Oh mother, what hast thou donest?

A week has gone by since my last blog and I still can't be arsed to write another one. Sorry people, you'll have to do without my bloggy goodness for another few months. I mean, I could write something about how my mother found out about the last blog and asked me to 'wipe it off the internet' (her words, not mine). I'd casually mentioned it to her over our dinner of cutlets and onion gravy, and she'd done some high-tech cyber-snooping to find out the extent of the damage to society I'd caused (she asked my Dad for his opinion on it, and he said it was "a bit strong"). She feared that posting a crappy made up picture of Mohammed and making lots of 'Mohammed is gay' insinuations would somehow lead to Muslims (or as they're known in America, "Moslems") getting annoyed at me.
And in my mother's brain, Muslims angered at a picture they see on some crappy blog in the middle of teh internets = angry Muslims attacking our house and burning it down. Now, you think I'm joking, but no. That was honestly her fear, that we were in some serious personal risk. I considered arguing and reasoning with her, using many many reasoned arguments:

1: I tried to dazzle her with technology. This should be pretty easy; my mother is about as technologically advanced as Edward and Tubbs from League of Gentleman. Actually, perhaps that's unfair. I mean, she's rightly an expert at using the iron, oven, vacuum cleaner, washing machine, and other such womanly apparatus. However, when it comes to man things with shiny buttons and flashing lights (like Computers, The Internet, Tape Players, Mobile Phones or Digital Watches), she fails abysmally. Usually I can confuse her with made up technical vocab until she goes away, eg:

Mother: Come and lay the table.
Me: Sorry, can't, I'm trying to reformat the Hard Drive on my computer but it keeps freezing, I think it's a type 2 kernal error, I'll need to go into disk mode and input /sbin/fsck -y to clear the bug or else the entire RAM is going to have a type 2 BSOD meltdown!
Mother: Oh. *Explodes*
(Ok, I made that up a bit. I have a Mac, so to be honest it never would freeze or break at all. That bit was an exaggeration.)

So I tried to persuade out that there was no way that the terrorists would possibly read it amongst the billions of other web pages out there. She fired back "But isn't your blog listed now?" I couldn't be bothered to even try and figure out what the hell meant by that, so I went immediately onto argument two:

(This is just for any slow females out there who are unable to comprehend reading for more than two minutes without something other than me to lust over... some Braddy goodness)



2: Everybody else on the internet is making up Mohammed pictures now: I used the good old 'tu quoque' argument to throw her off the scent. I told her that EVERYBODY was making Mohammed cartoons now, and that mine was relatively tame compared to what else was out there. I assumed that she'd just take my word for it on, me being the Internet Expert of the house. But no. She wanted proof, for Chrissakes. So I was forced to type "Mohammed Cartoon" into Google images to highlight this issue. She wasn't convinced by this argument, as "These cartoons only make fun of arabs in general and yours is about Mohammed". Apparently, in her mind, there's an important difference. I sighed, then went onto argument three:

3: Trick her with technology: I opened Safari, showed her my site on it for a second, then closed Safari again. "There," I said. "I deleted it. See? It's gone."
I was about 50% sure that this would work. It didn't. Damn her, I thought, she's starting to get techno-literate. Soon she'll be able to use the radio in the car without driving off the side of a cliff. Shit. Better quickly move onto argument 4:

4: Explain it: Do you know, it's totally impossible to explain the concepts of 'irony', 'hyperbole', 'extremist humour' and 'context' to your mother without feeling like an inexorably wanky pseudo-interlectual cunt? She just stares at you and all the references to Chris Morris and the great satirists just die in your throat and you end up muttering "It's like a joke, not serious, you know? Yeah...", or just repeating "Irony... irony... irony... irony" ad nauseum, kind of to yourself. You then start to doubt yourself. Thinking about it, was it really a good idea to make a picture of Mohammed? Is it clever to make fun of people? Shit, I should probably apologise to everybody, and FAST.
Before long, you've ripped yourself in two and you're a gibbering mess of giblets and malformed skin goblets, oozing all over the designer slate floor. The only chance? Flee to argument 5:

