. In all honesty, I believe economic theory to be as useful for predicting the future as mad medieval wise men cutting up harmless furry animals and reading their entrails. Of course, economic theory is a bit more socially acceptable these days. I'm told.

(2) Or the sweat of other people who are clicking on internet links. Hopefully, I can set up a factory in Guadalcanal, where tiny nimble fingered children can order holidays in Turkey over and over again. It's probably better than sewing shoes.

(3) Not just any black. Like many men unfamiliar with the process of hair dyes, his hair is approximately the same shade a black magic marker writes in. Midnight Blue with a bit of Chaos Black mixed in to GW fans. A shade of colour only produced in nature by the carapaces of particularly evil Stag Beetles. Suffice to say nobody looks at Mr.Orange and thinks "Maybe he's born with it"

(4) North Korea to you. NEVER call it that while there; it's a good way to get deported, bayoneted, or served under-done cat.

(5) Suggestions for more Pulpy titles are appreciated. Think Biggles-esque - I quite like the idea of "Willard and Tale the Ayatollah's Gold", personally...

(6) Even if I don't get the Ayatollah's Gold. Two weeks at $250 a day, tax free - you do the maths.

(7) If I didn't, Captain W.E. Johns wouldn't be able to write "Willard and the Cave of Fear" next year. As usual, I'll dust my self off, and have another adventure. Feel free to add yourself into the Biggles metaphor as you wish; Smithy is totally Flight Sergeant Smyth though:)

(8) The idea is to foster world peace by having the children of important people play pingpong and dance to techno together. It's not the best idea in the world, but it does lead to entertaining discipline situations, such as the children of Oligarchs telling you that if they aren't allowed to listen to Las Ketchup's Ketchup song one more time, they will literally buy you and have you killed. Like I say, interesting.

(9) One American teacher, a fine man named Steve "Big Dog" West actually had to body check a 14 year old lebanese oil heir against a bus in the rain to get the kid to move. It was the most action movie thing I've ever seen, as a burly yank grabs this kid, in a howling rainstorm, slams him against the side of the vehicle and screams "GET ON THE GOD-DAMN BUS!" Michael Bay could shoot the hell out of that scene:)

(10) The best explanation of this playbook is at http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=2215912760&id=507439707&index=3 I should probably put that on the blog at some point... hmmm.

5 minutes to Midnight

2009-03-20T02:00:00.001-07:00

Right, again, the blog is late. In fact, rather symbolically, I did in fact start writing it at 11.55 on Thursday night. Then, I fell asleep on the keyboard.

This is my fault; when I decided to say "oh yeah guys, Wednesdays" I could have looked at my work schedule and seen that by say, right now, Wednesdays might be busy. I used to be able to slack off at work; sadly that's not true anymore.

Obviously, busy at work is good; I miss the pirates, but feel like I'm doing much more good preparing to expose Bankers than complaining about Pirates. I wonder what it says about me that I respect heavily armed Somalis in boats, and despise law-abiding men in suits in the City. If I was forced to choose one of those lifestyles, hand me the AK-47 and the Rum, Abdullah.

I think that it probably makes me a romantic. Or an idiot. Or maybe both.

Thus, I'm changing blog writing night to late Thursday, to be read Friday morning.(1) This should give me time to rob more ships midweek. Ahem.

I don't like all forms of armed insurgency. I mostly only like the kind that involves stealing from rich people. A friend recently started a blog on the other kind of insurgency; you know, the kind that involves murals, hunger strikes and flags. It's very good. Almost embarrassingly so. If you care at all about the crimes committed in Ireland's name at Massarene and so on, have a look at it here: - http://dgdoyle84.wordpress.com/2009/03/11/why-are-dissident-attacks-happening-now/

In his first post though, Jimmy (2) lambasts most blogs for being poor quality, self-indulgent rants. Well, he's right. My blog IS self-indulgent (hence all the chat about toy soldiers and girls that no-one cares about), and ranty (hence all the chat about politics & ideology that no-one cares about). Basically, if I cut out all the self-indulgence and ranting this would be a blank page. Which it usually is on the day it's meant to be published. Let the self indulgent ranting begin!

I promised The Ginger Zero (3) that I'd write something about the movie version of Watchmen. I realise that there are hundreds and hundreds of articles and reviews you could read on this, but I feel you should read mine. It's just as self-indulgent as most, but I feel I have a unique perspective.

You see, most people writing about Watchmen are either die-hard superhero comic fanboys defending the science fiction fantasy genre with terminal intensity, or snooty academics who've flipped through the comic (sorry "Graphic Novel") once, said "hmm, interesting" and then watched the movie and been disgusted by the violence.

I'm a Snooty academic. And I'm a Comic (sorry "Graphic Novel") fan. Ergo, I am the most qualified person on earth to review watchmen. What, you think you can stop me? I did it 35 minutes ago...(4)

Let's get to the point. I loved watchmen the movie. It was probably one of the best films we'll see all year. I know. I watch two or three films a week, either on film4 (bless it) or at my local cinema. I got into the habit of watching loads of films when I worked as a projectionist/popcorn seller/ticket window monkey at said local picture palace.

And it was literally, a Picture Palace. A tiny local cinema which had been open since the early 20th century. They showed The Battle of the Somme there, for God's Sake. Sure, the seats aren't comfortable, and the screen is about the size of LCD Plasma-pocalypse televisions these days, but it's home. Other cinemas don't feel the same. (5)

Anyway, most films are rubbish. Sad but true. (6) And Watchmen isn't rubbish. But you'd never guess that from the reviews and some of the word of mouth. Among the comments I've heard are "More like Looking-at-my-Watch man", "too violent, hideously violent, and that Rape scene...Ughhh!", "All that cold war stuff is irrelevant now" and "It was just too complicated! What was going on!".

To an extent, I think some of those are fair.

The film is overlong. If Casablanca only needed two hours, then you'd better have a damn good reason for overstepping that mark.

The film is violent and complicated. It's not Spider-man 3, and I'm sure if you were expecting that evil superhumans were going to be a little bit emo, rather than say frying people's faces, exploding people and breaking muggers necks, it was a shock. By the way, all of those things are things the "Good" characters do.

The bad people do things like attempt rape, shoot grenade launchers into demonstrators, and vaporize New York. As for the rape scene, was it gratuitous? I don't think so - it established that the Comedian was a total bastard. It's a character moment. It's an effective scene; one of the few rape scenes shot from the perspective of the victim in full light.

I think the reason people find the scene upsetting is because it feels real. It's the most common form of rape; by someone you know and trust, somewhere you feel safe. The real reason people find the rape scene upsetting is precisely the reason it has to stay in the film; because it's great cinema.

I also think it's interesting that I haven't read a single comment in the press on the morality of shooting a pregnant asian girl in the face, something the same character does later on in the film. Everyone focuses on the (attempted) rape of the white girl. Why? Racism? Maybe. I think it's more likely that the shooting scene isn't as effective; it's much more about Dr.Manhattan's reaction than about the Comedian's act.

As for it's irrelevant, well, I don't think that's fair. The story is about human nature, and how destructive it is; about how we can't rely on "heroes" to save us. I think that message is particularly important with Barack Obama in the Whitehouse; there's a huge collective action problem where we all feel the world is safe now Bush is gone, but all the "irrelevant apocalypse stuff" is just as relevant, what with all of the dangers of climate change, economic meltdown etc etc. And it's not like Russia just threw all those nuclear bombs into the sea.

If you think it's too complicated, then, well it is complicated. As I said above, it's not Spider-Man 3. When you walk into watchmen, you aren't walking into an adaptation of comic written in the 1960s, aimed at children. You're walking into an adaptation of a real work of literature, aimed at adults, written in the bleakest part of the North of England in the 1980s.

To be honest, I've read the comic (sorry "Graphic Novel") so many times, I can't imagine what it must be like to watch the film without having read it. I was sitting through the (incredible) opening montage, amazed that they had been able to actually put all of what was infront of me on the screen in a coherent way without ruining it. Some films would have taken the first TWO HOURS to relate what happens in that montage. Even in the comic, all of that extra detail is contained in tons of extra text segments in fake newspaper clippings and so on.

Is Watchmen literature? I suppose if it is, then it's ok for the film to be complex. And it's equally ok to turn round to people who complain it's too complex and tell them that they should have read the comic (have I demonstrated my contempt for the term "Graphic novel" enough now?).

The comic is a masterpiece of the art. It has a truly amazing structure; a nine panel grid on almost every page, which allows Moore (7) to control absolutely the pace at which the story unfolds. Moore uses this predictable pattern to do all kinds of amazing structural things; for example, some issues can be read top to bottom, as well as left to right, the issue where they work everything out "Fearful symmetry" is completely symmetrical, front to back.

The first time you read the comic, the story carries you away; you don't see all the clever stuff until later. It's the best kind of clever symbolism; the kind that doesn't impede the story. It's absolutely packed with depth; if you read the scripts Moore gave to Gibbons, the scipts are over 100 pages long.

Gibbons, the artist did all kinds of clever things too; for example, the recurring motif of the smiley face, which pops up everywhere, from the comedian's badge, to the crater on Mars, to the power sockets in the walls, which are smiley faces upside down. His meddling with colour theory is fascinating too.

If you look at comics from the sixties, all of the heroes are in red, white and blue, and all of the villains are in oranges, purples, yellows and blacks. This was decided on using colour theory, based on the inks available in the 60's. Now think about watchmen - all the characters you think are bastards (the Comedian, Manhattan) are in the patriotic colours, and all the "heroes" are wearing the browns, purples, etc.

Gibbons also manipulates the mood and lighting with the colours too; using a lighter pallet for comedy moments, and darkening it with reds for the most disturbing scenes. The colourist didn't decide on this; you can see from the scripts it's all Gibbon's idea.

The characters are rounded and fully developed; but I think Moore's greatest gift is to make you sympathise with fundamentally unpleasant people. Rohrschach is a psychopath; but we like him, and root for him all the way through. We even respect his refusal to compromise and be silent at the end. Manhattan is inhuman, but we understand why he is the way he is. Even the Comedian has qualities; he's the first to point out to Manhattan what the Dr has become (something it takes "the smartest man alive" much longer to figure out), and also unearths Veidt's scheme, but makes the decision to leave it alone, as he realises it's the best thing to do.

Also, the comic made the Graphic novel. Without Alan Moore, without Watchmen, the comic would still be for children. Watchmen proved a comic with adult themes could sell, in fact, could sell better than the traditional dross. Comics are just a medium to tell stories. Like any medium, they have their strengths and weaknesses.

Novels are great for showing internal conflict; plays are great for showing personal conflict; film is great for showing extra-personal conflict. Comics can do all of these things well; they're versatile because they can still have the grandeur of film (without a budget; in fact, it's easier to convince and artist to draw a city full of dinosaurs on fire than a dialogue scene in a restaurant, and costs the same in pencils), but without the time pressure film has.

Film has two hours at most. Click, click, click goes the projector, 24 frames per second. With a comic, you can read it over weeks. Your audience can flip back ten pages and marvel at the symmetry; look for those hidden visual clues.

Ok, so I think I've established at least a prima facie case for why the comic is worth reading. Is the film worth seeing? I'd say unquestionably yes.

But what is the problem with the film? It's unquestionably flawed. Where does the flaw come? I'd say in the casting of Ozymandias, and the way that fluffs the ending. In the book, Ozymandias is unquestionably the most badass of them all. You really have no doubt he can take on all the rest of them and win. It's amazing when he catches the bullet at the end.

In the film, they amp up the prowess of all the other characters. This isn't a big problem; you could have amped up Ozzy too. But the trouble is the other characters (especially Jacky Earl Haley as Rohrschach) just act Ozymandias off the screen. The actor plays up the playboy thing too much; he never exudes intelligence or menace.

Thus, Ozzy fluffs the key line of dialogue in the film. He sort of mumbles "I did it 35 minutes ago". In the book, that line is like a punch in the gut. You realise it's all been for nothing. The villain has already won. In the movie, it's just another line.

Also, the movie blows the New York destruction scene. The comic focuses on the aftermath. It has SIX PAGES, FORTY EIGHT PANELS, of all the characters, all the places you have seen in New York for the last eleven issues, completely destroyed. Showing you the aftermath gives the line impact; the film ruins it by showing you it happening - the whole point is he's already done it.

Also, much like the rape scene, your imagination is much more effective when it has to fill in the blanks; when you can put yourself in the situation. That's why showing New York awash with blood and bodies is more effective than a CGI explosion.

So, the Watchmen movie - a great visual companion to a great book. But just like Pride and Prejudice, you should read the book.

