IMPORTANT NOTICE

This blog is migrating to

 

makeyourselfuncomfortable.net

 

I will no longer update this blogspot site- all the new material (and I have a backlog of funny for you so urgent I might well burst) will only be at the new site, above.

 

I will be categorising posts as pages so it's more web-sitey with material easier to access for you, dear reader. 

 

If you are enjoying my writing, please join me there on my continuing journey into furthererer.

 

And if you're not enjoying it? 

 

Well, diddums.

 

It's not like I forced you to read this shit, is it?

 

 

Bertie Bleep - He Shags Sheep

One from the vaults: a rather childish cartoon I drew for a Viz-style comic that I used to make and sell at school in 1990-1991, along with some like-minded contributors.

At the time, we were terrified of the teachers finding a copy and tracing it back to us, so we devised a cunning system of using anagrams of our real names. I was Ron Gridcharts, a monicker I have recently revived just in case my employers find this blog and fire me. (Some things never change, I'm afraid, kids: although I'm not really terrified these days, because I'm currently stuck in a literal and cultural desert in the Middle East, yet have a guaranteed job waiting for me in Vietnam which is a much more fun place to be.)

Other contributors were:

• Greg Horobin, who wrote many of the strips for me to draw, credited as Rob H. Goering;

• Neil Codling, later to go on to fame and fortune as a member of Suede, (firing every one of his childhood friends in the process) who enthusiastically contributed as Glen Coinlid;

• The poet and art critic Alexander Crowe, who produced the frankly baffling Uncle Sandie's page under the nom de plume Randy E Cows;

• Joseph Burke, who contributed a marvellous Radio One Gulf War special report, credited as Jokee H. Burps;

• Someone else whose name I have forgotten who used to do the photocopying for us after the cat did a wee on my dad's office photocopier. Karl something. His anagram was 'Lanky Hard', if you want to have a go at unscrambling it. I simply can't be bothered

The magazine went through three name changes- first Vim, then Rumpy, then Rim and ran for just five issues. Sadly, I only have the first four, which is a real shame because the artwork was a lot better by the time issue 5 came out. As well as benefiting from plenty of drawing practice, I was on the dole by then so had more time to work on it. But because I was on the dole, I soon grew too depressed to find anything much funny at all and simply stopped. 

If anyone still has a copy of issue 5 (unlikely, I know) I would love to get a scan. There was a strip produced by Anthony Vianna, Zorro the Back Street Abortionist, that was possibly the best thing to ever appear in Vim Rumpy Rim. 

Except all my bits, of course.


---

This blog is migrating to

 

makeyourselfuncomfortable.net

 

I will no longer update this blogspot site- all the new material (and I have a backlog of funny for you so urgent I might well burst) will only be at the new site, above.

 

I will be categorising posts as pages so it's more web-sitey with material easier to access for you, dear reader.

If you are enjoying my writing, please join me on the more flexible wordpress platform over there.

 

And if you're not enjoying it? 

 

Well, diddums.

 

It's not like I forced you to read this shit, is it?

 

I Fought the Law (in a no score draw)

 

My second arrest was in 1999. Exactly like my first, it was for possession of a single gramme of hashish, street value about £3. It wasn’t even good hash. It was soap bar, so they had a cheek arresting me really. Everyone knows there is little to no THC in soap- that’s why they stopped selling it. It’s all ‘head cheese’ these days, apparently, and the cheesier the better. (I wouldn’t really know as I left the UK years ago.)
 
My friend, let’s call him Charles (because that was his name), had a problem at the time with hard drugs (I try not to be judgemental, but watch out for junkies, basically). I happened to be with him when he needed to score- after a club when we had both done pills. I was dubious, but as he was clucking at the time (i.e. withdrawing), I kept my mouth shut. I needed a lift home after all and it was cold outside.

Read more »

Clit on

Friend to the Stars #1: Jamie Oliver

Jamie Oliver, miming exactly what he had to do to break into television.

 Jamie Oliver, French for ‘I like Oliver’, is a billionaire television chef with a chain of successful restaurants, a hot wife and a much-discussed disgust for Chicken McNuggets.

He is also my nemesis, because I could so easily have been Jamie Oliver. The parallels are there.

The fact that I am not is all my parents' fault, of course.