5: Just kind of swear a lot: Pretty self explanatory. Stand there looking ruffled and curse heartily. I have yet to find a person against whom this argument works. I think it's because I'm too polite to use it on somebody who would actually be upset by it. It certainly doesn't work with my mother, who, after three years of me and bro cursing solidly like troopers day in, day out, has built up a certified bio-immunity to even the foulest of swears. Except the C word. That's her kryptonite, but I'm too scared of her unholy female wrath to ever break out that bad boy in front of her. Swearing didn't work. So I finally resorted to argument 6:

6: Lie. A bit: Irritatingly, it's impossible to win a fight with my mother without resorting to common liery, which annoys me, because it's against my personal moral code. I'm actually quite an honest person. Well, sort of. I'm moral when I know that I can't get away with it. The upshot of this is that I find it unpossible to tell a sustained to my momma. I can make fun of her and belittle her and patronise her all I want, but for some reason, I can't lie. The best I can do is tell the truth, but not the truth that she's looking for. In this case, I said "Ok, FINE, I'll write another one to cover it and then it won't be up any more."
Well, that's kind of true. I was going to write another post. Not straight away, of course. And it would probably be as equally offensive and anti-foreigners as the last one, possibly with more pictures of Mohammed dressed in thongs and tassles. I just assumed that that would be enough to shut her up. And it was. Kind of. She walked off.

I thought that was all it was to it. I should have shut up then. I should have just relished my tiny victory. But no. I just had to go and find a meat-stick and poke that sleeping dog in the eye, just for fun. I wandered downstairs and, seeing mother drawing things on a piece of paper with a pencil, told her that I'd seen an angry mob of muslims with torches trying to burn down the car. WHY DID I DO THIS? WHY? WHAT POSSESSED ME? She was unamused, and I got another lecture about personal responsibility and how disappointed she was with my total lack of judgement (nb: she still hadn't read the blog in question at this point). The upshot of this is that I'm not allowed to make any more pictures of Mohammed. Yes, people, I have been censored for the first time by my mother. This is a sad sad day.

Well, I guess that I should be used to being censored by now. The school newspaper refused to publish my report on the year's sporting activities thusfar because apparently it was 'too extreme'. I don't see their point, all I did was run through the various sports and activies on offer in a concise way. For example, I praised the rowers for their strength and commitment. Nothing wrong with that. And I think that most of the school would agree with my point that "Table tennis is a true sport for retards". And then I said that the cricketers reminded me of the stormtroopers from Star Wars. And I claimed that rugby was a sport for fat retards who liked to jump on each other in a field. And I said that our football team was all homosexuals.

I bet that that's what it was, actually. You make ONE comment about the homosexuality of the football team and you're immediately marked down as 'an extremist'. Fucking Nazis. What annoys me is that they refuse to publish my well written, amusing article, but happily print little pink Paul's wanky essay on basketball. I quote:

"However, as if a proverbial mirror has been placed next to the Hampton basketball season, our fortunes have been flipped upside down... or back to front as the metaphor implies... currently 4 to 0 (to those unfamiliar with basketball terminology, which from experience, is practically everybone - it's a shame right? - that means we've won four games and lost, yes you guessed it! A big, fat, round, ominous, but strangely gratifying ZERO - excuse me while my ego expands..."

For fuck's sake. And it goes on like that. What the fuck is that? It's more wanky than a bukkake party in the wankiest portion of Japan during wanky season after a forced weeklong period of chastity.
Oh well, at least if I have the satisfaction of knowing that if I write an extreme article, I do a properly extreme article. I don't just do a crappy non-extreme article with a few extreme bits in it. I mean, if you cut out every sentence that contains a somewhat risqué reference to another sport, sexual innuendo, insulting comment about a fellow pupil, or claim that our school is a hotbed of fear, rape and violence, it slices my 700 word piece to less than 230 words of 'proper report.' That's some good offendin', right there.

Anyway, no more pictures of Mohammed. That's what I said, wasn't it? Shocking. But there's a loophole here, aint there? I can make pictures of people and inanimate objects with names kind of similar to Mohammed, just to be a rebel and break my enforced censorship. But that would just be silly and immature, wouldn't it?

So thus begins the "Comedy Mohammed Series" (I wonder if anybody else in the world has ever put those three words together), which will go on until I lose interest in making pictures, the joke gets boring, or I run out of things to rhyme with "Moe". Whichever comes first.

Comedy Mohammed Number 1:


Take that, Hitler!