Hope this was interesting, and not too self-indulgent or late,

Willard

PS:- You really should read more Allan Moore. Almost everything he's written is amazing, and has been adapted into rubbish films. Don't watch From Hell, V for Vendetta or The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, read the comics. The films are the basic skeletons of the comic plots, if written in crayon by a hyper-active four year old.

(1) This is partly because there aren't any good columns in the Friday Guardian. Just imagine the blog in the Guardian typeface with a cleverly drawn cartoon et voila! All is well with the world.

(2) Jimmy's real name is Derek. But everyone calls him Jimmy. This is so common on his bountiful green isle, that Irish passports have a "known as" section in the coverslip.

(3) That sir, is a good super-hero name. You should totally be out fighting crime in Tonbridge Wells tonight.

(4) This, is a good joke. If you've read the comic, but not if you've seen the film.

(5) Because I have to pay. Also, because the old man who owns it isn't there. He's called Ian Luck, and is a total legend. My favourite Ian Luck story involves him shouting to me over a packed queue for the movie Sixth Sense "Cor, these punters are going to be gutted when they work out Bruce Willis is Dead, eh Will?".

This is funny in of itself; it's even funnier when you realise he does this for every film with a twist ending ever. Including Titanic. "The Ship sinks! Who'd have thought it!?"

(6) Yes, even Saw part 5.

(7) Alan Moore. The writer. If you didn't know that, this self-indulgent rant may be wasted on you.

(8) Yes, Middle temple owns a Hunt-class destroyer docked on the Thames. It's for swearing people in to the maritime bar. Remember, Middle templars, we are the best Inn, because we are the only one with our own warship.

Lateness, Rapture & Rand

2009-03-12T17:22:00.000-07:00

Hey everybody.

I’m sorry the blog is late again. At least, this is giving you an insight into what it’s like to edit a publication I write for. The best part about that insight is you can’t withhold payment, or insist I not say nasty things about Tom Cruise.(1)

The reasons it’s late are many and manifold. For a start, with Bernie Madoff pleading guilty this week, I’ve been deluged with requests from journalists. Those of you who are at work super-early may get a chance to see me chatting about it on the breakfast sofa at 8.10 am. I’ve also just beaten the deadline on a piece for the New York Post.

On top of that, I’m still trying to deal with the fallout from dad’s death and lots of other things too. So, a class action lawsuit, TV documentary writing and researching, appearing on the BBC, doing my bit for charity, my birthday, coming up with a vast and epic roleplaying game to beat Bass’ last masterpiece of the art, writing for American newspapers, dealing with the emotional fallout from the weekend and generally tracking down assorted people who my father met/owed money to/had fathered.(2)

At one point this week, I was on a late, rickety train (3) to Oxford, having been asked by the world’s 3rd most evil South African (4) to appear in a comedy debate for comic relief, trying to write a speech, while talking to an American lawyer (5). You haven’t known frustration until you’ve discussed difficult legal issues, with a guy in LA, on a mobile phone, on a train.

Midway through this farrago, a shrill fat woman decided to berate me for “discussing money, in the wake of such a tragedy as your father’s death!”. She then proceeded to shout quotes from the bible at me, while everyone else on the train looked extremely interested in their magazines/books/the palms of their hands as the covered their faces in horror.

This is just an example of what my life is like. You see, I’m not just busy, I’m busy and I’m Willard. The weirdness keeps coming, thick and fast. And yet I still feel obliged to write this. Probably because it’s amazingly cathartic to share all this nonsense with you lovely people.

Anyway, in between all of this journalism, comedy, detective work and law, I’ve had to go on a lot of train rides. And I’ve read a lot of books. Some have been awesome. Some have been a bit meh. But there’s one I’m going to talk about in particular. Hopefully, I can save you all the trouble of reading it, because it’s probably the most evil book I’ve ever read.

What was it? Mein Kampf? The 777 and other Quabalist writings by Aleister Crowley? The Necronomicon by Abdul Alhazred? (6)

No, it’s a science fiction book, written by a Russian dissident and star witness at the Mcarthy witch-hunts, called Ayn Rand.

It’s called Atlas Shrugged. I was interested to read it; Alan Greenspan said of it “It taught me that capitalism is not only practical and efficient but also moral." But really, don’t bother.

It’s dark. Crazy dark. Crazy enough to include quotes like “Altruism is the only real evil. The man who speaks to you of making a sacrifice is speaking of slaves and masters, and he intends to be the master.” It is the exposition of Rand’s theory of life; the theory of objectivism, a theory which says that “people of the mind” – writers, artists, entrepreneurs & inventors should cut themselves loose of a society which expects them to contribute to the rest if it; to hand money to “moochers and parasites”(7) as Rand would have it.

As well as a philosophical thought experiment, it’s also a turgidly written, 1000 page, rubbish science fiction novel. It is frankly, in need of a ruthless edit. Apparently, Rand’s publisher suggested this, to which she curtly responded, “Would you cut the bible?”.

Well, aside from the obvious answer, “Yeah, totally, especially all the contradictory and/or mad bits”, it is clear Rand wouldn’t get into her own elitist city on the strength of the novel’s plot. At its heart it’s a mystery; it’s about a railroad executive and a steel magnate who realise society is crumbling around them, because all of the best minds in the world have hidden away in a paradise city hidden under a holographic shield in Colorado.

Don’t bother reading it. Play Bioshock instead. What? Play a computer game instead of read a book?! What kind of Philistine are you Willard?

Seriously. I would hold Bioshock up as one of the best scripted and most thoughtful games ever released. Sure, it has it’s problems(8). But it’s also imaginative, atmospheric, genuinely both horrifying and scary as well as being fantastic to look at. It’s fun as well.
But much more than that, it’s a much better telling of the story Ayn Rand wanted to tell, and a much better way to experience her philosophy.

I’ll quickly tell the story here.

The main character (that’s you) wakes up, a total amnesiac, on a tiny lighthouse in the middle of the Atlantic ocean. All you have is a wrench, and some soaked clothes. Shivering in the chill salt air, you go inside the lighthouse, only to find that the lighthouse is in fact the top of a lift to a city ay the bottom of the sea. (9)

With nothing much else to do, you decide to descend in the rusted lift, and ask for help from those in the city. In the lift as you descend, looking at all of the interesting and hideous fish, a scary 1950s voice says: -

I am Andrew Ryan (10) and I am here to ask you a question:

Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?

No, says the man in Washington; it belongs to the poor.
No, says the man in the Vatican; it belongs to God.
No, says the man in Moscow; it belongs to everyone.

I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something...different. I chose the impossible. I chose...

Rapture.

And then you see Rapture. The city under the sea.

A stunningly designed 1950s Le Corbusier masterpiece. The grand Modernist architecture is at once futuristic and archaic, but as you step into Rapture, you find the city is nothing but a tomb. The walls are crumbling and the ocean is seeping in. The hallways are littered with corpses of the best and the brightest. You realise something obviously went horribly wrong on New Years Eve, 1959.

You soon come to realise it’s even worse than you thought. Not everyone is dead. Those who have survived are not only geniuses, they are evil, selfish, mutant geniuses. But don’t worry: you’ve got a wrench. It’s good for clubbing people.

How did those mutants come about? Well, this is the really crazy part. A scientist discovered that the juice from a rare sea slug would give the person who drank it impressive super-powers. Only problem was, there weren’t enough slugs to go around. And the power the juice gave you was addictive. Highly addictive. Oh, and repeated use left you a hideous mutant freak.

The obvious solution (11) was to, wait for it, to implant the slugs into Little Girls, so the slugs could be milked without killing them. Obviously, with addicts on the prowl for precious slug juice, the little girls couldn’t be left to their own devices. So, the mental nazi scientist bred giant men, put them in massive diving suits, and then programmed them to love, protect and care for the little girls. These are the iconic “Little Sisters” and “Big Daddies” of the game.

Now, granted, the above sounds mental. But trust me, it works. It’s a great metaphor for the warring ideas in the game; the most powerful people in Rapture are the ones who depend absolutely on each other, rather than the individualistic slug mutants.

The game presents you with a choice; you can either go through the game saving the Little girls, which kind of limits your ability to use appalling slug mutant powers, and means you have to rely on that trusty wrench and your wits a lot more. Or, of course, you can go slug-crazy, start killing little girls for the precious slugs in their bellies, and drinking your fill of delicious slug juice. Which means you can get Magneto-badass by the end of the game. But, you’re a mutant slug addict.

I, being a decent chap, decided to use my wits more, and was amazed by how much thought had gone into rewarding the intelligent player. For example, early on, you have to fight a mad doctor, who can regenerate practically any damage you do to him. You can just beat him down, shoot him to pieces, torch him with mutant powers, and a whole variety of other simple things.

But I killed him by setting him on fire with a Molotov cocktail, having watched him jump into water to put himself in a previous scene. What the good doctor didn’t realise was that I’d lugged some high-voltage cables into the pond he was going to dive into. Bzzzzt. Shocking.

But why should you play the game apart from all of these other reasons? It’s because it’s a very entertaining way of exploring Rand’s philosophy. It’s a bit like Marx; an idea that seems ok until you expose people to it. (12) And Rand’s philosophy is becoming depressingly relevant in this day and age. Not to you and me, of course. But in America, people are taking it seriously.

"The current economic strategy is right out of Atlas Shrugged," the commentator Stephen Moore wrote recently in the Wall Street Journal. "The more incompetent you are in business, the more handouts the politicians will bestow on you." The Obama administration's support for poor homeowners and idiot banks, they argue, smacks of tyrannical socialism, forcing the strong and successful to prop up the weak, feckless and incompetent (13).

Right-wing activists have been organising protests known as "tea parties", inspired by Rick Santelli, who in a high-profile speech last month called for direct action by taxpayers in the manner of the Boston Tea Party, the anti-British protest that helped trigger the American revolution. Some even predict a Rapture-style revolution, in which those tired of supporting their fellow citizens decide to "go Rand", withdrawing their labour or refusing to pay taxes.

The notion of a Rand rebellion seems outlandish to us in the UK. John Campbell, a Republican congressman who gives copies of the book as gifts to his interns, told the Washington Independent "People are starting to feel like we're living through the scenario that happened in Atlas Shrugged, the achievers are going on strike. I'm seeing, at a small level, a kind of protest from the people who create jobs ... who are pulling back from their ambitions because they see how they'll be punished for them."

Still we all know how that will end. With slug mutants. Buy your wrenches now.

Hope this entertained you all,

Willard

(1)This happened once. Back when I was tipping words into the bin of a tiny film review magazine in Bath, Tom’s “people” were in touch to say they didn’t like my article, entitled “Last of the 80s movie stars”. The bastards.

All I said about him was he was the last true 80s movie star: a pretty boy with good teeth who couldn’t act. All of the other 80s movie stars had sunk without trace (e.g. Van Damme), or learned to act (e.g. Bruce Willis). He did later prove me wrong in Tropic Thunder, but I’m not sure I can ever forgive either Last Samurai or Valkyrie.

If you doubt the Last Samurai is the worst film ever made, I’m not sure we can still be friends. It’s just so unbelievably racist and patronising; for example, despite the fact Cruise has a “drinking problem” which he endlessly whinges about, he is able to be drunk, and still kill ten samurais IN A SWORDFIGHT (!). He then seduces one of the samurai’s wives, teaches the Samurai leader the true meaning of honour, and at the end, shows everyone how much he’s learned of the Samurai ways by refusing to kill himself, making everyone else in the film seem stupid pointless.

Essentially, the moral of the film is “Your Japanese ways are rubbish. Learn from the west, suckers.”

(2) Yes, I have unearthed extra siblings this week, which was lovely in some ways, but so far at the edge of human existence it was the emotional equivalent of the Moon landings. Basically, the story can be summed up by the phrase, “Sigh. way to go Dad…” Ask me in person for details; I can’t really go into it on the interweb.

(3) So rickety I would not have been surprised to have found the engine was steam powered, and that the carriage roves were covered in cheering Indian street urchins.

(4) James Dray.

(5) His name was Frank Bottini, Jnr and sounded like he was one of the made guys in the Sopranos. I love it when ethnographic stereotypes are confirmed as accurate…

(6) This is what that "Tomes Read" section on the Cthulu character sheet is for. Just need to fill in "Entities encounteres" and "Spells known now".... ARRRGHHH! IT'S AT THE WINDOW!!!!

(7) Just in case you’re wondering, that’s you. Unless you invented something, made loads of cash or are an amazing creative genius. Hopefully, blogging counts.

(8) The main one is it’s too easy: not just for people like Bob who’ve worn down the WSAD keys on their PCs with too much WTPF pwning omg pewpew lazors on Counterstrike, but even for people like me who are rubbish at FPS games. If you have no idea what the last sentence meant, then you are clearly a noob. Look it up on Wikipedia.

