As above.

I got my haircut by a junkie. I strolled down in the sun to the barbers on Saturday with my hair in much need of a cutting. I’m a scab so I always wash my hair before I go get it cut and by the time I got there it dried into a massive puffy afro.

Got in and the place was packed with the young males who get their cut every week, who are surprisingly not all fags, just like to keep it tidy and styled. I’m the opposite, not the fag bit. I let it go for months and months. After flicking through the tabloids they have on the table I was called. She was the only female in the place, each of the eight chairs was manned by a man except this one. It was early Saturday morning so I was not alotogether shocked to see her in what I’d call pyjamas but still thought it weird. I instantly could tell she was either dying from a hangover or whacked out of it on something. She gets spraying my hair and she done a bad job of it, should have figured that if she couldn’t handle the spraying water part the chances were that this was going to end in tears.

She starts snipping, I make it clear that I’m not talking with my well practiced vacant stare. All of a sudden she freezes as if she’s listening to something important on the telly but it wasn’t the telly, they have it tuned constantly to some shit like ‘Mens and Motors’ the televisular equivalent of the tabloids on the table. Complete pap for complete saps. It continues and she jams a scissor tip into my head and I wince and she tuts to herself. She redeems hereslf with a burst of rapid cutting and it all appeared to be going swimmingly well. But with my fringe clamped between her fingers she sways backwards and I’m thinking she’s going to pass out.

God bless my volumous locks because she manages to keep balance by clinging fast to my fringe.

When she holds up the mirror for me see the back of my head I sigh with relief. The ordeal was over. I paid and left. On the walk home, I’m stopping to look in shop windows trying to suss out if my new do is passable and thinking about what just happened. Can anybody just walk into a hairdressers and rent the chair off the shop and then keep what they earn? Loads of scenarios popped up as to why a drugged person would be allowed to operate, they surely weren’t understaffed that day. I got around to thinking how maybe she owned the place and then I had a flashback to when I was around 14 in the same place and had another crazy experience with a blond hairdresser.

She was cutting away and all of a sudden she turns to her work mate on the the other chair, clutching her jacket thing she sez:

And indeed she did, there was nothing on under her jacket thing and I saw a glimpse of the tit, not the nipple but an apple sized segment. I saw enough to get a few weeks out of it. I heard from a friend how he was once mad about a female hairdresser and went in to get his haircut every few days to see her . I thought it was funny, not because it was endearing in a Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan kind of way but because I would have presumed that she thought he must be gay to get his haircut so often thus scuppering all hopes with her.

Was the ‘no bra’ incident a ruse to get a young pervert like myself hooked on the heady mix of Brylcreem and striptease? Give me a glimpse so that i’d come back next week and tell all my pals to go there. I reckon it was the same girl alright, the bra girl and the junkie girl. Maybe she bought the place from all the cash she made from the ruse. Maybe that’s why she was in her pj’s and out of her mallet, her place - her rules.

But back to the no bra thing, I’ve always wondered if I could take a sly one off the wrist when they put the cape over you. I reckon it happens all the time. Ever wonder why sometimes she gives you a tissue when the haircut is over?

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I miss porn on video. I downloaded a new bit of flarn there over the weekend and it was some ropey German shit from the 90’s transferred from video and as with most flarn I acquire these days it stirred an emotion other than what the producer intended.

Nostalgia slapped me like a bitch. The grainyness and sporadic wobble reminded me of the golden years of porn for me, a complex network of tape trading and subterfuge where new material was rare. Living at home with your folks added to the danger of trying to get the video player to yourself but what I miss most is this: A sizeable collection was hard to hide.

Think about it, a video tape or rather a dozen video tapes takes up a fair chunk of space. I resorted to tactics worthy of Sun Tzu; hide in open site. A sophisticated labelling system meant I could safely store the smut in the front room. For example,
Rocco’s Parisian Perversions was labelled Rocky and Bullwinkle (French subs) and
Strap on Sally became S.O.S.- Son of Sam Live 1976. Completely parent proof.

Where 5 or 6 years ago porn was rationed out in dribs and drabs that could only be viewed on the sly, we now can download explicit hardcore dvd quality flarn for free which can be easily stored in a password protected pc and viewed anywhere, look at the video ipod for christs sake.

It’s too easy and there’s too much. Like the shit cartoons that prosper between December 22nd-28th, I am the kid who wished it was Christmas everyday and is now miserable every time he pulls a cracker/cracks one off.

Here’s another unique property of video porn, inevitably the best bit was rewinded and rewinded until the film was ruined. And it was part of the thrill knowing that you could replay a certain bit but only a finite number of times before you damaged the tape and prevented yourself from ever seeing the ‘gold’ again.

I’m a notorious porn nazi. I was pioneer of dvd porn in Dublin in the late 90’s, I was one of those show-offs who had a dvd player before you and made a few quid transferring dvd’s to video, the quality and clarity just blew people away. But finding myself with a steady supply and now with the facility to view them at 8 times the speed, I became a porn nazi. I can watch, review, distill and grade a 2 hr flarn on fast forward in about 10 minutes. That’s what I’m like now, if I don’t like the camera work or I even see the remotest attempt at introducing a plot it’s deleted. It’s sad when you won’t watch a blue because of the editing.

