We need to stop these people, Norm

I got my first bit of hate-mail for a long time the other week. It was from a woman named Adrienne, which is a french name originally derived from the roman "Hadrian", from the Northern Italian town that gave its name to the Adriatic sea. The hate mail was in the form of a comment on this blog, and it read:

"You're a vile cretin to spew such hatred. I hope someone treats you with the same disregard as you treat others. Karma's a bitch."

Ouch. Hmm. Interesting. I have a few problems with this. Firstly: I really can't see why she's so upset. I mean, the post in question was entitled Fat people are annoying>, and featured the sentence "If fat people are to be made thin, and therefore non-annoying and quiet, all is needed is to point a gun at them and keep them running until a: they die or b: they get fit enough to outrun the bullets"; but really, it was clearly ironic. I was secretly on the SIDE of the morbidly obese people and was cleverly satirising the size-0 debate with my incisive wit and intellect, which is why I made the photoshop picture of the fat man being chased by the little boy with a rifle. I was frankly being postmodern and the fact that Adrienne was unable to realise that 'copying and pasting extracts from the Weight Watcher website in order to poke fun at the suffering of the unforunate women' was meant in a metaphorical, subversive way... well, frankly I find that slightly offensive. And more than a little racist, to be honest, especially coming from a frenchwoman. I bet she's really fat.

My second main complaint about this comment as a piece of relevent biting criticism is that it was posted on a blog-post that I originally wrote in April 2005. APRIL 2005. That is 2 years, 5 months and 2 days ago, or 885 days, or 76,464,000 seconds. She is kind of behind the times here and frankly I think that SHE is the vile cretin for not giving me an opportunity to GROW and MATURE in the 21,240 hours I've had to think about my behaviour since writing that blogpost. I might have grown up a bit... gained a bit of maturity and an increased respect for the female form of all shapes and sizes; I might now be a sober responsible adult who listens to U2 and comments on the fretwork and who shops at John Lewis and thinks that Myleen Klass is a jolly swell lady. Just because I haven't and I'm not doesn't mean that I'm not offended that she has simply made these assumptions about me. If anything, I'd say that SHE is the bitch, not karma. Or me.

But really, what do I care what some anonymous fat bint named after a wall thinks about me on the internet? I'm still a hellraiser, baby. I'm tearing it up. I mean, here I am, sitting on the sofa with my laptop balanced on my lap at a precarious angle - I was told that actually holding it on my lap would cause me to get cancer BUT DO I CARE? Hell no - I don't intend to be alive that long! After all, it is the brightest spark that burns out the soonest, and frankly, at the pace I'm going I'll be surprised if I make it to October. I mean, just think of some of the adventures I have had recently. The other day I went to a pub on my bike and I nearly got hit by a car (this was because I tried to bisect a roundabout). And then I didn't get up til 9:45 the next morning. THAT'S NEARLY TEN. But then I went totally mental and downloaded the entire audiobook of 'Great Expectations' onto my laptop and LISTENED TO IT FOR TWO AND A HALF HOURS. I did this because my reading list for Oxford is so fucking long, and I don't like reading at the best of times, so I decided that it would be a better idea to just find as many medias of taking in literature as possible. If I could find a way of liquidising a book and injecting it directly into my spinal cord, like my friend Steph does, then I would (although, she tends to eschew 'literature', instead choosing to go down the 'highball of turpentine, carpet cleaner and crystal meth' path). The main problems with the audiobook approach is that:

a: It is narrated by this American dude who - every time somebody refers to the protagonist Pip as 'boy' - pronounces it like a deep-south confederate talking to a slave during the 18th century
b: It is 16 hours long
c: It takes up 1.1 gigabytes of disk space and means that I can no longer update my iPod; the chapters are not saved as audiobooks but as individual songs which means that listening to my library has a high probability of being hit by Pip and co

However, it beats reading and it means that I can do my sit ups while taking in literature, thus allowing me to more effectively manage my time and fit more scholarship into the day. YEAH LIKE I SAID HELL-RAISER.

Oh man. It is telling that my first bit of hatemail for months is for a post that I wrote two years ago. I think maybe that I have blunted myself somewhat in my old age. Maybe I have gone down the John Cleese route; once a tall gangly Fawlty Towers firespark, now doing cameos as the new husband of the annoying chipmunk bitch on Will & Grace. Oh shit, I'm married to Karen. That's awful. I think that I need to go back to being gratuitously offensive. Hmm.

Hmm. Well, I could just call my ex-girlfriend's sister fat. That usually gets some responses. Or I could write some sort of thing about paedophilia.
OK I KNOW. I heard this joke the other day.

KNOCK KNOCK.
'Who's there?'
NOT MADELEINE!

Hahahahaha. I told this one to my boss yesterday while we were spinning around on the chairs in the stockroom, and he started laughing hysterically. We then got to talking about the McCann case. The whole thing is pretty fascinating to me. But it only got so when the parents were accused. Beforehand, when it was only "hot blonde girl gets kidnappd", I frankly didn't give a shit. But now the evil mother has come in, it's gotten well good.
Me and Jerry (MY BOSS) are both in agreement the mother is as guilty as fucking sin. Apparently, according to Jerry's reliable 'inside family sources', she's a psychotic bitch who had some screaming fit at her wedding and marches around yelling at people and probably has a collection of sharp axes in her house for kiling homeless people with. She also probably listens to Crazy Town which in my opinion is so hardcore, it'd turn even the most mild-mannered doctor into a serial killer.
After about three minutes of extensive criminal deductive investigation, we've come up with the theory that the 'rents probably didn't mean to kill her; either she overdosed on sedatives, or she fell down the stairs or something; so they hid the body inside a crypt at the chapel, before moving it in a hire car 25 days later in order to bury it somewhere, and that the wife wrote a confession in her diary because - as Jerry said with a wise pause that showed off his years of study of criminal psychology "people like that are narcissistic... they just want to be caught". He gave me a wise nod then stubbed out his rollup on the wall. I thought about it. It does seem that there's a lot evidence against them; the hair in the car and the blood on the stairs and the fact that the mother claimed that her daughter's last words to her were "Mummy, I've had the best day ever. I'm having lots and lots of fun." WHAT SORT OF THREE YEAR OLD SAYS THAT. Has nobody ever watched Supernanny? Young children are shits. My experience of three year olds tells me that she probably said "BUY ME SOMETHING," or maybe "MUMMY, WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH THAT CHAINSAW?".

The thing is, I want them to be guilty. Or at least her. I dunno why, but I've had an aversion to her from the beginning. Not because of any sense of justice or decency or to restore my faith in the power of civilised society to deal with its criminals, but simply because I think it'd be fucking cool twist. Narratively, that is brilliant and I absolutely approve of it. I'd like all of life to be like a cheesy fiction and frankly, this is the only answer that makes sense. And imagine the film adaptation. Dakota Fanning is: Maddie. Tamzin Outhwaite is: Kate McCann. Paul Burrell is: the dad. Actually, with that cast it'd probably be direct to tv on Five.

I don't know what the point of this post is. Originally it was about hate mail, then there some stuff about me not being a firestarting rebel rockstar any more. And then I started talking about the McCanns. What a load of shit. This a very Joycian post. Brup.