Have you ever been compared extremely unfavourably to your relatives, the offspring of your parent’s friends, or high-achievers of a similar age and disposition to yourself? Yeah. That’s how TR is feeling at the moment, so while we get over our incandescent rage and stop wallowing in pathetic misery, here are a few other, far superior, sites for you to blindly fawn over.

Crying, while eating – Did your cat bite you on the toe? Has your online girlfriend dumped you for a communist? Are you having problems reconciling your love of horses with your love of gelatine? Well, you’re crap – because these people aren’t just suffering. They’re turning their suffering into something constructive, and making something of their lives. Now go and eat a multi-pack of salted crisps through saltier tears. Don’t bother filming it though, because it won’t be anything like as good.

MulletJunky – See that no-good white-trash caravan-dwelling drunk with the bloody awful hairdo? That’s you, that is. You might as well just go and get a mullet right this minute and give in to it. In fact, don’t bother spending the money, since you’ll probably have just spent all your meagre wages on those crisps, you under-achieving shit heap. If I were you, I’d just go and fetch the scissors. The safety scissors. I don’t know if you could handle grown-up ones.

Joe Cartoon – As those who were supposed to nurture and protect you turn against you one by one, you’ll undoubtedly need something smaller and more helpless than yourself to destroy. As you take to the internet, desperate for respect from someone, anyone – only to get flamed by nerds even more helpless than yourself – the prospect of exacting death and destruction upon others will seem less and less cruel.

They have a lot of different foodstuffs inside Waitrose. More variety than most supermarkets, anyway. Looking for haggis out of season? Need gooseberry fool? Want to be able to select from every item in that range by the Prince of Wales? Look no further than your local Waitrose.

Well, not quite, actually. I was in there the other day, buying that chocolate made by that man in the Channel 4 documentary, and decided to see if I could pick up anything else from my shopping list. But did they have any swan burgers? No. Nor did they have pickled peacock eggs or angelfish fingers. I searched in vain for breaded polar bear, and was frankly staggered by the lack of fresh coelacanth on offer.

Thank god for Fortnum and Mason, that’s all I can say.

A very modern plague continues to sweep the country: Solution enActment Dialect. For the uninitiated, that means Corporate Bullshit Talk (CBT).

Don’t get me wrong – it could be worse. While being a business means registering with Companies House here in Blighty, to Americans the term applies for any enterprise with a shitty, meaningless byline attached to it. On a recent trip, my friend and I discovered to our horror that our hotel’s logo/strapline thing was “The Hotel Affinia: Putting the emphasis on the ‘Ahhh’.” Until recently, I couldn’t see British establishments putting up with that crap. I mean, can you imagine? “The BBC: Putting the emphasis on the ‘Beeee’.” No, it wouldn’t make sense. That’s my point. It doesn’t have to – in fact, it seems better if it doesn’t make sense.

However, things are changing. Some CBT is becoming so prevalent that it’s slipping into daily use. People don’t just have think tanks any more. They have whole rooms called The Think Tank, and nobody even looks twice. For years, Private Eye has run a small column simply called Solutions, featuring its favourite CBT… solutions. The market has been saturated. It is clearly time for some new meaningless bullshit.

You will have noticed that other, inferior, websites are merely content to mindlessly criticise things they don’t approve of. Hardly constructive. Teasmade Revenge is made of sterner stuff than that. Therefore, I’d like to leak the latest memo from me to Grim Squeaker, which should lay open our clear-thinking linguisticalisation solution theories.

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TO: GS                                 FROM: MB                                 DATE: 24/04/2008
SUBJECT: Language solutionment enforcement policification

Dear Grim,

It has been brought to my attention that either yourself or a person of equal or greater cretinaceousment has been encouraging antideconstructionivision in the workplace. This is clearly not acceptable. Please be aware that in advancemention of this time framespace continuum-now, such closed-box behaviour will not be tolerated.

Teasmade Revenge Corp. is entering a new skyscape of development interface solutionment, and as such cannot afford to become complacementageous. Any examples of brown-skyish think-thoughting will be acted against with the most severely detrimental-asylum advance-back implement bubbles possible.

Laterz :)

Minnie

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Yes, it’s been raining, and you’d think we’d never seen anything like it before. Either that, or nobody has anything interesting to say. Of course, Teasmade Revenge never does anything by halves…

So, while things outside start to dry themselves out in time for tomorrow’s outburst (think ‘Tropical storm’, according to BBC Weather), I’d like to propose a few neat ways we could prevent this outrage occurring again. No longer shall we be forced to fill awkward silences in lifts, at bus stops and at checkout queues with meaningless niceties: from now on it’s all about the embarrassing random incidents.*

Verbal warning
In China, they like to prevent rain by sort of injecting it with stuff. Obviously, this would not be a very British way to go on, but perhaps a UK-friendly version might be to give it a stern telling off.