Still, it being easy means you can play through it, no matter how fumble fingered you are. Play it!

(9) I could have said “Bathysphere”, but only Smithy and the two Dans would have understood what I meant. Or maybe I am misrepresenting you terribly.

(10) The astute among you will notice that this name is not unlike “Ayn Rand”.

(11) Well, it’s not the solution I’d have thought of, but I’m not a scientist. I know that both Dan and Simon are sitting reading this going, of course, implant the slugs into little girls! Genius! Both of them would clearly get into Rapture before me.

(12) I’m waiting for Bioshock 2: This time the mutants are Commies! before I read Das Kapital.

(13) I lived under this system for a while at Florence park. Sorry, Matt and Jason.

Battleships, Mateship and Adventures in Television

2009-03-05T15:06:00.000-08:00

Hey you guys,

Sorry this post is late. The lateness is mostly to due to me being uncharacteristically busy with meetings for work yesterday, but also because of a promise I made to Dan Bradley last year. (1)

“Meetings?” I hear you ask. “I thought your role at the BBC was to sit by a phone all night, just in case Somalis ring up to tell the world they’d stolen something large.”(2)

Ah ha, but in addition to running my all night Piracy hotline (3), I do other things as well. And not just trying to get newsreaders to read out silly emails at 3.24am. Most recently, I heard that Auntie Beeb was looking to commission a documentary about a subject close to my heart.

Now, this wasn’t my first time having a crack at this getting a show commissioned lark. However, my previous attempts were always totally ridiculous Game show or reality TV formats (4); this one I took a bit more seriously.

Anyway, cut a long story short, the BBC liked it, and it’s now going to get made – with me presenting it. This is obviously, awesome. Mostly, because I can somewhat spuriously now call myself a documentary film-maker; also because the team I’m working with have won loads of Baftas and Emmys and things.

I can’t let on what it’s all about yet, or when it’ll be on, at least not on the tinternet. Ask me face to face if you really must know.

I was also recently able to keep a promise to an old friend of mine.

I was in Manchester, and quite randomly blundered into a fellow veteran of the Israel-Lebanon war, the excellent Mr. Simon Quinn, Fellow of All Souls Oxford, and one of my favourite Australians (5).

This is Mr. Quinn and myself by our stolen UN wheels. More on that later. Still you can tell he's Australian from his Australian National football team shirt, which he's wearing, in the middle of Gaza. And his shit-eating grin, which is counterpointed by my own rather more serious expression.

I was able to live up to a long term promise – the promise was, that the next time I saw him, I would say, without a shred of a lie, “Hello old boy; I haven’t seen you since the war!”.This was an excellent time to do such a thing, since I hadn't seen Simon for two years, and he was in the middle of chatting up a German girl so blonde and beautiful I suspected she was the product of a cloning lab at the South Pole.

I talked about how brave and clever Simon was for a few minutes, and then left him to move in for the kill. My reward was a text message in the morning saying “Thanks mate! Totally scored. Awesome.”

Anyway, on the subject of keeping promises, I made a promise to Mr. Dan “Nuclear Dan” Bradley ages ago. I like keeping my promises to Dan. For those of you who don’t know him, he’s a former scientist at one of Britain’s leaky atom factories, and amazingly, he doesn’t glow in the dark(6) or have super powers from a radioactive animal bite (7).

Dan once asked me, “So, Willard, what happened at Gallipoli?” and I said “That’s a long story Dan” and promised to tell him.

Now, Dan has always kept his promises to me. He is the sort of very clever scientist/engineer I often become friends with, and have to ask questions of, questions that make them despair, questions like “Is this dangerous warmation of the global icepoles making Polar bears melt?”(8)

Thus, I’m going to return the favour. Those of you who are reading this, who aren’t interested in the First World War, stick with it. I’m going to try to write it up as entertainingly as I can, partly as an experiment on how interesting I can make relatively dry topics, without actually lying. If you like, Smithy, this is my “Monkey Issue”.

Oh, and there will be pictures of models! Pretty ones…

Right, so Gallipoli.

Ok, a bit of background. In 1914, while the Germans were invading everywhere and generally kicking sand in the face of all the rubbish countries in Europe (9), there was huge crisis in the Middle East that everyone forgets about.

What happened was there was a massive German battleship, The Goeben, cruising around the Mediterranean, generally doing 19th century German battleship things. This was technically called “showing the flag” but essentially involved sailing your ship around the tropics, being rude to the natives, burping in public, drinking local cheap sticky wine out of your pickelhaube(10) and attempting to leave your towels on other people’s possessions. Like Morocco.

Essentially, two British battleships followed the Germans around the Mediterranean, making sure they didn’t steal anything. Sort of like store detectives. Now, as everything in Europe was going horribly wrong, with Archdukes being shot and so on, the commander of the Goeben, Admiral Souchon (11) had a plan.

He invited the British admirals to dinner, and told them that if war broke out, his orders were to destroy French things near Toulon. “Such a shame, but c’est la guerre”. So, war broke out, and the British actually went to Toulon, not realising that Souchon, a Frenchman in German uniform, might be lying to them. Junior officers pointed this out, and were told not to impugn the honour of a gentleman.

What Souchon actually did, was sailed to neutral Turkey, pointed his battleship guns at the Sultan’s palace and said “Don’t let the British through the straights at Gallipoli”. The Sultan, who rather liked his palace unblasted by 15” shells, decided that the Germans had a point. The legal fiction was cooked up that Turkey had bought the Goeben, which was renamed Yavuz Sultan Selim.

This caused even more problems, as the Turks asked the Germans, that since they were on what was now a Turkish battleship, could they fly the Turkish flag, wear fezzes, worship Mohammed and generally avoid causing trouble. The Germans lived up to everything apart from the whole causing no trouble bit. A Turkish admiral was appointed to command the Goeben, but Souchon had the unfortunate chap locked in a cabin, and refused to listen to anything he had to say.

Souchon then decided that Germany needed help in Europe, so flying his Turkish flag, went and blew up a Russian Naval base, and started sinking Russian ships. This made Russia declare war on Turkey, and as everyone knows, once you declare war in 19th century Europe, everyone’s in on the act.(12) Declarations and counter declarations spin out of control, and suddenly the poor Sultan is at war with everyone and their dog.

Right, still with us? Good.

By this point, it’s March 1915.Anyway, the British really need to deal with this whole Gallipoli thing. For a start, they need to sink the Goeben, in revenge for how silly it had made them look. Secondly, the Russians export all of their grain and import all of their weapons through Turkey.

No Gallipoli, no grain for us and no bullets for the Russians. The Russians, at this point, were in real trouble, as Grain, no matter how nutritious, is a poor substitute for things that go bang in Germans faces.

So, why not just sail the 40 miles through the Gallipoli straights, get to Constantinople, sink the Goeben, point our massive cannons at the Sultan’s house, make him surrender, win the war? A battleship at full speed could do the journey in two hours. Easy, right?

There were of course, problems.

The Gallipoli narrows are well, narrow. At the Hellespont, the narrowest point (pont?), it’s less than a mile wide. This is supposed to be Leander swam over to Hero’s tower according to Ovid, and where Xerxes (13) crossed from Asia to Europe on his bridge of boats, according to Herodotus.(14) Lord Byron recreated both of these feats, just to prove his virility. So, it’s narrow enough to be crossed by lovesick Greeks, bumbling fat mutants with axes for hands or laudanum crazed Victorian poets.

So, the channel is hard to navigate big ships down. On top of that, it was covered on both sides by forts full of Turks with big guns. Even worse, these are not mere Turks, but exceedingly brave Turks backed up by cheating Germans with mobile howitzers and even worse, the Germans had filled the water with cheating submarines and cheating minefields.(15)

Everyone realised that these might pose a problem. The answer was thought to be in sending the admiralties oldest, and most expendable battleships. These 16 ships, once the pride of the Navy, were now due to be scrapped. But there were 16 of them. Armed with massive, massive cannons, much bigger than anything the Turks or Germans had.

Just in case our chubby quasi-French chum Souchon tried anything in the Goeben, the 16 old battleships would be accompanied by 4 modern battleships, including the world’s most powerful ship, the brand new shiny “Super Dreadnought” Queen Elizabeth, had the biggest guns in the world at the time.

On top of the 20 British battleships, the French agreed to send 4 of their Battleships. So that’s 24 Battleships, to sail down the channel, flattening every fort one by one. What about the mines? Well, those were going to be fished out by wooden trawlers, with civilian crews. What? Yes, that’s right. That’s how you swept mines at the time. What about submarines? Err…well…those would be cheating, so obviously the Germans wouldn’t use them.

Also, the French fleet was rubbish. Dangerously rubbish. So rubbish they couldn’t hit an island in target practice. So rubbish they had to be towed when their engines broke down all the time. So rubbish the British admiral cynically gave them the “honour” of being the lead squadron, secretly hoping that if there were mines, the French would blow up on them.

The problem with the French fleet was its ships were unseaworthy; its chief gunnery officer described the problems of their worn out guns in a wonderfully Gallic way by saying “These old bastards are so useless, they shit on their feet.” To get anything like the range of the British, they had to use dangerously large charges of powder in their guns. Still they were keen. And their old admiral, who was in a wheelchair, apparently had the best band in the French in Navy. Tres Bon.(16)

So, on day one, the fleet sails in, with the French fleet in the lead, flags flying, band playing the Marsellaise. And then the shooting starts. The Turks stick to their guns and shoot back. The British realise they have a serious problem. You see, if you shoot a fort, there’s an impressive bang, stone rains down everywhere, but the guns don’t stop firing. You have to get pretty much a direct hit on the gun to wipe it out. However, if you shoot a ship, occasionally things can go horribly wrong.

For example, on the first day, French flagship Bouvet, got to a position between two forts. One fort was firing, the other was not. With typical French sang-froid, the second in command of the ship ordered men over the disengaged side of the ship to spruce up the paintwork. With flammable paint.

Anyway, a German officer saw this, and moved a battery of howitzers into position and opened fire on the Bouvet. The Germans scored 56 hits on the stationary French ship, killing the painting crew, setting the ship on fire, before the British battlecruiser Inflexible pasted the German battery with 12” shells. When asked how severe the damage to the blazing Bouvet was, the Inflexible was informed “Situation Dangerous. Bakery destroyed”.

Now, while the lack of croisants wouldn’t be a serious setback for a real navy, I’m sure this incident demonstrates that poor tactics or poor luck could be much worse for ships than forts. Still, after a day’s bombardment (well over 1000 shells) the forts were silenced, and the fleet proceeded to the next group of forts, which were protected by minefields.

That night, the wooden minesweepers were sent in. The Turks rather unsportingly shot the crap out of them with machine guns, while the Germans kept the old battleships at bay with their heavy mobile artillery. Thus, you can see, there was an interlocking system of defence.

The forts, the minefields, and the German mobile guns all relied upon each other. The Minefields prevented passage of the straights, stopping the ships just sailing past; the mobile guns of the Turkish and German infantry prevented the sweeping of the mines; the heavy guns in the forts kept the Battleships at a distance where they couldn’t engage the small, mobile guns.

This put the British admiral in command at a loss. Despite repeated attempts, the trawlers could not operate under fire. Even when their civilian crews were replaced, the trawlers just weren’t tough enough to stand up to the gunfire. Souchon wouldn’t come out and fight like a man. This was too much for the poor British admiral, who had a nervous breakdown, and the fleet’s medical officer, a Harley street specialist, relieved the admiral of command and sent him home.

The Germans and Turks breathed a sigh of relief. What the British didn’t know was there were only 20 mines in the channel and ever since the Navy started into the forts, Turkey had been on the verge of collapse. The Sultan had a train ready to evacuate him; the Turkish government ministries had burned all their papers; the German ambassador had the German embassy repainted to make it less obvious from the Sea.

The Germans were finding it impossible to raise money or get any trade with neutral powers like Holland and the USA. (17) The price of grain on the world market had dropped, in expectation of the Russian grain harvest flowing out of the straights. In short, everyone thought the Brits would win.

The new British admiral who arrived, Admiral Wemyss, was boyed up by this international press coverage. Determined to succeed, he decided to dispense with all this hand wringing, time wasting, unmanly minesweeping, and just go hell for leather through.

So they steamed in at 15 knots, 18 battleships in formation, ensigns flying bands, playing. One officer said “it seemed no human force could resist such an array of might and power”. They reached the forts, and a gun battle began in earnest. The Turkish forts scored first blood, a 14” shell from Chanak fort striking the French battleship Gaulois below the waterline, sinking the ship in minutes.