Read more »

Our barely-literate Man in Phuket writes...

 so i got asked what cultural stuff i been doing in thailand... think i went past a temple the other day... or it may have been the Novotel…other than that, it's been shrugging off the ping pong show touts mainly who act like there actually may be a ping pong show going on somewhere… it's that one where ping pong balls get fired from a lady's doodah rather than just watching a game of Table Tennis. Because as a form of drunken transgressional entertainment, watching people playing ping pong just doesn't cut the mustard...

and for days I kept saying no, no, no, no thank you. finally I said "oh, huh, ok then" to some tout, lured in by the offer of a free show all evening so long as I buy a minimum of 1 drink ... so I go in and there's an empty stage with all these bored looking girls with numbers on, and all suddenly springs into life with the arrival of their first customer ... so I order a Beer Chang and they tell me it's 2000 Baht (about 40 quid!) so I laugh & say no way ... they say "hey hey! no problem! floor show start now.. ok!"

Read more »

Laurel & Hard-on

Wayne Rooney

Root vegetable joke

One in the hand

Emissaries

  When I was nine, growing up in The Butchers Arms, Mickleton, a religious sect from California moved into the large property over the road. This was a rather grand building, whose privet hedges kept my sister’s stick insects in food.

It was called The White House, due mainly to it being painted white, not through any resemblance to certain other white houses, except it too was inhabited by American nutters.

Read more »

Up the gravitas

B. L. Sibbub

One from the vaults. Drawn on paper in 1990 and then photocopied for a 6th form rip off of Viz.

Caught by the Fuzz

The first time I got arrested was in Birmingham in 1996.

I had gone out clubbing with a mate of mine, both of us big techno heads and pretty much addicted, at the time, to Atomic Jam and House of God.

But we decided we needed a change. Techno nights played fantastic music, but they were always short on women. Either women didn't like the music (a sweeping generalisation- I knew quite a few girls who dug it) or they weren’t impressed by a bunch of sweaty druggies in hooded tops. I dunno.

So we thought we would go to Wobble, a house club famous for its bouncy wooden floor. When everyone was dancing, the whole place wobbled. 

Read more »

Can you smell old man's piss yet?

Filthy pedo Aussie flashing satanic hand signal, yesterday

And so Rolf Harris is finally bang to rights for being a nonce and I for one am very glad indeed.

You see- in 1981, when I was aged only eight, Rolf Harris very nearly ruined my life.

It was my parents’ fault, of course.

Read more »

Bonk

Eye Beef Er

London, June 2003. 

While my then-housemates, Steve and Lucie, were in the last stages of preparing for a month in Ibiza, in celebration of Lucie's 21st birthday, I had problems of my own. Specifically, I had no cash for the ticket.

I would trundle into work, cursing it for all I was worth, and trundle back again, drink Stella and waste time on my Mac in the evenings, getting neither richer nor poorer. I felt I was wasting my time. Any job that doesn't allow you one decent holiday a year is not worth doing.

My housemates would ask me time and again if I was going to go. I was full of 'Well, if only' and 'Still thinking about it' but the fact was they were all coining it in except for me. Orange was a qualified technician and Lucie a pole dancer in Spearmint Rhino.
 
How I cursed at having done an Arts degree. All I was cut out for, it seemed, was answering the phone.

Read more »

Are you

Hammered House of Horrors

APPLE EXCLUSIVE: LEAKED PICTURES: NEW PRODUCT PROTOTYPE

On a recent fact-finding trip to Binh Hoa, an Export Processing Zone to the east of Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City, I managed to pick up two very interesting things.

The first was some kind of tropical ear fungus whose gunky black spores rendered me deaf in one ear until I had them sucked out by an Ear Nose and Throat specialist just this week.

The second, which I’m sure will be of much more interest to the world, is what looks very much like an early prototype of Apple’s new product line, tentatively called (by me) the iLight.

Before we look closer, I just want to say to those who doubt the product’s authenticity- well if it’s not real, how come I’ve got photos of it? And don’t say Photoshop, because I don’t know how to use it.

Apologies in advance for the slightly blurry nature of some of the pictures- I took them on an iPhone 4 which, let’s face it, has a rubbish camera.

And remember this is a makeyourselfuncomfortable.net worldwide exclusive.

That’s make yourself uncomfortable dot blogspot dot com with me, Ron Gridcharts, in association with blogger.com. But if this blows up like it deserves to (the post, I mean, not the Apple product), I’ll probably be upgrading to wordpress or something.

And here it is, folks- the Apple iLight:

Read more »