Giant brolly
Should this fail, another common sense solution would be to make a giant umbrella. If everyone donated wire coat hangers and old tents, British builders have said that the feat could be entirely accomplished in a reasonable 14 months – so in two years time, up to half of the UK and parts of Wales could be rain-free for 45% of the time. Lack of sunlight might be a problem, but we’re all so physically unfit that we probably wouldn’t miss the vitamin D in the slightest.

Rain bonnets
A simpler alternative could well be to enforce the compulsory wearing of cheap, old lady style rain bonnets – with possible room for punchy political and corporate slogans (see tomorrow’s post). By the way, for all those wishing to share their touching rain bonnet memories, there is a survey at Mister Poll (no, really).
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*At this point I would like to relate the story of an ERI I witnessed in Tescos one Easter. Imagine the scene: there’s a long queue, and halfway down it a skinny blonde lady is carrying six or seven large Easter eggs in a big pile. While waiting, an awkward silence appears on the scene… a braver soul than I decides to nip it in the bud. Unfortunately for her, this wannabe conversation hero is more than slightly overweight. The conversation goes thus:

Fat lady: Oh, I hate having to buy so many Easter eggs at once, don’t you? I always end up eating them all!
Blonde Lady: [Stares at fat lady with utter contempt] They’re not actually all for me, you realise.

D’uh.

It appears that the one good thing that Gordy did for us while he was staring up at Blair as though he were the last Eclair in the patisserie – the 10p tax rate – has been eaten up by Alistair Darling, the greedy little bastard. Nobody noticed this until now because our jaded electorate can’t even be bothered to vote, never mind actually follow politics.

The thing is, we’ve all had our first paycheck of the financial year now, and it’s looking even more crappy than usual. All of a sudden, everyone’s ears have pricked up, and they’re starting to think that perhaps the Tories aren’t so bad after all. Not good.

So, what can Labour do to ease the strain on the hard-working low-paid masses to make everyone love them again? Here are a few changes that would certainly cheer me up while I’m eating pasta in front of the TV yet again while my richer friends sod off to the theatre and Waitrose and bloody wine tasting in the bloody South of bloody bloody France. Not that I’m bitter.

1. Bring back Nerds
What the hell happened to Nerds? I used to love those little E number-riddled sour-as-heck bastards. If Darling and Gordy were seen fighting over Nerds at PM’s Question Time, maybe the nation would be able to forgive and forget.

2. Panem et circenses (bread and circuses)
The Romans were arguably the greatest civilisation that ever lived. How did they do it? Well, not only did they give away free bread, but they also held immense public gladiatorial battles in which fierce wild animals ripped the shit out of Christians. I suggest we go all retro and convert Wembley Stadium into a giant amphitheatre, roping in London Zoo and waking up the half-dead lions with a few bursts from a police taser. Let’s stick with the tried and tested Christian theme – it’s okay, so long as nobody starts on any Muslims.

3. War
Distract the nation by starting a war in a country nobody’s heard of, somewhere really far away. Oh, hang on…

4. Morris dancing
Legendary conductor and covert ping pong addict Sir Thomas Beecham once said “try everything once except folk dancing and incest.” As much as I defer to the opinions of one so wise, I think this rule can be broken. Yes, Morris dancing is utterly horrific, but I understand it’s quite nice when it’s over. I refuse to compare this to the incest one. Let us brush through this point quickly, before I get a worried call from my parents.

5. Transvestite government
All members of the Houses of Parliament should be made to wear drag at all times. Obviously, this policy is skewed toward blokes, so to make up for it, all female MPs would have dress like Anne Widdicombe.

Also, Muhammed Al Fayed should be made Speaker of the House of Lords – this would be fuggin’ great.

6. A new show for Ant and Dec
Three words. Celebrity Russian Roulette. Five more words. Six rounds in every gun. A guaranteed success. In fact, I’m tempted to email Channel 5 right this minute. Instead, I shall continue.

7. Give Russell Brand the Guy Fawkes treatment
Okay, so everybody loves the turd, but at least two people would be immensely cheered by a crafty glimpse of entrail or two. Alright, one of those would be me. And the other would be Grim Squeaker. But I couldn’t resist sneaking it in here anyway.

8. Cake
The obesity ‘crisis’ is getting us all down, so I know that I for one would like to hear that Gordy’s official stance on confectionery has changed. Conservatives will probably condemn what they will call ‘typical Labour back-tracking’ and maintain they supported the policy from the beginning, but either way the ‘New Labour: Let Them Eat Cake’ campaign is sure to be a roaring success.

In fact, this last campaign may have already started, in its own little way.

Thanks to Beerbottle and Grim Squeaker.

I went to America recently (i.e. ages ago) and just got around to uploading some of my photos. Most people take snaps of monuments… I decided to instead record examples of American stupidity for posterity.

We also went to see one of the most famous buildings in America’s history: the World Trade Centre. It wasn’t there though. There was just this big hole:

Fond memories.