Several other ships were hit; in particular, the crack modern British battleship Inflexible’s bridge was smashed by a lucky hit, killing all her senior officers, and making the ship lurch out of control. The final signal from the bridge as flames engulfed it was “Fore control out of action. We are all dead or dying here. Bring up morphine.”

Seconds later, the French flagship, the unfortunate Bouvet, struck a mine. Still travelling forward at full speed, she heeled over, capsized and sank in under thirty seconds. 700 of her crew went to the bottom including the entire band and the wheelchair bound admiral; his last order to his men was “Suvez-vous, Mes Enfants!”(18)

Then Inflexible, still out of control, hit a mine and began to sink. Attempting to go to her aid, her sister ship Irrestible, also struck a mine. Her crew managed to beach her, but she was coming under heavy fire from the shore. Heroic damage control parties on Inflexible managed to stem the damage; in fact, the mine explosion and consequent partial sinking helped extinguish the dangerous fires burning onboard.

Still, someone had to go in and get the Irrestible, which was being pounded by Turkish guns, and at risk of being stormed by Turkish infantry. The old battleship Ocean, supported by the one of the oldest (and some say luckiest) ship in the navy, the Canopus, moved in to tow the crippled Battlecruiser off the beach.

Of course, Ocean in doing this, struck yet another mine, and was immobilised in the path of the oncoming French battleship Suffren. Suffren was a relic of the 1890s, and was armed with a huge toughened “ramming bow”. She collided with Ocean, dealing the already crippled British ship a fatal blow. Equally, the French ship’s “specially designed” bow was so badly crushed it began to take on water, and limped away, being shot to pieces by German guns.

At this point, Admiral Wemyss, having lost more battleships in that battle than anyone was ever going to lose in a battle ever again, ordered a retreat. The captain of the Canopus displayed a Nelsonian disregard for the orders, and towed the Irrestible out, while rescuing the survivors of the sunken battleships, all the time under heavy fire.(19)

Incidentally, I think a WW1 naval game based on gothic would a.) be cool and b.) cheap, easy and fun to model. Here’s some pictures of a very talented German painter’s little ships.

Seriously, this game would be awesome! Is anyone apart from me interested? You can even get nice models for WW1 ships! Look!http://www.ghqmodels.com/store/gwg8.html - there's a nice model for the Goeben... and almost everything else. Anyway, back to the story: -

The Goeben was twenty miles away, steaming through the Golden horn, with Admiral Souchon under orders to fight his ship to the death, when the word reached him that the allied fleet had withdrawn. Unbeknownst to the allies, the Turkish forts only had 27 shells left. The fleet had come pretty close to winning the war. But not close enough.

Churchill was furious. He pointed out (rightly) that almost none of the vessels lost were worth a damn, as they were supposed to be scrapped anyway. And the casualties were less than in one night raid on the Western front. But still, the prevailing wisdom was that both banks of the straights had to be held by soldiers to allow passage of the fleet.

Lord Kitchener, Imperial warlord extraordinaire, declared that since the Turks were a “second rate enemy”, they could be dealt with by “Second rate troops”. That is to say, the 30,000 troops of the Australia New Zealand Army corps (which is where the slang term for aussie soldiers, ANZACs, comes from), which were training in Egypt. They would be supported by the 29th Division, who were “fresh” (20) from the western front.

Among the men of the 29th were Dan’s great grandfather, and my own Great-great grandfather. I think Dan’s relative was a corporal; my relative was a Brigadier. You see, second rate troops only required second rate generals. My ancestor had been plucked from the reserve list to command an Indian brigade in 1914, and had been defeated at the battle of Tanga by Germans armed with Bees.(21) Somehow, he was given another chance at Gallipoli.

On day one of the landings, in May 1915, there was disaster. The navy had once again misjudged the resistance of wooden boats to machinegun fire, and the army had underestimated the morale and skills of the Turks, as well as the ability of their own troops to scale cliffs under heavy gunfire.

My ancestor’s plan was actually quite good; as opposed to other commanders, he decided to beach a freighter and have his men charge out of it. Unfortunately, the freighter ran aground 100 yards or so off the beach in 15 foot of water. And the men still had to get out of the ship. Two of my great uncles were killed trying to get ashore.

Still, somehow, they got ashore, despite 5,000 men killed, and failing to take even one of their first day objectives. The allies had captured a 400 yard perimeter at most of the beaches. And they were stuck there, just as on the western front. There was no way flesh and blood could push through barbed wire and machine gun bullets.

Equally, the Turks had it just as bad, as they desperately tried to push the allies out of Gallipoli, all the time under horrendous naval bombardment. For example, three days after the landings, 30,000 Turks charged the Australian lines at ANZAC cove (as the Australian beach was called). The Australians called for support, and despite shelling from the Turkish forts, our old friend Canopus came with 500 yards of the shore and laid down in a curtain of 12”, 6” and 4” fire.

For anyone who hasn’t seen artillery going off, I saw 6” rounds in the Israel-Lebanon war leave craters 15 feet wide and 15 feet deep. The shells Canopus was shooting would have been approximately double the size, and thus the square of the explosive force.(22)

The ANZACs also opened up with machine guns and rifles, and still some Turks managed to come through all that and get into hand to hand combat. 70 Australians died, and 500 were wounded, compared to 10,000 dead Turks from that engagement alone.

To make it more difficult for the allies to use their naval firepower, Ataturk (23) insisted his men should get as close to the allied lines as possible, so close that soldiers on different sides could swap rations by throwing them to each other. Of course, assorted spoilsports would also throw more unpleasant things, like shit or grenades.

The land campaign at Gallipoli is best imagined by putting your hand on the table, with all the fingers splayed out enough that the tips of your fingernails are touching the table. Each of your fingernails is an allied beach and perimeter, each of your fingers represents the path up the cliff. The place where your watch would sit represents the ultimate goal, the fortress summit of Chanak Bair.

So, despite the best efforts of Ataturk, the allied fleet still controlled the sea, and still the allied shells punished every Turkish attempt to do anything, and slowly the allies began to push the Turks back. Then the Germans started to cheat again. And cheat with U-Boats.

Over three days, a single German U-boat, U21, sank the British battleships Triumph, Majestic and Goliath, all while they were providing artillery support to ANZAC cove. The only answer Admiral Wemyss had was to withdraw, to the horror of the troops ashore.

After prodding from London, Wemyss agreed to return, but only old, replaceable ships were able to be risked on bombardment duty. In August, a new and more cunning plan was hatched. The Australians would attack towards Chanak Bair as a diversion, while two fresh divisions of Kitchener’s “new armies” would be landed just north of ANZAC, at Suvla bay.

No expense was spared for this landing; even specially designed landing craft were put into action for the first time. Unfortunately, the landing was a mess. Commanded by a totally undistinguished second rate General called Freddy Stopford, the troops got ashore, achieving complete surprise.

Things started to go wrong as General Stopford tripped over, and hurt his knee, and then demanded he be evacuated, leaving the troops ashore leaderless. The overall commander, General Hamilton, was horrified to find the troops “smoking, laughing and cooking” on the beach, rather than taking the commanding heights.

By the time the jam was sorted out, Turkish reinforcements had rushed to the heights, and the Suvla operation was all for naught. In the course of the landings, the Battleship Albion was heavily damaged, and beached on a sandbank; the Canopus (who else?) came in close and towed it to safety, despite the guns at Chanak Bair shooting off Canopus’ topmast, funnel and wardroom.

The irony was that while the main attack was failing due to incompetent command, the “diversionary” attack on Chanak Bair was succeeding. While the Australians fought their way up Lone Pine Ridge (your index finger – 62% casualties in the brigade), New Zealanders clawed their way up Sari Bair (your thumb – 74% casualties), the Indian brigade (24) finally made their way to the fortress of Chanak Bair, and put the Turks to flight.

I’ve stood at the foot of that fortress. After slogging up those hills, even without being shot at, you can see that this is the pivotal feature of the campaign. The British had won. The Turks knew it. Ataturk grabbed his pistol, and led his last reserve into a charge. (25)

At the top of the hill, waiting for Ataturk and the last two Turkish battalions were a battalion of Gurkhas, who called for artillery support. The one remaining French battleship, Charlemange got the orders to fire. She aimed her aged 12” guns at the summit of Chanak Bair…

And fired short. She put eight 12” shells square on to the Gurkha postions, wiping out three companies. Almost perfectly timed, Ataturk’s counter attack hit the Gurkhas moments later. 711 of 760 Gurkhas were casualties. Despite attempts to retake the hill by the Australians and New Zealanders all night, Ataturk and his men held on, Ataturk having given his famous order, “I order you not to make war; I order you to die.”

After that, the most deadly blow to the allied cause was dealt not by the exhausted Turks, but by an Australian journalist in uniform, one Keith Murdoch (26), who wrote an expose of the truly shocking incompetence shown by the British high command during the Suvla campaign. Public opinion turned against Gallipoli; Churchill and Fisher, seen as the architects of the strategy were removed, as were Generals Hamilton, Stopford and, rather unfairly, Foxton.

The evacuation, carried out in December was extremely successful, and not a single man was lost. The Germans urged the Turks to attack the retreating British, but Ataturk was happy to let them go, perhaps realising how near run a thing it had been in the end.

So what did it achieve? Political and military careers were ruined, thousands died, but modern Turkey and modern Australia found lasting national identities. Ataturk, the hero of Gallipoli, resisted European attempts at colonising Turkey, broke the power of the backward looking imams and the Sultan, and established a modern, secular state, which still reveres him.

Keith Murdoch made his name as the journalist who broke the Gallipoli story. The subsequent prestige enabled him to become a powerful figure in Australian newspapers, and his son, Rupert, is now one of the most influential figures in the world.

The significance of the Gallipoli Campaign is perhaps most strongly felt in Australia. Before Gallipoli the citizens of Australia were proud members of the British Empire and were and eager to offer their service to the “mother-country”.

Gallipoli shook that confidence. The ANZACs are seen as heroes and, in Australia are stereotyped as typical tough Australians, full of Mateship, who were betrayed by incompetent and callous British superiors, impressions re-affirmed by films such as Gallipoli. I wish I could say that film doesn’t represent a truth; but sadly it does.

Anyway, there you have it. When I promise you something, you get it. I can’t let you down, because you’re a mate.

Hope this mildly entertained, or at least perplexed you!

Willard

PS:- Are you not enthused by the idea of actual Naval gaming? SIGH! Well fine, what about a science fiction-y World War One game? There's a cool game called Aeronef, based on the HG Wells novel "War in the Air". Check it out here:-

http://www.brigademodels.co.uk/NoFrames/VAN/index.html

By the way, if we ever do play this, I'm totally using the Turkish fleet...

(1) Yes Dan, I’m actually going to do it. Only you know the horror that is coming.

(2)Only at sea. If you’re a Somali and you’ve stolen something large on land, you need to call Dushand at extension 7037.

(3) Calls charged at £1.50 a minute, make sure you have the bill payer’s permission.

(4) Smithy will remember these; one of my madder get rich quick schemes. The best of them were Bad boy, Bad boy, Whatcha Gonna Do? and Great Escape 2004.

Bad Boy was going to take British “gangstas” from Slough or Woking, and challenge them to get accepted into an LA street gang within 7 days. It was rejected as “too likely to get someone killed.” Clearly, the commissioners don’t understand what makes great TV; haven’t they seen Death Race?

Great Escape 2004 was going to recreate the Stanford Prison experiment, but in a WW2 prison camp setting. Basically you dress a bunch of Germans up as guards, a bunch of people from everywhere else in the world as prisoners, and then divide a prize fund up based on the amount of escapers. And hope no-one gets shot.

This got to the final pitch stage – I even had my grandfather’s old wingman from the Battle of Britain, Stan “Sneezy” Skalski onboard as an “expert advisor on WW2 escape technique” - but it was rejected in favour of a Game show which centred around old people playing maracas on a cruise. Sigh, executives have no vision, you see.

Both of these shows were described by a Cambridge Moral Philosopher friend of mine as “Shockingly unethical”, which I took as a badge of honour.

(5) Simon endeared himself to me by generally being extremely sensible & explaining the concept of “Mateship”. Mateship is an Australian concept, which entails doing almost any act on the grounds “I can’t let him down; he’s a Mate”.

Despite Simon’s common sense, this included getting busted by Israeli customs for my arms smuggling, helping convince Colletta Smith to marry me, so we could all hire a car, and when that failed (not because we failed to convince Colly; because we couldn’t find a sufficiently irresponsible Rabbi/Imam at Ben Gurion airport), stealing an armoured UN Jeep. Basically, having Australians around is good for me.

(6) That said, I’ve never seen his cock. For all I know, it lights up like the Blackpool tower.