I always said I’d never abandon videos, like most people I still have hundreds of them, in the last 2 years I’ve only set the video up once. I still have the first blue I bought on video, Euruptions 4. Maybe I’ll dust off the player tonight and fiddle with my tracking for old time’s sake.
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Thing over at TCAL about the best fights ever. These things never bother me except this time. Gross Point Blank is included. I HATE that film and the lame little slapping match which made it into TCAL’s list. Irony of irony, the dude who he fights in GPB is Benny The Jet Urquidez who happens to be the baddie in my choice for the best ever fight in film. The clip below is from Wheels on Meals and fuck me that’s a scrap.

Nuff said. Case closed.

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What a film. Finally got my hands on a decent version of it over the weekend. In the days of seedy tape trading and pre-internet, this film eluded me for years.

I had this 3 hour tape of flarn that had some really wacky shit on it, stuff I couldn’t stomach today but the tape was the perfect party mix. By party I mean 6 stoned lads sitting on couches. I’d put that tape on and show these lads the craziest flarn ever,when the last scene ended the tape would go all white and fuzzy and as with all worn out old videos, the next piece of footage was barely visible through the mess until the tape straightened itself. The porn had ended and The Story of Ricky had begun.

Through the jumps and grainyness of the tape you could only barely make out some parts, the sound was more or less gone too but it would have moments of shocking lucidity. The part where Ricky is put in a vice then has razor blades forced into his mouth would play perfectly then it’d go wonky for 20 minutes. It still left the audience speechless. I didn’t know the name of the film so hunting it down was a chore but I got another copy of it. That one was missing 25 minutes from the start and still had terrible quality. I’ve said before how I like bad quality video, and it certainly applied in this case but I still wanted to see it clearly.

I’m calling this the best film ever not because of the gore but because of it’s attitude. It has the strange quality of every good comic, game and dopey power fantasy you’ve ever had.

Based on a popular manga, the story features our hero Ricky being sent to a privatised prison in the terrifying future of 2001. There are 4 daddies for each wing, North, East and the other two. When he works his way through them, he fights the end of game boss, The Warden in the craziest scrap ever. Forget all this CGI shit, latex and pig guts all the way. The clip below is just a snifter of the goodness.

Whuaahhh! I love it.

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My first wheelie, my first standing up wank, getting the call from Diamond, all landmarks in life. Figuring out how to put YouTube clips on my ipod ranks with above. I feel giddy. Everyone’s been telling me it’s do-able for months but I just couldn’t get it to work.

Here it is explained in terms that idiots like me should be able to follow, I’m sure there’s loads of other ways too. If you don’t have a video ipod you are obviously bent.

1) Get Firefox

2) Download a thing called Video Downloader.It installs a little icon down in bottom right of your screen.

3) Get a YouTube clip and let it play to the end.

4) Click on the new icon

5) Do what it says, either ‘save target as’ or just save by clicking the button.

6) The ‘flv’ or whatever is saved so just convert it to an ipod compatible format with Videora or whatver you prefer

7) Entertain yourself on the bus, in the jacks, in bed, funerals, anywhere you want you can watch gems like this:

Should definitely come first in google for that phrase. Done this 5 years ago and I’m still ashamed of it. It’s a cover for a comic called ATOMISER that was never published because the dude behind it found God and decided what he was doing was wrong. The theme was ‘Father’.
I think it’d make a great Shiznit cover! I reckon we could sell even less ads that way.

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Never mentioned this when it happened a few months ago but I feel like boasting today. In that kind of mood. Either this or I eat the giant sized Toblerone in bed while listening to The Smiths.

Yep, a group of comic fans in France with amazing taste dedicated an issue of their zine to me. Mad seeing an interview with yourself written in French. They pick an artist, mainstream or otherwise, interview them and big them up. Their site seems to be down but you can see the other covers here

The centre pages were occupied with this moderately unseen comic.

I got the idea for that comic after seeing this crazy BBC programme where this dude goes to live with a tribe and he does whatever they do and whatever it takes to gain their respect. He drank a bowl of fresh ox blood but it was coagulating as he was chugging it down, fuckin disgusting. I think they had him smoking some magic powder too. Some of the tribesmen were clearly just buzzing off him and loved making him to stupid or uncomfortable things. Did they ever really drink ox blood? Or was it just something they made up on the day? Reminded me of when I was in school and these straight laced kids would tag along after school to get a blow off a joint, once they were stoned we’d wind them up something rotten.

For example we’d pretend to that in order to get a toke off the spliff everyone had to talk in rhyme or with a Jamaican accent and these poor bastards, uncustomary stoned would presume that this is what we do normally. Ah, we’ve all been on the receving end of messing like that. But it’s funny shit.

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Got a mail from a cult who worships the Spire, asking to use this comic.

For those not living in Dublin or Ireland, The Spire is a massive vertical tapering metallic pole that looks completely shit. I hate it. What a disgraceful thing to put right in the middle of the capital’s main thoroughfare. And it’s not like other eyesores, it’s hard to avoid seeing it.

I suppose I can call myself a designer and say from a designer’s point of view it’s shit. Yes, they wanted to build high so what about a good old fashioned statue or a totem pole?. A blank metal pin that only attracts pigeons and culchies. I heard some lad on the radio a while back from the company that designed it. Not just one person, it took a whole company to design a pole. At least that huge angel thing in the UK has merit.

It really annoys me. It’s fucking useless. The IRA blew up Nelson’s Pillar and then they build The Spire in it’s place. They don’t even use it as a flagpole or anything. Complete waste of MY money. 4 Million Euro’s it cost.

When it was being contructed and was more or less finished an English geezer says to me in town: ‘ Ere, wassat?’ I told him it was the Spire and he says ‘ Wass i’ goin ta be when it’s finished?’

Nuff fuckin said.

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