(7) It strikes me that the only way you could get bitten by a radioactive animal these days is in the tundra around Chernobyl, and who wants amazing Reindeer powers anyway.

(8) Back when I was a teenager, this role of answering my stupid questions was filled by Simon Maris, then merely an evil scientist, rather than the inventor of the world’s most erotic drug, Viagra. We literally used to sit down before playing roleplaying games, and make Simon answer one science question a week. Usually about time travel, string theory or how to home-make Laudanum.

As I recall, the answers were “Impossible, like aliens and magic”, “A waste of time made up by physicists, like all physics” and “Mix 3 parts Codeine to 10 parts Dark rum to achieve a similar effect”. As you can tell, I was pretty cool aged 17:)

(9) i.e. Everywhere without “United Kingdom of” in the name.

(10) This is your spiky German hat, but it does sound like a good euphemism, doesn’t it? Incidentally, you should all go and see the German emperor’s hat in the Imperial war museum. It’s a helmet, made of gold with a spike on top of it. On top of the spike is a Golden model of the globe, and on top of that is golden eagle clutching an iron cross in its claws.

If anyone tells you the first world war was caused by anything but the Germans giving their emperor a hat rejected by the costume department of the 1970s Flash Gordon movie as “Too glam rock opera villain”, then they are wrong. Once you have that hat on, Megalomania inevitably follows.

(11) He was actually French by birth, and had begged to be allowed to join the French navy, but was rejected for being too fat. This is yet more evidence you shouldn’t be nasty to fat people; one day they might have a battleship.

(12) Unless you’re playing the cool old board game “Diplomacy”, in which case some bastard always sells you out.

(13) You remember the bad guy from 300 with the army of mutants.

(14) One of my favourite things about Herodotus is how ludicrously exact he is. It’s never “ooh lots of them” or “about a million” or even abstractions like “Xerxes controlled all the armies of Asia”; he numbers Xerxes’ army at exactly 5,283,320 men.

(15) I imagine wargaming this would be a bit like playing against Eldar. At Gothic. With asteroids on the board.

(16) In this light, Trafalgar wasn’t all that impressive. Basically, all Nelson had to do was turn up and half the French ships would explode or surrender.

(17) That’s right, the USA weren’t in the war yet. Late as usual.

(18) “Save yourselves, My children!” Part of me always assumes he was talking directly to the band.

(19) The Canopus had a good war. Due for scrapping before the war broke out, she was recommissioned, given a scratch crew of reservists who had never fired the guns before and sent to hunt for two German battleships that were threatening shipping off China. On the way, her chief engineer went insane, and started sabotaging the ship.

This all eventually came to a head when he locked himself in the engine room. The ship’s captain had the watertight door blasted off with dynamite (!) and the crew had to subdue the frenzied engineer, who was “wildly smashing things with an axe”. Very Cthulu.

Anyway, Canopus was assigned to be part of a squadron looking for these two German ships, which were reputed to be the best shots in the German navy. The Germans sank every other ship, but never got Canopus. After this, the Navy started to take the Germans more seriously, and sent two modern ships to get the Huns.

The Germans attacked the new British ships in harbour at the Falklands, and Canopus held the enemy off long enough for the two British battlecruisers to get up steam and win the battle. After this, Canopus was sent out to the Mediterranean, to be one of the old battleships for Gallipoli, but never hit a mine & never lost a man, despite being at the centre of several heroic episodes.

After Gallipoli, when the rest of her class were scrapped, she was rearmed as an anti-aircraft ship, and famously “bagged” a Zeppelin over the North Sea in 1917. She was one of the only ships of her age and type to survive the war, finally being cut up for scrap in 1920.

Annoyingly, I can't find a model of her! A travesty.

(20) i.e. terribly fatigued.

(21) You read it right. Bees.

(22) Doubling the area squares the volume, as per the inverse square rule.

(23) He was just plain Colonel Mustafa Kemal at the time, but I like the name Ataturk, which he took up as absolute ruler of Turkey after the war. It has a good Heroic ring to it. You may be able to tell, I'm quite a fan of Mr. Ataturk.

(24) Commanding officer, Brigadier Mordecai Foxton; I’m actually starting to think he wasn’t that bad.

(25) Army commanders who are national heroes, leading charges is very 40k.

(26) Yeah, he’s the father of that Murdoch.

Romance, Books worth Reading & Girls who are Funny, Sane and Not Evil

2009-02-26T03:09:00.000-08:00

The other day, I was standing in a charity shop in my home town of Hythe, and I saw, sitting in the window, fading in the sunlight, a copy of "They Marched into Sunlight". (1)

But do you know what I thought looking at it? I thought, "Oooh, with my birthday coming up, that would be an awesome present for a girlfriend to get me". Yes. I was standing in a charity shop, fantasizing about having a girlfriend. And not just any girlfriend; one who was cheap.

So why haven't I got a cheap girlfriend? Or any girlfriend for that matter? That, is as they say, a good question. I suppose this blog post is going to be all about why I can't find a girlfriend, and why what's so wrong with me is wrong with me (2).

Ok, so, why can't I find a girlfriend?

It's a long story.

No, seriously. This is a proper Willard story. The sort that requires a cup of tea and a comfy chair. The sort that's kind of entertaining, but also hair-curlingly horrendous at the same time(3). So get a cup of the heated beverage of your choice, and then carry on reading.

It was 2002. Combat trousers were an "in" look, the "noble savage" case was ruining debating(4), The White Stripes were an underground buzz act that only cool people liked (5), invading places seemed to be working, and despite that, no-one thought Dubya would get a second term (6). Matt Smith was looting the GW bitz bins, living in Filton with a Jungle DJ; Ben Brooks was trying to nail the Nazi's corruption down as our boss; I was reading for a Masters in International Criminal Justice; some of the people reading this blog were still in school.

In short, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way. (7)

Right, all of this aside, I was going out with this girl I met on the debating circuit, who was (at the time) the best debater Bristol University had. To protect the guilty, I'll call her Miss Hydra.

She was pretty, and very, very clever. But, she was also mad and a little bit evil. And I know what you girls are thinking, it's not me saying "She was crazy; occasionally she expected me to call her!". She was crazy in an authentic, take off her facemask to reveal a writhing mass of tentacles, Cthulu cultist, end of the world by the power of the Dark Star-gods way.

Just so to establish her mentalist credentials, here are some examples. She was concerned that I might not be faithful to her,so she got one of her friends to come on to me. Of course, I was a bit shocked, and rejected the friend, explaining I was a bit shocked, as she knew I was seeing Miss Hydra. However, I was still the bad guy, as when I rejected the friend, the Hydra was angry with me because I didn't tell her the friend had cracked on to me.

Also, she used to do things like keep spreadsheets of MY finances (oh, and hers of course), so when I bought us a valentines holiday in Paris, she refused to go because I couldn't afford it and would be better saving the money. (8)

Oh, and this is just the highlights. There were all kinds of crazy mindgames, tearful fits because I beat her on tabs at debating, etc etc She once threatened to dump me by Point of Information in the semi-final of a debating competition at the Inner Temple. Everyone in the audience laughed, assuming it was a joke; I didn't. She never joked.

So, i've established her nutter credentials, right?

Ok, the other important other thing about her was she had a life plan. Her whole life was planned out to the age of sixty.

On a calendar. (9)

In her room.

(I realise you are probably wondering why I went out with her; the answer is, I don't really know:)

Anyway, on the calendar, she was allowed to have 8 boyfriends before she got married. Why? you ask. That's such an arbitrary number. Well, otherwise, she wouldn't be young enough to be well established as a barrister before she took a career break to have her first child. It was eight boyfriends of six months each. Six months to prove your worth.

Anyway, I got to the six month window. She walked me to a little church in her village, and told me that as a little girl, she had always dreamed of getting married in that very church. And then she turned to me, and asked me, "Where would you like to get married, Willard?"

What I didn't realise at the time was that there was a wrong answer to that question (10).

Unfortunately for her, my response was "Well, I'd always rather fancied getting married under the big top of the Moscow state circus, by the Arch-Mandrite of the Russian Orthodox Church"
This was my jokey way of saying, "Lets not talk about this; we're 22".

Not the right answer. She ran away crying, which was a bit of a shock; I remember thinking, "that Orthodox joke was pretty good...wasn't it?". I didn't run after her; in her eyes, this was death death Death. I had failed the final test; oh, yeah, this was the last in a series of tests including the faithfulness one; another included forcing me to ostracise a close friend.

So, she'd decided that I was not "the one", but, this put her in a dilemma. It was my finals; she was obsessed with success and exams. She couldn't imagine dumping me during my finals,
but, the calendar's merciless ticktock was still going on in the background, and she had to move the relentless grind of boyfriends on.

Her solution was to start fucking one of my friends behind my back. The reasoning was she could dump me after my finals, no damage to my exam chances, and satisfying her need to keep within the strict timetable.

Sadly, there was a problem with this other wise brilliant plan.

The problem was, well, I went to my doctor with a small problem; now, bear in mind my doctor is a sweet old man with a bow tie, who I've known all my life, who used to give me lollipops when I was five, to imagine the awkwardness of this.

My doctor looks at my problem, and says "Have you been sleeping with Nigerian prostitutes?"

I looked shocked

"Of course not!" I reply

He looks at me, very embarrassed, awkward, very English, wearing his cheery bow-tie and says, "Come on Willard, it's important to your treatment you are honest with me..." And I reply I'm in a committed relationship, totally monogamous, etc etc.

To which he replies, "Well, she obviously isn't as committed as you are".

So, yeah, he, through her, had infected me with a rare and potentially hideous disfiguring African genital parasite.(11)

So, I was disgusted, appalled, horrified, betrayed. So, I call her, we row, and I break it off.

Now, at the time, we were the fucking golden couple of debating. So us splitting up was massive, massive gossip and next week, at an Inter Varsity Debate, someone says "I hear you and Sarah broke up; I can't believe it; is it true?"and I say,

"Yeah it's true." And they ask what happened.

And I tell them. In excruciating, hideous, african parasite detail.

And then, she goes totally berserk. I'm the bad guy. How DARE I tell everyone the private business of our relationship. To which I reply, how dare you have unprotected sex with one of my sluttiest friends?

Anyway, so I then write a piece on the dangers of rare sexually transmitted diseases for the Bristol Epigram, her university paper, naming her explicitly as a sufferer.

We...haven't really spoken except at a shout since. She tried to push me down the stairs at the Oxford Union the following year, after a 15 minute knock down drag out face slapping shouting match. It was especially bad for her, as 99% of the friends took my side completely within 6 months; without me to reign in her madder tendencies, she just alienated everyone.

But of course, I got the blame; I had "turned them against her". We still have a couple of mutual friends; the kind of people who will forgive anything, who'd probably say "Oh, of course we're inviting Adolf! He's so funny! You aren't still angry about that whole Second World War thing are you?" Even for these saintly types, it's always a careful balancing act of who do you invite, because even 6 years after the fact, we will still fight on sight.

So, is that the worst breakup story you've ever heard? I don't think it's a coincidence that in the aftermath, I grew an American Civil War beard, an afro that was cool on Black men in 1974 and stopped studying Law to become a music journalist.

Anyway, after that relationship (12), I developed a criteria for what I want in a woman. She has to be the diametric opposite of the Hydra; that is to say, she has to be:

1.) Funny

2.) Sane

3.) Not evil

That's it.

you'd think it'd be easy to find:)

Sadly, that woman has proved elusive. The trouble is, most women who want to date me are 2/3 at best. It's not an iron-hard criteria. It's just as soon as a woman starts playing mind games, or I realise she has no sense of humor, she becomes terribly unattractive. (13)

Women who do, of course, meet all three criteria, are hard to find. And when I do come across them, they almost never want to date me, for some ludicrous reason, like they don't find me attractive, or I embody all they despise in society (14).

This moves on to problem number two.

What's wrong with me.

Or rather, as I usually say it, in an exasperated sense, "What's wrong with me!?".

I can't think of a better person to summarise this than Miss Bex Towlson, who recently tried to analyse my problem with women:

"I had a long conversation recently with your friend and mine, Mammoths on the moon, born in the wrong century, Willard... Will, if you are reading this then I apologise for sharing our private conversation but let's be honest, you've probably told everyone who reads this at least 4 different versions of this same story already. (15)

There was a time when Will would call upon me to act as his moral compass, which of course I did and I would like to think that in some way I have helped to create a slightly lesser monster than would have been in his place were it not for my influence... Of late however, he has called me less frequently and now when he does call it is not to ask for my guidance but to tell me what he has done and 'just check' if I thought he had done the right thing... I am proud to say that 9 times out of 10, he has... I know you're all aghast!

You will also know that Will has a terrible history with women... it's a classic tale. Boy meets girl, boys pursues girl, girl is charmed by wit and sniff of inheritance (16), boy and girl start dating, boy is proper gentleman and treats girl like a princess, girl leaves boy for complete and total shit bag....(17)

Obviously this is because women are fundamentally flawed and prefer the company of bastards all the while bitching and whining about how we just want a 'nice' man... this is bollocks...we don't want a nice man.... nice men bore us... we want a man who is a Canute(18)...not enough of a Canute to push you down a flight of hard wood stairs rolled up in a quilt (that's just for me and my man) but someone to keep us on our toes... women don't like to be content... women like to have something to complain about and the best thing to complain about is how much of a fucktard our man is....

If we really wanted a 'nice' man we would go and find one... we're not stupid (generally) we don't all have cripplingly low self esteem (well I do, but many other don't I understand) and if we really wanted a 'nice' man, we wouldn't stay with men who treat us like crap... truth is, it is important for a relationship for a bloke to man up and pull his weight, to be tender and sweet when necessary but generally just to be enough of a cock to keep us interested...sorry boys but there it is... women are crazy... "

So, there you have it, from a real live, female, Tarot reading Psychology graduate (19).

The problem with that is that I just don't believe in it. I'd rather be single than treat a woman like shit.

Even if that means metaphorically I'm the only man in the Deep South running my plantation on free Labour, while everyone else has slaves picking cotton and is making a fat profit, and they look over from their Spanish moss covered mansion, drinking mint juleps, while the ladies in ballgowns fan themselves and says "Hot damn, why does that crazy English feller pay his workers?".

I keep doing it (treating women well) because even if it costs me in the end, I think it's the right thing to do. Here's hoping General Sherman arrives soon.

Hope this was entertaining!

Willard

PS: - I meant to include a cool picture of a female model I'm converting for my high elf army, consisting of the everqueen, riding on the new plastic dragon, summoning a cool little lady fire imp, but haven't got round to it. Will post a pic as soon as I finish it.

PPS: - They Marched in Sunlight is an amazing book; would recommend it to anyone, as it's basically an explanation of why Vietnam went wrong designed to convince both left and right wingers for different reasons. Read it before Paul Greengrass ruins the film version.

(1)It's a Pulitzer winning book, about one day in 1967, when America stopped making sense; it contrasts the experience of students getting beaten by cops at a peaceful protest in Wisconsin with the experience of two companies of GIs who got all but wiped out in an ambush in 'Nam (85% of the soldiers were wounded or killed; the highest loss rate by an American unit of equivalent size in the 20th century). I've read rave reviews of it; I've wanted to read it since I saw it was on a slate of films one of my PR clients was doing the costumes for.

(2) As correctly pointed out by the excellent Miss Sammy Neville, these really are different questions:)

(3) Lots of my stories are like this if you think about it. Usually, any time a story starts with "Well, this one time in Israel/North Korea/GW Bristol..."

(4) This case basically identifies a hideous cultural practice, typically Wiapi forced oral sex on eight year olds, and says it should be legalized, as it's "cultural imperialism" to say that our culture is in any way better.

More extreme forms of this case included the ludicrous Liberian Kraan tribe, who eat the hearts of their foes (sure Fred, legalize it..) and the "Aboriginals should go Opal mining with their bare hands" Oxford Final. Debating - it's a strange place.

(5) Yeah, I have a 2001 cut of White Blood Cells on CD; I was totally keeping it real.

(6) No-one except my fellow Seminar tutor at UWE, Wes Rist, who self-identified as a "God-fearing, Gun-Loving, Republican". Wes Rist is wrong about alot of things, but is a very nice chap, and may not be wrong about his conviction that the Wiapi and the Kraan's problems could be eased with "Fire and Bibles; lots of both."

(7) Some of that may come from Dickens.

(8) For the record, I took the money and spent it on a giant model tank. Ha ha bitch! IN YOUR FACE! I SPENT THE MONEY ANYWAY!!

(9) In case you thought I was joking about the Cthulu cultist thing, this one really was waiting for the Stars To Be Right.

(10) i.e. Anywhere else.

(11)They managed to kill the damn thing by freezing it off with Liquid nitrogen; that's the stuff they use to kill the T-1000 in terminator 2. Some people say they have scars from their relationships; I have frostbite scars on my genitals from that one.

(12) I suppose I have to call it a relationship, but it could be summed up with the word "damage" as well. If you want to simulate what the hydra relationship was like, just take a screwdriver, and jam it into your brains. Just as harmful, just as much fun, but much, much quicker. And no concern about being invited to swanky dinner parties either.

(13) I can usually cope with people being a bit mental, but as I'm kinda flaky myself, I don't think it's a good idea to be in a relationship where I'm the sane and sensible one. I can feel Smithy's cringe at the thought of there being people more reckless and foolish than me out there, but Matt, I date them all the time!

(14) Miss Marx is a good example of this type of woman.

(15) This is a lie; I had told no more than three people. I've also never claimed to have gone to the moon. But there are mammoths there. Douglas Haig told me.

(16) Christ, I haven't even go that going for me anymore. Bloody Bernie Madoff!

(17) I wish this wasn't the true pattern of my relationships. But it totally is.

(18) Bex may have not originally used the name of the legendary sea thwarting King. But I decided to clean up the language a bit. And lets face it, King Canute was a total c*nt...

(19) Either the femaleness, the magical cards or the degree probably give her a bit of insight.

Tough Acts to Follow

2009-02-19T07:30:00.000-08:00

Hey all.

I've been wondering how to follow up last week's blog post. (1) I doubt the hit counter will ever go that high ever again; despite a five year stint in journalism, that post, or quotes from it, will probably be the most widely read thing I ever write.

Ultimately, I started this blog as a way of chatting to friends who lived a long way away. One friend in particular remarked that it was a bit like a secret diary, that other people could read. He cautioned me on writing certain things, pointing out that the wider the audience of the blog got, the more constrained my ability to tell the truth (2) in an unvarnished, amusing way would be.

I, of course, just laughed, and told him there was no way anyone important would ever read my blog.

Ahem.

If I had known the world's media were going to be using it as a source, while my father's friends and colleagues were using it as an impromptu book of condolence, I might have been a bit more circumspect. I certainly would have included less jokes about Polar bears. (3)
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Still, that post also represents a tremendous professional success; an old PR comrade pointed out that the extent of the coverage would have led to a 7-figure bill had it been an agency story. The total number of articles was in the region of 500 in newspapers worldwide. (4)
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Pieces ran in all the major UK papers; in the Washington Post, USA Today and the New York Daily News(5) in the States; in the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald in Oz; in papers all through South America, Asia and Africa. The story was relevant to people on every continent; I've even received emails from an old colleague who is part of the Scott Polar research centre at the South Pole - they saw it on the BBC.

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Op-Ed pieces are still running - the one I'm really looking forward to is a savaging for Madoff in the next issue of the Wall St. Journal, which I'm sure he'll read. Although I'll never know if Madoff feels bad about what he's done, I suppose I'll have to settle for the image of his eyes flickering across those pages, reading the words I hammered out last week in a haze of anger.
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In terms of broadcast, we went out on main bulletins on the BBC News at Ten, Sky News "Live at Five" in the UK, a well as being picked up by Fox, CBS, BBC America and MSNBC. It was a big story.

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However, obviously, with this level of media attention, I have come across some truly unbelievable bottom-feeding crotchdogs. (6) In a totally counter-intuitive sense, these came not from international media outlets; in fact, everyone who I dealt with from the international media was absolutely lovely.(7) The real feeding frenzy for scraps came from the local press and their affiliates in my father's home town.

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Aside from a level of desperation to profit, callous rudeness that came with every contact with them, a litany of broken promises, a tendency to misinterpret or misrepresent basic facts, treatment of my family which bordered on illegal harassment, and a bag of adjectives that would make a 19th century horror writer blush, I think what shocked me the most (8) was the basic level of idiocy they displayed.

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I'll give you a couple of examples.

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The phone rings. I answer. Instantly, the women on the other end blurts out,

"Hiya I'm from the local paper, we're all terribly-sorry-about-your-ummm-dad, wondered if you would mind giving us some quotes for a tribute piece? The first thing we need for the tribute will be...umm how much money did he lose?" To which I replied,

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"Do you mean tribute in the Roman sense then?"

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Tragically, she didn't get it. She then went on to ask a series of increasingly bizarre questions, including, my personal favourite, "Did your father have any enemies?" What? Sorry?! My dad was a soldier, not batman...(9)

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There was also a massive farrago with her reluctance to email me a copy of her story before it went to press; when I pointed out that as a PR my clients recieved that courtesy for, say reviews of their toasters, and that this was a bit more important, she said "It's against policy". I then pointed out that all the national papers were extending this courtesy to me. "It's against policy".

I then pointed out I could pull all of my quotes, pictures and co-operation, which produced a bizarre volte-face. She would dictate the story to me down the phone. And I could suggest any changes I wanted. Even ones in punctuation. But she couldn't email it to me. What? Sigh.

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Anyway, needless to say, the story started with "William Foxton's devastated son wept..." I think I cut about 70 adjectives, pointed out that since I hadn't cried yet, I'd rather she didn't, you know, lie about it in print.

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"Oh, I thought it would make a better story..."

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Sigh. The other great moment was when a "PR guru"(10) called to tell me that he could "make me a fortune from this story" (11). I pointed out that I wasn't really interested in the money. He told me he could make the story "huge". I told him I'd already been in touch with the national and international broadcast media, and therefore the story couldn't get much bigger, to which he replied that he could make it "much, much bigger."

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I would like to know how. Once a story is on AP, BBC, Reuters, Fox and so on, the only way to make it bigger realistically is to beam it into Space. Maybe he has great contacts at the Jodrell Bank observatory or in the Sh'iar empire (12) or something. Needless to say, I turned down my opportunity to "make £££s!", but that didn't stop him from bothering everyone else I'm related to.

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Anyway, the crotchdogs of the local press aside, the response worldwide has been amazing.

Last week, when I typed "Instead, I'm going to try to make my father's name known, so I don't feel he died for nothing. I might be on the BBC tomorrow; hopefully after that you can read about it in the newspapers" I didn't really believe it would work. The story of how a decent man died as a result of his swindle is probably as close to revenge as I'm ever going to get on Bernie Madoff.

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As George Bush would say, "Mission Accomplished".

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Willard Foxton

PS: The random fullstops for paragraph breaks are beacuse blogger is being odd, and this is a good stopgap solution.
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(1) And other things, in case you're totally dead to dual meanings in sentences.
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(2) In addition to other things that constrain my ability to tell the truth. Like, you know, my personality.
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(3) That joke actually was faithfully reproduced by the Independent as a quote from dad.

(4) If you want to see them all, type "Willard Foxton" into Google news.
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(5) The New York Daily News story is probably my favourite; why can't our tabloid journalists be as cool as them? http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2009/02/12/2009-02-12_brit_says_bernie_madoff_ponzi_scam_led_t.html

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(6) Thanks to Charlie Brooker of Guardian for coining this term.

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(7) In particular, Allan Little from the BBC, Jayne Secker from Sky/Fox and Raphael Satter from Associated Press were superb. Fine journalists all.

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(8) Well, it was that or the basic inability to spell or punctuate; while dictating a quote I had to explain to one of the crotchdogs how a semi-colon was used.

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(9) I do now regret not replying "Well, he did once thwart Gorilla Grod's attempt to write his name on the moon with a giant laser." A link to a local paper website with the frontpage headline "LOCAL MAN MURDERED BY PSYCHIC SIMIAN SUPERVILLAIN!!!!" would be a good corollary to this piece.

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(10) The excellent boss of the old PR firm once said to me, "Anyone who describes themselves as a PR guru only does so because he can't spell charlatan". Good advice.

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(11) To give you a measure of the man, he sounded like an extra from Eastenders, and had a website with a scrolling banner that said "HAVE YOU SLEPT WITH SOMEONE FAMOUS?? SELL YOUR STORY!!! MAKE £££s!!!!!".

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(12) And we don't want them knowing the earth's only protector is dead, do we?

Stop all the clocks

2009-02-10T17:14:00.000-08:00

My dad shot himself at 4.45pm today.

I'm just going to tell you what happened in a totally unvarnished way. I realise I have a reputation for exaggeration, so I'm going to back up every claim with an internet link. At times, this story is so unbelievable, even I can't quite believe it myself.

My father, Bill Foxton, was a decorated soldier, a holder of the OBE and MBE, who lost an arm in combat.

He had spent the 1990s and early 2000s in the Balkans, where he was head of the European Comission Monitoring Mission(ECMM) during the Yugoslavian wars, and was a highly respected figure in many of the communities in the former Yugoslavia. I've included a couple of news reports about this period; if you search, they have quotes from my father in them:-

ITN video report on my father reporting on ethnic cleansing:
http://www.newsplayer.com/war-escalates-in-kosovo-video

Radio interview with my father on Kosovo.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1001032

Quotes from my father in BBC reports on refugees.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/114804.stm

Reports by my father on Kosovo to german TV.
http://www.seetv-exchanges.com/code/navigate.php?Id=188

Reports on my father working with the "Angel of Mostar" during the first phase of the Yugoslavian war.
http://www.geocities.com/bikem71/Kukes.html

Following his time with the ECMM, my father continued working in Kosovo with the Organisation for Security and Co-Operation in Europe, and with the German charity Arbeiter Samariter Bund (ASB).

He recieved his OBE in 1999 for his work in Yugoslavia; you can find it in the BBC report is linked below.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/special_report/1999/06/99/queens_birthday_honours/366666.stm
I can't find the citation for his MBE; it is mentioned that he was "William Foxton MBE" in the '99 Birthday honours; I believe the citation was for services to the disabled.

He had retired in November; his final posting (I believe with the OSCE or the UN; I'm not 100% sure) was in Afghanistan this year.

Thus, my father was a very decent, very brave man.

Unfortunately, he was brought low by the greed of Bernie Madoff. I spoke with my father recently and he confided in me that he was in (and I quote) "an absolute shitfight" with his banks, as his life savings had been invested in two hedge funds; the Herald USA Fund and Herald Luxemburg Fund (which is apparently are in Austria). He had found out that the offices of these funds had closed and that the money had in fact been invested in the Madoff Hedge funds.

Story on the end of Herald Funds:
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/herald-hedge-funds-suspend-redemptions/story.aspx?guid=%7B8FA1D1D9-B655-4A0D-A3D3-12DAE11ABB98%7D

Shareholder class action against Herald funds - NB; HSBC & Ernst and Young are implicated in this.
http://www.shareholdersfoundation.com/case/class-action-lawsuit-behalf-investors-herald-usa-fund-herald-luxemburg-fund-primeo-select-funds

Obviously, I'm going on where my father told me he had investments, so if this turns out to be untrue it means he was lying to me; however, his subsequent suicide has certainly convinced me that he was telling the truth.

On getting home, I realised that my father's suicide has already made the local news in Southampton; it's pretty easy to read between the lines.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/hampshire/7882161.stm

I think it's disgusting that Bernie Madoff is sitting in his New York property, thinking that all he did was steal money; when, in fact, what he was really doing was ruining lives. I feel a little helpless at the moment; essentially I want Madoff and others involved in Herald funds to know that they have my father's blood on their hands. I'm very angry; my first thought was to show up at Madoff's trial in New York and throw all of my father's medals in his face.

Instead, I'm going to try to make my father's name known, so I don't feel he died for nothing. I might be on the BBC tomorrow; hopefully after that you can read about it in the newspapers.

Sorry there aren't any jokes in this.

Willard.

Commandos, Convicts & Giant Ponzi schemes

2009-02-04T12:56:00.000-08:00

Since my last post, quite a lot has gone down in Willard world, but first things first.

In response to a question from a “fan” of the blog(1), I intend to publish one post a week, usually late on a Wednesday evening, for the foreseeable future.(2)

Anyway, on to the real work of telling you how shit things are.

I’m worried. Worried about a lot of things. I think the thing I’m most worried about is I’m about to spend the next four days at a Marine Commando training camp in Wales. I have to say I view this particular part of embedded journalist selection procedure with much the same horror as Superman might view a trip to a Butlins made of Kryptonite.

Let’s analyse why this is bad. First off, I am something of a marmite person. That is to say, people usually love me or hate me. While at school, I would frequently say witty amusing things about people much bigger and meaner than me, with the usual consequence that they would hammer the shit out of me.(3) I haven’t really grown out of this; I’m sure all of you have seen my mouth write a cheque my arse frankly can’t cash.

Thus, when put in an environment where giant burly tattooed man-mountain Commandos are going to be escorting me, telling me what to do and generally being in charge, bad things will inevitably happen. I’m bound to make one too many references to Albert Camus’ L’Etrangere, admit I read the Guardian, or admit I once spoke to a Gay, and will end up being beaten up, shot, having my body ground into paste under a land rover, and then my fatty remains fed to the Colonel’s pet gibbon.

Secondly, as I’m sure you can’t have failed to notice, it’s been snowing all week. I’m going to Wales. Mountains in Wales. Mountains covered in snow. People die there you know. People fitter than me. I will be the first to admit, I’m pretty unfit. I get out of breath going upstairs, let alone fleeing through 4 foot snow drifts, pursued by Welsh mountain man cannibal rapists.(4)

I’ve been trying to get fitter. Ha ha, I hear you all cry. But no, seriously. I’ve been going swimming, watching what I eat, and actually going running. You see, one of the measures of fitness the Navy want in their embedded journalists is the ability to run a mile and a half in 14 minutes. Pre-snow, I was getting there. I’ve even managed to drop a jeans size. I actually managed to do the timed run, like, twice(5). Now, even one breath of the chilly air and my gimpy lungs seize up.

Also, there are other people going for it. So, assuming my lungs don’t explode and I survive the Marines, the elements, the Welsh, I still might not get the job. Still, one ray of sunshine is the fact that the only other person I know going for the job is a fat, bespectacled diabetic who works for the Guardian and has obsessive compulsive disorder. Part of me wonders why the two of us are going for this, as we’re so transparently cripples(6). I suppose it’s a strange sort of self-selection; the people who apply to be embedded journalists are probably fat wheezy boys who want to play at being soldiers.

Still, even though my only definite competition consists of a man who can be defeated by emptying out a box of coloured pencils on the ground, I can’t help but imagine I’ll arrive and the rest of the prospective journalists will be tanned, blonde, 6’11” eugenically perfect Nazi super-humans, standing there, casually reading Atlas Shrugged. And that will just be the women.

Of course, in addition to the physical, there a number of what are cryptically called “Battle Simulation exercises” (7). Now, the Navy are very coy about what these actually involve. So, I decided to use my initiative (8), and ask my father what these were likely to entail.

My father’s advice is legendarily bad. For example, on my 16th birthday, he took me to one side and said “Willard, I have something important to tell you.” I listened, rapt with attention, expecting some great wisdom to be imparted to me. He said: “I just read this fascinating article – apparently, if you’re attacked by a Polar bear, the best thing to do is lie perfectly still! Then the beast will assume you’re dead, and get bored! Useful, eh?” To which I replied, politely, “Yes dad. Useful.”

Just before I went out to Israel, I asked him for advice on what to do in a firefight. He said: “Well, if you get shot, lie on the side you got shot in. That way, only one lung will fill with blood. Useful, eh?” To which I replied, politely, “Yes dad. Useful.”

Before I went out to North Korea, I asked him if he had any advice for surviving in hostile places. He said: “Well, I did read once that if you’re in a space station and it loses pressure, exposing you to hard vacuum, the best thing to do is breathe out, rather than trying to hold your breath. If you try to hold your breath, apparently your lungs explode! Useful, eh?” To which I replied, politely, “Yes dad. Useful.”

You’d think I’d have learned about this whole advice thing. But no.

I said, “Dad, I’m off to this Navy embedded journalist thingy, and they are threatening to do Battle Simulation exercises; what will that probably involve?(9)” He replied: “Oh, well, knowing the marines, they’ll probably tell you to go into a minefield. Under no circumstances should you go into it.”

I then said something about this being not that helpful, that I could probably have worked this out by myself. He then turned to me and said something that was truly shocking.

“I’m sorry Willard, I can’t really concentrate; you see I lost all of the family money to the Bernie Madoff scam, and I think I’m going to have to declare myself bankrupt.”

I was pretty shocked. Let’s look over that again, with added emphasis based on me informing you of things that I know, to give you the resonance it has with me.

“All of the family money” is a large amount of cash. I’m not sure exactly how much; but we’re probably talking in the high 6 figures to low 7 figures. This is money that since my birth has been held over me as “the inheritance”, which I will be cut off of if I ever do anything wrong(10).

It’s also provided me with a warm safety net of thinking that no matter how much I failed, I could always just count time until dad died, and then bam, respectable and loaded. So, that was gone with a stroke.

Why has this happened?

Well, apparently, my dad had been investing with Madoff hedge funds since the late eighties, and had never had any trouble, until now. Now, all his money is gone, poof.

Just in case you don’t understand how this whole scam operated, I’ll explain briefly below.

Madoff wasn’t running a hedge fund. He was running a con known as a “Ponzi scheme”. It uses cash from new customers or investors to pay returns to existing investors. It does little legitimate business, but just recycles money – it’s basically the same scheme the mice use with the biscuit machine in Bagpuss. The scheme depends on a constant stream of new investors to fund the payouts.

He was paying clients a 10% to 12% annual return. He managed to produce consistent returns over a 20 year period, which is extremely unusual for a hedge fund. He was hailed as a financial genius. It looked to good to be true. And guess what, it was.

New clients began to dry up once the credit crunch took hold. In 2008 Madoff (13) was forced to pay more than he could afford when clients needed to withdraw their cash. Some analysts at the FBI pointed out that his investment prowess was virtually impossible to achieve. Madoff got arrested, and $50 Billion had just vanished. Poof.

It wasn’t just my dad who was fooled though. Banco Santander are in the hole for approximately $3 Billion, City “superwoman” Nicola Horlick is reckoned to have lost £27millon, Kevin Bacon has lost his life savings (14), as has Steven Spielberg. The rest of his victims, according to the New York Times, “read like a virtual who's who of American Jewry (15).” Perhaps they saw Bernie as one of their own, a smart Jewish boy who would take care of them.

Perhaps it was dumb to trust someone just because they seem to get good investment returns and share your religious affiliation. But, as my dad pointed out, people much better with money than he was were getting involved in it, so why shouldn’t he?

Thus, I feel terribly 1920s at the moment. Even more so than usual; I’ve often felt my personality would make more sense writing fiction and drinking jug wine in Paris circa 1924, coughing up foam from my froth-corrupted lungs. But now, wow, I mean, you can’t get more 1920s than being a wastrel son, family money wiped out by stock market fraud, off to climb mountains and indulge in daring do to redeem the family status(16). And we know that never goes wrong, right?

Anyhow,

Thanks for reading,

Willard

PS: - I haven’t had time to make any models this week, but I imagine few of you have ever seen my squad of giant thieving Ork convicts for my Guard army.

Just to clarify things for people who aren’t regular 40k players, I usually play an army composed of normal squishy humans, without anything exciting about them. My guys have rifles, grenades, guts, and not much else that a 20th century army wouldn't be familiar with. This is in a science-fiction game where some people will have giant HR Geiger monsters, others will have the ability to summon sanity blasting squiggly multi-tentacled HP Lovecraft beasts from beyond space and time, some people will have killer robots, and at the very minimum, people will be using genetically engineered power armoured super-humans capable of crushing skulls with their bare hands.

It takes a special type of person to play my army, the Guard. Basically, the kind of person who isn’t compensating for anything (17). However, recently the rules of 40k changed, mostly because the tiny-penised players of the other armies complained so much. Now, their superhuman fascists can run faster than my tanks. This has led to a certain amount of unpleasant skull-crushing.

Now, I did experiment a few years ago with using some giant Orkish pirate mercenaries in my army (18). They were hilarious to use; few moments in 40k have lived up to the look on Matt “Not the Shank!” Smith’s face when 5 of them rampaged through his entire army once. The new edition has had me dust off these cool old models, tart them up a bit, and use them to bring terror to my local gaming club. I should probably get round to painting them really! (19)

1.)Yes, the blog has fans now. I am officially a self-facilitating media node.

2.)At least until I get bored, get a job, or a pretty girl who might sleep with me finds out about it, in which case I will have to delete it in a hurry to cover up my tragic late-twenties obsession with toy soldiers. Of course, if I delete the blog then inevitably she will leave me for an Outlaw Biker within twelve minutes.

I might occasionally post more; but generally, Thursday mornings will be the time to check it. One of the fans has also requested that I make the footnotes into links. Of course, being a total luddite, I have no idea how to do this. I’m sure one of you technocelots could tell me how to do this, as I agree it will make the blog easier/more entertaining to read.

3.) Only once with an actual hammer. Fucking David Griffiths.

4.) No-one can tell me these do not exist.

5.) For those of you who know Hythe, I’ve been running between the Hotel Imperial and the Murco garage. Those of you who don’t know can probably find it on Google Earth. Once you’ve seen it, fuck me, a mile and a half is a long way, isn’t it?

6.) Cripples may be an offensive term. Feel free to substitute it with “Spazzes” or “Retards” if it offends you.

7.) Yes, I hope it means playing 40k as well. I just doubt it.

8.) Cheat.

9.) Tragically, my father did not say “Oh, they’ll make you pretend you’re lying wounded on an explosively depressurising space station, and ask you what you’d do if in addition to that you are suddenly attacked by a deranged polar bear”, which a.) would have been funnier and b.) I would know exactly what to do.

10.) Thus, in hindsight, I should have gone to Glastonbury in 1995, done a non-vocational degree, gone to RADA, had sex in my dad's bed, taken drugs, never bothered to varnish the shed, paint the walls, clean the moss off the roof or clean the bathtub with boiling vinegar, seeing as I was never going to get the bloody money anyway.

11.) My favourite part of the Bigamy story (and there are lots of good bits; ask me sometime) is the part where my father admits he is about to be convicted of Bigamy to the Colonel of the Greenjackets, who’s response is to hand my father a bottle of scotch and a loaded revolver and say “You know what to do Foxton; the scandal will be terrible for the Regiment if you don’t”, then leave the office.

For the record, this was in 1983, rather than say 1903. My father’s response was to drink the whisky, and put the revolver in a desk drawer, then walk out.

12.) My dad’s big house was the best bit of the inheritance. Damn.

13.) Anyone who's read Dickens really should have been more suspicious of "Mr. Made-off".

14.) This means I can be linked to Kevin Bacon in four steps; Willard Foxton, General Sir William Foxton, Bernie Madoff, Kevin Bacon. This may come in useful at a party at some point, but is not much of a consolation.

15.) Thus, while cripple and spaz are off-limits as nineteenth century throwbacks, "Jewry" is apparently ok, even in liberal newspapers. Anti-semites, I say.

16.) If there are cultists, I blame you Fricker.

17.) This means you Matt.

18.) Yeah, they have Orks in space. It’s cool, honest. For proper nerds, I use them as counts-as Ogryns, to keep everything legal. Or “Ork-gryns” if you will.

19.) My main reluctance comes from the fact they are almost certainly the best models I’ve ever made, and am worried I’ll ruin them with a rubbish paintjob.

Bankers, Crosses of Gold and the Anvil of Cheating

2009-01-28T10:57:00.000-08:00

Sooner or later, I was bound to use this blog to rant about politics.

This is paragraph is just to serve as a warning to anyone who is deeply apathetic about the greater world to stop reading now; but, if you carry on till the end there’s a picture of a cool converted model! (1) And some jokes. And some information about what I’m actually, you know, doing.

I’ve been writing a dossier for the BBC the last couple of days on banking and have basically realised that someone is having a laugh. The chief executive of Lloyds, is trying to get himself a, wait for it, a 225% (2) rise on his £1,300,000 salary, and a £22,000,000 payoff if fired, but thought himself "pretty much at the bottom of the pile". What? I’m sorry? You’ve totally fucked your bank, fucked it so badly that the government had to buy 44% of it… and now you want a pay rise?

These people clearly live in some kind of special magic kingdom. A magic kingdom where if you fail, catastrophically, you get rewarded. That’s not how things work in the real world; I’ve sacked people for stealing ballpoint pens (3), let alone losing £322,000,000,000 (4) since August 2007. I mean, the September 11th attacks caused around £27 Billion of damage, and Osama bin Laden still has to live in a cave. It’s not like the government bought a 40% stake in Al-Qaeda and gave him a million a year(5).

For decades, the justification for these telephone-number salaries was that magic people had to earn magic money. Yet the last 18 months have demonstrated conclusively that there was nothing magical about these people at all. Tragically, this is quite usual in banking; J Maynard Keynes said in the 1930s "A sound banker, alas, is not one who foresees danger and avoids it, but one who, when he is ruined, is ruined along with his fellows, so that no one can really blame him."

This isn’t limited to banking though. A recent survey in the Guardian revealed a wonderful symmetry - shares fell 24% as boardroom pay in the FTSE 100 rose 23%.

I’m a hardline capitalist. But it’s clear that in the long term, the capitalist interest is not served by ludicrous pay for a small number, coupled with ludicrous bonuses to encourage ludicrous risk. That way lies bankruptcy, tears, and people with fake tans and expensive suits hurling themselves out of windows.

But how do we solve this problem as capitalists? Well, I think we have to turn to the ideas one of the most evil capitalists of all – the original J.P. Morgan. Now, no-one could accuse Morgan of being some kind of hand-wringing, pinko lefty, but I feel I should establish his evil capitalist credentials to this audience.

His more awesome feats include; a scam buying $3 rifles from the US army, then selling them back to the US army at $22 a rifle; avoiding military service in the American civil war by paying a man to impersonate him; founding the US Steel corporation from nothing, building it up so it was worth more than all the property in 22 US states, then leaving to found an equally successful competitor; owning a yacht so large the government confiscated it to turn into a battleship; bailing the US government out twice (6); funding the experiments of mad scientist Nikola Tesla, only to cancel the funding when he discovered Tesla intended to give away electricity for free; and finally, on learning one of his mining companies had discovered a new mineral, insisting it was named Morganite.(7)

No-one can accuse good old J.P. of being a socialist. But he, arch-capitalist that he was, believed in a concept that I think might be able to solve all of our current problems with ludicrous executive salaries, as well as tackle the problem with income inequality in one go.

Morgan ran his business on the principle that no company should have a differential between highest paid and lowest paid greater than 10. He thought that enough to create executive motivation; any more, he thought, would “be a damn waste of money on fools”. Also, if Morgan wanted a new yacht, piece of art or whatever, he limited himself to raising the salaries of his entire workforce, which harnessed his greed to making everyone better off. Like capitalism is supposed to.

This may sound strange, unworkable, and fundamentally 19th century. But there are examples of similar approaches working out fine in the present day. Some Japanese firms impose pay ratios limiting the gap between top and bottom pay. US basketball teams take a total remuneration package and pool it between players, with limits on any individual's pay.

The argument against this wage differential has always been that “talent” would flee overseas to other higher paying jobs. But this doesn’t occur in industries where the 10x limit exists. The Royal Navy, for example, has had a de facto differential of eight, with Fleet admirals earning just over 8 times the salary of able seamen, yet the RN is over-subscribed. The legal system has Law Lords at the top on £165,000, and junior clerk jobs on a neat £16,500, and there is no terrible brain drain to US firms, despite the earning potential being nearly ten times higher.

And even if they do flee overseas, with the mess they’ve made, who cares? It’s all very well for people in the city (8) to say “Will it do anybody any good if you put the financial system in the hands of stupid little grey men in suits who are willing to take £150,000 a year to run a bank? If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.”

In my mind, it’s hollow to talk about a need to pay multi-million-pound bonuses to “keep the talent” when this same “talent” has delivered a catastrophe. I think it’s preposterous to say the corporate world somehow attracts the absolute best of society. I say fuck it, get me a £150,000 a year monkey and see if he can fuck it up as badly as the supposed experts. Just make sure it’s a monkey in a sharp suit.

Sigh, rant over. Back at the beginning of this, I promised a cool model conversion. Now, hilariously, this model goes totally against the principle I just outlined.

Some of you may be aware of the fact that recently, during a five minute rummage in GW Canterbury’s bitz box, I was able to escape with 6 complete Dwarf armies from Battle for Skull pass, the new Warhammer introductory box set. This leaves me the proud owner of nearly 200 fat beardy midgets, as well as sundry other bits and bobs. I think I may have most of a High elf dragon on sprues, for example.

I’ve always fancied a dwarf army(9), and during my teens I made several abortive attempts to start collecting one. The problem was, as with all teenage Warhammer armies, I’d get a couple of special characters and war machines, then run out of money and lose interest once I realized I needed £300 worth of metal models for each infantry unit.

Thus, in a single looting spree, I’d achieved all my teenage dreams!(10) However, it was only today I actually got around to writing up my all conquering midget host. I suddenly realized, if I was going to play this army at 2,000 points, I’d need a lord of some type. Now, I could take a mighty king of the Dwarves… or I could take the Anvil of Cheating™.

Those of you who don’t know anything about Warhammer probably don’t appreciate how ridiculous the Anvil of Cheating™ is. It’s truly outrageous. It’s basically a magic indestructible Anvil (11) that removes all of the Dwarf army’s weaknesses.

You can gong your anvil to shoot lightning absolutely anywhere on the table (GONG!ZZAP!), make volcanoes erupt to make flying things crash (GONG!RUMBLE!BOOOOM!), make your dwarves immune to everything psychological (GONG! FREUD ZZAP!!), make your dwarves move lickety-quick (GONG!ZOOM!!) and even gong it to re-collateralize your Dwarves sub-prime home loans into easily saleable financial instruments! (GONG! ECONOMIC MELTDOWN!)

Suffice to say, the Anvil is awesome. It actually makes the Dwarves fun to play. It’s in your face cheating, but your opponent can’t stop you. Two problems; it costs near 500 points, and secondly, all the models for it are rubbish. The original model has a cool anvil, with a cool midget riding atop it to gong it, but is let down by the fact it’s mounted on ridiculous wheels. No roller midgets(12) in my army.

The new model is even worse. It’s a semi-naked midget just standing by the anvil, with the anvil mounted on some kind of Stonehenge-esque sacrificial dais. This basically means you have to assume that your dwarf army only ever fights near the bloody thing, as it clearly can’t move.

Going through my model collection I found a potential solution; would the anvil fit on the old sedan chair of the Dwarf High king? You bet it did!

Now, the only problem to solve was the fact that on a salary of 500 points, my anvil + Gong Midget costs more than 50 times the average cost of my lowest earning midgets. This means JP Morgan would not approve(13). Unless…the anvil is worth 50 times more than the average dwarf. Which I think it is.

Anyway, I promise more salacious gossip about how I'm not having sex next time,

Thanks for reading,

Hope this informed, educated and entertained,

Willard.

(1) I now know how my sister feels when bribing her squealing brood with jelly sweets in order to get them to do anything.

(2) Yes, that reads Two-hundred and twenty five percent.

(3) While co-ordinating the Bath festival, the head of the board of trustees discovered my secretary had taken two boxes of pens home for her own use, and insisted I fire her. This was particularly worrying for me, as I usually chewed apart four pens a day.

(4)That’s £32.2 billion, or to the more defence minded amongst you, seven fully equipped, brand new, giant, Nuclear powered aircraft carriers, named after the US President of your choice. Personally, I’d like to see the USS William H Taft, named after America’s chubbiest president.

(5) Although he should totally float that thing. Or at least franchise it. He’d make a fortune!

(6) Back in the day, businesses bailed out governments. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? By far the best Morgan bailout is the “Panic of 1893” bailout, where Morgan loaned the US government so much bullion he offered to have a democratic politician who opposed the loan “crucified on a cross of Gold”. Wacky place, the late 19th century.

(7) It’s a green glowing mineral, made of pure capitalism, reputed to be able to sap communists of their powers. Honest.

(8) This is an actual quote from the pages of the Daily Mail. Ugh.

(9) Not in an I-want-to-sleep-with-them way. Honest.

(10) I also found a beautiful girl who’d let me kiss her on the mouth, a way to make Bass stop talking, £50,000 in cash, the telephone number of a Czechoslovakian hitman to assassinate the head of the fifth form (Mr. Harding), tickets to an REM gig, a book explaining a sure fire way to stop being cast as the “old man” in every NYT play I was ever in, and a letter from Cambridge university telling me the interview I attended there was either a.)a bad dream or b.)a nigmarishly contrived test, ala Michael Douglas in The Game. Fair to say I wasn’t the average teenager.

(11)It’s made of Pure Morganite you see.

(12)The phrase “Roller Midget” originated from the most Un-PC thing I have ever said. You see, back at my university, we had a dwarf on campus. But not just any dwarf. This one was in a wheelchair. One day, while exiting the bar with the all-to-easily shocked Pat Dunford, I saw the wheelchair bound dwarf approaching.

As a gesture of gentlemanliness, I opened the door wide, and stood back, to allow him to glide effortlessly into the bar. However, he curled his lip, looked at me with disdain and said, “I hate it when cunts like you do that.” To which I replied, “Well, then Fuck you, Roller-Midget!” and slammed the door in his face. The whole bar laughed, apart from Pat, who claims to still have flashback nightmares to how embarrassing it was to hang out with someone so offensive.

(13)I actually suspect he would approve of the Anvil even though it gives out electricity for free. You see, in the specific case of the Anvil, it gives out free electricity in the form of lightning, directed at his foes, no matter where they are hiding. This was clearly the line Tesla should have taken.